Whether you have kids or not, you’ve likely seen “The LEGO Movie.” The family-friendly offering topped the box office for nearly a month, raking in more than $225 million dollars domestically and putting it on track to be among the top 30 most profitable films ever made. Which makes it all the more ironic that critics are mostly right — “The LEGO Movie” does vilify the business world, and most especially, the figure of CEO. The ruler of Bricksburg is named President Business. He’s also the head of the Octan Corporation, which controls everything in the land, from Over Priced Coffee™ to Taco Tuesday™ to the devilishly catchy “Everything is Awesome,” the only song that plays on Bricksburg’s sole radio station. In the end, President Business is not just chief executive — he’s an evil tyrant out to destroy the world. Fox News, which has, over the past few years been sounding the “anti-business” alarm about films such as “The Muppets” and “The Lorax,” may be onto something.
Lots of animated villains are powerful, greedy, and rich. Think Cruella De Vil, who wants to profit from Dalmatian puppy fur, or Hexxus in “Fern Gully,” who is the oil industry personified as a toxic skeleton. There is Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons,” the wealthy Malfoy family in “Harry Potter,” and the plot of every “Scooby-Doo” episode that ends with the corrupt business owner muttering, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids.”Yet if Hollywood is indoctrinating our children with anti-corporate messages, then shouldn’t our children be growing up to be mini-Marxists? Indeed, multiple surveys tell us millennials are more likely to approve of socialism and that they are more embracing of racial, social, and cultural difference. On the other hand, millennials also love to buy stuff, think highly of entrepreneurs, and rank “being financially well off” as their number one concern. So breathe easy, Fox News. Capitalism is still safe.
Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Which is not to say these films have no influence. At its core “The LEGO Movie” epitomizes the internal struggle every LEGO lover has when they open a new set of the plastic bricks: Should I follow the instructions or go my own way? And it is inescapable which side the film comes down on. It stands its ground as an endorsement of creative, collaborative, and free play — for both kids and adults. The heroes in the film are rebels who figure out that you don’t have to follow the instructions and that, if you work together, you can save the world. That’s a lesson absent from too much of the rest of our kids’ lives today. As any parent will tell you, this moral is directly antithetical to the LEGO company’s marketing strategy over the last 20 years, which has focused on selling large, expensive, complicated, themed sets, such as the LEGO Death Star and the LEGO Hogwarts Castle. But this approach may also run counter to LEGO’s roots.
The 80-year-old Danish firm originally took its name from the Danish expression, “lego godt,” which translates, more or less, to “play well.” Is its Hollywood alter-ego a sign the toymaker hopes to reinvent itself? Will it start to market more free-form sets that appeal to both boys and girls? Still, the message of the film goes beyond the context of the LEGO box itself. Parents today — myself included — are afraid to let our kids so much as run to the neighbor’s house, and schools are cutting back on recess to focus on test prep. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that the decline of wild, unsupervised outdoor play — the play the vast majority of us grew up with, whether we were born in the 1940s or the 1970s — has reached crisis portions. We are raising a generation that is more anxious, depressed, and narcissistic and, without doubt, less inspired. Indeed, it may be true that “The LEGO Movie” and many other animated children’s films present a dim view of corporate America in order to champion creativity and play.
But the main message our kids are getting from everywhere else is: Be quiet, sit still, and follow the rules. So if you want to raise real revolutionaries — truly innovative, creative individuals who will grow up to be confident, happy, healthy adults — open the door, shoo the kids outside (and away from the LEGOs), and tell them, “Play well.”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.