IT HAS all the building blocks of a blockbuster: a ludicrous plot, a cheesy theme song (“Everything is awesome”) and stars who are not merely enhanced by plastic surgery but actually made of plastic. Small wonder that “The Lego Movie” rules the American box office. But while children (including your correspondent’s) fall cackling out of their seats at all the slapstick, grown-up pundits are pondering a more serious question: what is the film’s political message?“Practically Communist,” screamed New York magazine’s Vulture blog. “Smart [and] satirical,” agreed Michael Moore, a left-wing documentary filmmaker. “Hollywood pushing its anti-business message to our kids,” fulminated a host on Fox Business Network.The film’s villain is Lord Business, a corporate boss who looks like Mitt Romney and is bent on world domination. The hero is Emmet, an amiable doofus of a construction worker who somehow finds himself leading a rainbow coalition of Lego figures in a revolution that seeks to return power to the people (well, to the Lego figures that look like people).
Thus far, “The Lego Movie” fits the old stereotype of Hollywood peddling anti-capitalist propaganda to kids. The film is also an hour-and-a-half-long commercial for costly toys made by a multinational corporation based in Denmark; a commercial, moreover, that people must pay to see.You can make what you like of “The Lego Movie”, but your correspondent found its message to be pleasingly libertarian: suspicious of top-down power and supportive of individual rights (such as the right of Lego people not to spend eternity in the position Lord Business deems correct). Its target is dull conformity. “Take everything weird and blow it up!” are the instructions to Emmet’s crew at the beginning of the film.Among the institutions it pokes fun at is Lego itself. Once the bricks came in a giant box, and kids were supposed to build what they liked with them; today they are packaged with precisely the right number and type of blocks for a specific purpose, such as building a Death Star.
The film is about learning to break free of the instructions on the box. If it has a fault, it is that it underplays the suffering of parents who tread on Lego bricks in bare feet—a fate that befalls conservatives and liberals alike.On Thursday, New York mag critic Bilge Ebiri praised The Lego Movie as, "the best action flick in years, a hilarious satire, [and] an inquiry into the mind of God." And it isn't over-the-top praise—it accurately reflects the overwhelmingly positive critical response to the computer-animated comedy, released on Friday. The film, which is based on—and pays loving tribute to—Lego toys, was co-written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the pair who directed the fantastic 21 Jump Street reboot and its upcoming sequel. The Lego Movie takes place mostly in a city in a Lego universe. A construction worker Lego named Emmet Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt) must save the Lego realms from imminent destruction and coerced conformity. His comrades are a mysterious female Lego warrior named Wyldstyle;
a "Unikitty," which is a unicorn-animé kitten hybrid; a pirate called Metalbeard; and many more goofy and heroic Lego characters. The simple tale is loaded with gleeful pop-culture references and great voice-acting (everyone is in this movie, by the way, from Morgan Freeman and Jonah Hill to Cobie Smulders and Alison Brie). But what makes The Lego Movie even more accessible for viewers above the age of six is the fact that the film is full of political and social satire. The villain is President/Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell), who presides over a totalitarian surveillance state. President Business' regime creates virtually everything in the Lego society—generic pop music, lousy TV comedy, cameras, rigged voting machines, you name it. The dictator/CEO uses extended televised broadcasts to inform his citizens (with a friendly grin on his face) that they'll be executed if they disobey. He controls a secret police led by Bad Cop/Good Cop (Liam Neeson), who is charged with torturing dissidents and rebels.
President Business is the Lego Ceaușescu, if you swap the communism for capitalism. Some of this sounds pretty heavy, but it's all filtered through the soft, giddy lens of a kids' movie. Like all other entries into the "kids' movies that their parents can dig, too!" subgenre of cinema, it's this thinly-disguised maturity that makes the film both fun and winkingly smart. UPDATE, February 8, 2014, 12:39 a.m. EST: I missed this earlier, but on Friday, Fox personalities went after The Lego Movie for its allegedly "anti-business" and anti-capitalist message. One says President Business looks a bit like Mitt Romney. Another starts defending Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life (which is just an act of life imitating parody). This is weird, but not all that different from the Fox reaction to The Muppets and The Lorax. UPDATE 2, February 8, 2014, 4:04 p.m. EST: I asked the Lego Movie directors what they thought of the reaction on Fox Business to their film. Phil Lord got back to me via Twitter:
art deserves many interpretations, even wrong ones Now, check out this trailer for The Lego Movie:› I’d rather binge on booze than self-denial Emmet Brickowski, The Lego Movie's proletariat protagonist. In his seminal 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter wrote that "paranoid" was the only word adequate to describe the "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy" possessed by the extreme actors of the American Right. I had that in mind when I went to see The Lego Movie to investigate Fox Business's claim that the film was "anti-capitalist" and "pushing its anti-business message to our kids," expecting to roll my eyes over yet another witch-hunt. But I’ll concede this for once in my life: In a sense, Fox was right.The Lego Movie follows the adventures of Emmet Brickowski, a construction-worker Lego figurine completely devoid of original thoughts or interests. Consequently, he’s the ideal citizen of Bricktown, a Huxleyesque city governed by explicit behavioral instructions issued by corporate oligarch Lord Business—or “President Business,” as he’s known to the sheeple.
