Sign In to Architizer Or use your email. The new Architizer recognizes addresses and passwords from the original platform. Don't have an account yet? Join with a Social Network Join with an Email Address By creating an account on Architizer, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy Already have an Architizer account? Sign In to Architizer Thanks for verifying your email address. Need to verify your email? Enter your email and hit submit to have a new verification message sent. You should receive an email shortly to verify your email address! Enter your email address and we will send you a link to reset your password. We just sent a password reset link toCheck your spam folder, or we can resend the email. If you created your account with Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn, try signing in with that.(I have written synopses of both The Lego Movie and We at the bottom of this article for any who may have missed either of these seminal works, but I recommend reading/watching them yourself, especially in order.)
With the obvious transformation of world, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The Lego Movie does something between a reboot and sequel to We. By the time of The Lego Movie, Zamyatin’s absolute authoritarian One State has failed. But the tensions between control and freedom in an artificial world continue. The wheel turns again, another revolution, as Zamyatin predicted at the end of We. Then at an unspecified future moment, a new war, and a new autocratic Well-Doer (the title of the dictator of One State) arrives in the absolute power of Lord Business.The authors of The Lego Movie learned from some of Zamyatin mistakes. The protagonists, Emmet and D-503, are much alike. Both of them are competent technical men content with following orders. They are also useless and uncomprehending of their circumstances at every point of the plot, but where We is a first-person tale told by an idiot, The Lego Movie takes a safe third-person perspective. We are not trapped inside only what Emmet knows at any given time, which, like D-503, is usually damn little.
Unfortunately both stories hinge on a nearly identical and demeaning love story, as if a man’s only possible desire for freedom comes from the need to sexually pursue an attractive woman. In both cases, the main characters have no motivation beyond attempting to please women who have more political consciousness than they do. It’s sad that this view of men has persisted so long in the minds of male writers — the stories were released 93 years apart.That the sequel had to wait nearly 100 years to be made shows that We was ahead of its time. This is not the morally simple dystopias of 1984 (which was based on We but lacked the original’s fundamental quandary) or The Hunger Games (which is an alternative history that places the Chicago labor movement in a science fictionalized ancient Rome), but worlds where the trade-off of freedom for security and happiness is real, places where the autocrats fulfill the fascist Utopian promise. We and The Lego Movie are about the tension between happiness and freedom, and in both the deadly irritant is the disease of imagination, which poisons the perfect happiness of autocratic order each society has and leads the resistance to the dangers and uncertainties of free lives.
Resist, and you will be killed, but comply, and you will be happy and safe. You will want for nothing, and any suffering that may be will be so distant as to be the fate of insects too small to see. It is the promise of empires to their people taken to its logical conclusion. We may burn a few native villages and track everyone via numbers assigned to them at birth, but there will be so many more happy people in the world!Most of us are more OK with this deal than we care to admit. Often, this is for good reasons. Despite the expectations of the cruelties of automated societies, in some aspects the whole thing went rather well. Numeric identifications aren’t about making us all the same, but distinguishing us uniquely. You aren’t John Smith to the system because then you’re not you, only the category of John Smith. Most of the time this surveillance is used to make sure everyone has some access to the benefits of society. Yes, it makes dissent nearly impossible, but almost everyone gets to learn to read and it’s easy to get food and communicate with almost anyone in the world.
Then there’s disability in its myriad forms. Despite the draw of eugenics and compliance cultures, the post-industrial urban age has been a place of rights and empowerment for people who would have once been seen as drags on resources and quietly culled, often by their own families. The ADA has been called an authoritarian crackdown, which it is, but it’s also created a world far more humane than any before it for the many people fated by bodily flaw to lives of pain and constraint.The question both these works subtly place before their readers/viewers — all while distracting them with more straightforward tales of running through tunnels and secret meetings and romance and blowing up infrastructure — is this: Is authoritarianism a dystopia or a utopia?In his 1970s sci-fi classic Ringworld, Larry Niven proposed a device called a tasp, which could stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain and cause a sense of total happiness, pleasure, contentment. The tasp was a device, drug, and a weapon of control that could enslave through addiction to involuntary bliss.
In 2014, we are very close to building something like the tasp, though not yet usable from a distance. We are feeding deep brain stimulators into areas of the brain to cure depression and treat Parkinson’s. We are tenuously close to escaping the painful freedoms Nature has made for us, into the slavery of technological Bliss. I often ask people if they’d take a tasp. Some say yes at once. Some view it with existential horror, but most are in-between — fascinated, desiring, but not wanting to let go of the world. Most people I ask seem to be OK with the idea of a little slavery in exchange for happiness-on-demand.Both these stories make clear the price of making these dystopias into utopias isn’t the little bit of slavery part, your involuntary labor is easy to live with. We’ve lived with involuntary labor in one form or another since we started experimenting in civilization. No, the thing we must give up is imagination: the sense of future, the pain of desire, the draw of struggle and change.
It’s obvious that to be changelessly and uniformly happy, we must give up change and difference. Both stories are filled with little desires to be sought and fulfilled — sex, friends, rivalries, sports, so on — but as along as we submit to the Well-Doer and Lord Business, nothing of deep consequence can ever happen to us. Once we grow disconnected with meaningless lives, such that not even happiness and pleasure can save us, the wheel revolves again.Where the stories depart is in how to resolve the tension between imagination and the desire for safety and happiness. For Zamyatin, the cycle of destruction and conflict is eternal. “Why then do you think there is a last revolution?” the rebellious I-330 asks D-503. “Their number is infinite …. The ‘last one’ is a child’s story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night.”The Lego Movie veers completely away from Zamyatin’s fatalism and does something new, and strange, even possibly naive — but also hopeful, risky, and above all, imaginative.
At the moment of conflict, Emmet steps away from the cyclical script of 20th-century fascism and seeks reconciliation. “Look at all these things that people built. You might see a mess… what I see are people inspired by each other, and by you. People taking what you made, and making something new out of it.”Here, he acknowledges the fault of the natural world: that people can’t create as much alone as they can working in concert together. But he also argues for a place of imagination. He continues: “You don’t have to be the bad guy.”That Lord and Miller have rebooted and extended We at this moment is important. A paradox has entered our political discourse: The more controlled and artificial and technological we make the world, the more capable of wild and powerful fancy it becomes. Like Facebook protests, taco delivering drones, antibiotics, graffiti stenciling robots, comicons, carbon-fiber space elevators and custom over-night stickers, reconciliation between control and imagination was beyond imagining in 1921.