It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon during my Spring Break. I was relaxing at home and decided to watch a movie. I picked The LEGO Movie just for the heck of it. If you have not seen the movie, here’s a basic plot summary. A local, bumbling construction worker, named Emmet, inadvertently finds The Piece of Resistance, an ancient relic which can stop the evil Lord Business from destroying the world. He and his friends journey to stop Lord Business’ plan to glue the world in place with his superweapon, The Kragle. I had seen it once before, and upon my first viewing, I found it to be a pretty entertaining movie with an overarching theme of “Anyone can be special if they try hard enough”. However, after watching it a second time. I realized that The LEGO Movie is a carefully crafted work of anti-capitalist, pro-socialist propaganda.
The anti-capitalist sentiment is obvious in the very beginning of the movie. Let’s start with the movie’s antagonist. His name is Lord Business. LORD BUSINESS. With a name like that, the writers align big business with evil and malicious intent. Lord Business is an evil overlord and also the President of the gargantuan Octan Corporation. The evil overlord of all the whole world is also the head of a company which holds a monopoly on every commodity. The Octan corporation has a facade of a friendly business, but in reality, is a crucial element in financing Lord Business police state and robot army. Emmet casually notes that the Octan corporation, “produces all our, music, dairy, coffee, television shows, surveillance cameras, history books, and voting machines”. This is clearly an anti-capitalist indictment of corporations, which hold an absurd amount of power over the common people and use their power to control them.
The Octan Corporation creates all of Lord Business’ surveillance systems, giving him the ability to spy on the whole city of Bricksburg and disseminate his propaganda. Bricksburg’s streets are plastered with billboards of Lord President’s frowning face with the slogan, “I’ve Got My Eye On You”. Every morning, Lord Business broadcasts a greeting to his citizens, under the alias President Business. He commands them to be good citizens “or they’ll be put away”. Emmet questions this threat until the government produced and manufactured sitcom, “Where Are My Pants?” comes on the television. The banal, half-baked humor of the sitcom makes him forget all about Lord Business’ threats and his ulterior motives. Lord Business, under the guise of his friendly persona President Business, tricks his subjects into supporting him. This is similar to companies such as Enron and AIG who were able to sustain public support by maintaining a good public image. The Octan corporation controls the media and ensures the population is brainwashed into complacency. Emmet follows the Octan-approved booklet, “How to Fit in, Have Everybody Like You, and Always Be Happy”, another form of propaganda Octan uses to control the people. Lord Business uses his resources from the Octan corporation to fund his evil robot army and ensure control over the different countries of the world.
Along with its anti-capitalist undertones, the film also champions the role of the humble proletariat worker as integral to the success of society. To the Octan corporation and Lord Business’ evil empire, Emmet is but a lowly worker with no significance. Once he is able to escape the city, he begins on a journey of self-discovery with other revolutionaries and realizes that he no longer needs to rely on the government mandated “instructions” which tell him how to build and how to live. Emmet relied on government instructions for so long that he initially could not think for himself. He has been drained of any originality. It is not until he combines his intellect with the other “Master Builders”, individuals with creative, egalitarian, community-oriented minds, that he unlocks his true potential to creatively attack the evil materialistic grip of Lord Business. After Emmet is enlightened by his fellow comrades, he uses his knowledge of Lord Business' forces he gained as a construction worker to take down the empire.
In the end, however, Emmet converts Lord Business to the leftist cause of the Master Builders. The Master Builders advocate for the uniting the different realms of the LEGO universe and for destroying the vice grip of Lord Business’ evil empire. Lord Business, on the other hand, wanted to use his superweapon, the Kragle, to glue the entire world in place as the ultimate act of control. Emmet convinces him that the world cannot simply be divided up into separate realms and that he too can be a Master Builder if he simply believes. Lord Business joins him and repents. However in a world made of LEGO bricks, one can postulate that a world glued together would never sustain itself. A universe where LEGO men and women live together and create new things is the obvious outcome. The moment when Lord Business joins the Master Builders is simply a metaphor for when capitalism slips away and is replaced by the glorious communist society as Karl Marx theorized. The LEGO movie is not simply a message to kids to be creative and recognize the power of imagination but is also a carefully crafted, critique of capitalism, materialism and promotes a socialist society.