Everything changes when Emmet finds a bizarre, distinctly un-Lego-like red artifact that makes him “the special,” a savior destined by prophesy to thwart Lord Business’ plans to freeze the world with Krazy Glue. The second and third acts ensue, wherein Emmet joins a cast of Lego-ized pop culture characters on a journey to fulfill that prophesy—which, spoiler alert, is ultimately revealed to be a stand-in for a dispute playing out between a live-action child and the real “President Business,” his anal-retentive father who wants to glue his “adult models” into permanent perfection. It’s true: The Lego Movie is pointedly critical of late capitalism consumer culture. The villain is named Lord Business, after all; he hates "hippie-dippy stuff." The inhabitants of Bricktown drink Over-Priced Coffee™. The film's anthem is the Brave New World-ish "Everything Is Awesome." The archetypical proletariat protagonist, the climactic class revolt, the laughable "relics" made from middle-class waste—The Lego Movie lays it on so heavy, even a five-year-old would get the drift.
I suppose that's the point, and explains how the folks at Fox picked up on it. But this is a film which, among other things, features Lego Abraham Lincoln piloting a jet-fueled rocket chair out of a meeting with Batman, Gandalf, and a robot pirate. Subtlety isn’t quite the point. But even more cartoonish is a world where full-grown adults devote ostensibly serious news time to decrying a children’s movie. And that, more than capitalism itself, is precisely what The Lego Movie is attacking. Furthermore, corrosive bourgeois sentiment isn’t alone among The Lego Movie’s "targets," if we can even use so serious a term for objects of ridicule in a children’s film. In its trim hundred minutes, the movie manages to assault an impressive array of cultural bull’s eyes, from academic think tanks (literally manifest as the best and the brightest with tubes plugged in their heads, threatened with electroshock if they fail to produce whatever new ideas are demanded of them), to film tropes in general ("it sounds like a cat poster
, but it’s true"), and even Lego’s own legacy of long-forgotten trend products made embarrassing by time, like the Shaquille O’Neal figurine. And the politics are hardly one-sided: "Cloud Coo-Coo Land," an aptly named locale for perpetual-rainbow dance parties and an explicit ban on negative thoughts (which must be "pushed deep down, where you’ll never, ever find them"), makes a mockery of those all-too-familiar Facebook liberals whose politics seems best expressed by cat GIFs and conflict aversion. At the risk of stating the obvious, we should remember that this movie cannot possibly be anti-capitalist. Beneath the satire, after all, is a feature-length toy commercial for a ubiquitous plastic product valued at $14.6 billion. The film was produced by a major studio, banked $69 million in its opening weekend, and already has a video game tie-in available on Amazon. Even in the film itself, the profit motive isn’t seriously at risk. If it were, then perhaps The Lego Movie would end with the overthrow of President Business and the installation of a socialist utopia, or—in the "real world" where the Legos are revealed to exist—a moralizing replacement of the Lego models with some environmentally friendly hemp dolls and an illustrated kids edition of Chairman Mao's The Little Red Book.But that isn’t what happens.
Despite Fox’s claims, the function of capitalism in our society isn’t the target of The Lego Movie. Lord Business isn’t so-called or so-hated because he’s "the head of a corporation where they hire people" and "[people] feed their families"—he’s called that because he’s the projection of a young boy whose obsessive-compulsive father wears a tie and does some kind of business-y job that, being ten years old, the kid doesn’t have a more precise word for. He’s hated because he’s a boorish control freak spoiling his son’s attempt to have fun with Legos. The kid isn’t upset that his dad pays employees a wage for their labor, he’s upset that his father is so fixated on his paranoid need to make everything the way it’s "supposed to be" and so self-conscious about any questioning of his "adult" use of the toys that he’s going to literally glue them in place, preventing his child from using his imagination again. This movie isn’t revolutionary; at bottom, it’s more about empathy than politics.