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Nathan Roberts Independent Study: Postmodern Film

Professor Rahul Hamid December 14, 2014

Playing with Lord Business:

Structure, Bricolage, and The Lego Movie (2014)

Immediately after The Lego Movie (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2014) was theatrically released,

critics and viewers began to debate the nature of its true ideological function. Film Comment’s David

Filipi summarizes two sides of this debate when he asks: “Is The Lego Movie a surprisingly cheeky

critique of consumerism and social conformity? (Some have gone so far as to call its impossible-to-

unremember single ‘Everything Is Awesome’ an anti-fascist anthem.) Or is it just a two-hour

commercial for the titular products as well as the properties owned by its distributor, Warner Bros.

(Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.?)”1 Characters in The Lego Movie fight capitalist oppression, but the film

also functions as an advertisement for two multinational corporations: Warner Bros. Entertainment

and The Lego Group.

An initial impulse may be to suppose that The Lego Movie is a one-hundred-minute commercial

designed to reflexively critique its own “commercialness.” In his 1991 essay “E Unibus Plurum,”

David Foster Wallace describes how, “by “blur[ring] … the lines between genres, agendas, commercial

art and arty commercials,” reflexive commercials “invite [viewers] to ‘see through’ the manipulation…

[They] invite a complicity between their own witty irony and [the viewers’] appreciation of that irony”

(58, 60). 2 If Wallace’s critique can be accurately applied to The Lego Movie, then the film’s reflexive-

artistic merit is designed to encourage complicity between Warner-Lego and the ‘sophisticated,’ irony-

appreciating viewer. The self-critique is a means to the film’s ultimate end: convincing viewers to

purchase Lego products.

                                                                                                               1  Filipi, David. "Animation Pick: The Lego Movie" Film Comment Sept. 2014: 75. Web. 22 Nov. 2014.  2  Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. 21-83. Print.  

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This view corresponds with Fredric Jameson’s assertion that “capitalism produces differences

or differentiation as a function of its own internal logic.”3 Although The Lego Movie holds ideological

differences in tension, Jameson would argue that this internal difference is a strategy of, rather than a

refutation of, multinational capital. The Lego Movie should be treated as one of “the various

postmodernisms, which … share a resonant affirmation, when not an outright celebration, of the

market” (305).

This line of reasoning is not without merit. The Lego Movie is blatantly “pro-Lego,” and, by

extension, “pro multinational consumer capitalism.” Lego bricks proliferate in every single mise-en-scène.

(Christopher Miller has remarked: "Any frame, if you stopped the movie, would be something you

could recreate if you had a lot of money to buy a lot of Lego bricks.”4) The film’s triumphant, final

scene features a father and son playing with Legos. The shot looks like it could be straight out of a

television advertisement.

It’s also empirically true that The Lego Group used The Lego Movie to market Lego products.

When Lord and Miller created “worlds” and characters that did not already exist as Lego products,

The Lego Group even turned these worlds and characters into new products. As The Wall Street Journal

reported in late January 2014:

“Lego is receiving a share of the film's profits and flexing its own marketing muscle to

promote it…. Already in stores are some of the 17 new building sets that recreate scenes from

The Lego Movie and 16 new character figurines, known as ‘minifigs.’ There will be a

simultaneous Feb. 7 release of The Lego Movie Videogame, McDonald's Happy Meal

                                                                                                               3 Jameson, Fredric. ""Conclusion"" Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 406. Print.  4  Ibid.

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collectible cups, and all the other usual tie-in merchandise licensed to outside partners: books,

apparel, school supplies.”5

However, in order to give a detailed account of The Lego Movie’s ideology, the “self-critical

commercial” assertion must be necessarily complicated. It is problematic to claim that The Lego Movie is

a “self-critical commercial” because that claim implicitly assumes that The Lego Movie must have an

“ultimate” ideological aim. It presupposes that The Lego Movie’s ideological tensions must––if not

“synthesize into” an overarching ideology––find their heterogeneity denuded by the all-encompassing

aim of Warner-Lego. The “self-critical commercial” is a full-blown commercial nonetheless.

The problem with this assertion is that it neglects how the “singular text” of The Lego Movie is

not subject to any singular ideological aim. It is more accurate to analyze The Lego Movie as the site of

multiple, coexisting ideological aims and functions. Structurally, these tensions are maintained through

a version of what Stuart Hall, in his seminal essay “Encoding/Decoding,” calls the “articulation of

linked but distinctive moments.”6 In one “discursive moment,” Warner-Lego decided to produce a

film for the sake of economic gain. But in another “discursive moment,” writer-directors Phil Lord

and Christopher Miller were able to write and direct a film according to their own ideological aims. And

as Hall explains, “since each [moment] has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can

constitute its own break or interruption of the ‘passage of forms’” (91).

A close reading of The Lego Movie demonstrates that Lord and Miller intended to use their

writer-director “moment” to “break,” “interrupt,” and “decode/recode” the “passage of forms” from

initial production stages––in which the film was proposed by The Warner Bros. to The Lego Group,

then greenlit by The Lego Group––to post-postproduction stages of audience reception and

                                                                                                               5  Steinberg, Don. "Building 'The Lego Movie,' One Brick at a Time." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 30 Jan. 2014. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.  6  Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding." The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 90-103. Print.  

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interpretation.7 As Lord and Miller decode Warner-Lego’s capitalist aim and recode it for audiences,

they stand by a particular version of what Hall calls a “negotiated position.”8 According to Hall:

“Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional

elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make grand

significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own

ground rules –– it operates with exceptions to the rule… Negotiated codes operate through

what we might call particular or situational logics: and these logics are sustained by their

differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power.” (103)

In the The Lego Movie, Lord and Miller “acknowledge the legitimacy” of Warner-Lego’s basic

hegemonic project: to convince viewers that Legos are worthy financial investments. However, their

position contains “oppositional elements” because they oppose The Lego Group’s encouraged mode

of product use. They encourage viewers to avoid passively reconstructing the pre-made structures

pushed by The Lego Group’s press materials and instructions. Instead, they implore viewers to, as

A.O. Scott words it in his New York Times review, “throw out the manuals and follow the lead of your

own ingenuity, improvising new combinations for the building blocks in front of you.”9

                                                                                                               7  A reasonable critique of this line of reasoning could be that it relies on an antiquated form of auteur-oriented analysis. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s “discursive moment” was certainly not the last discursive moment in the production or distribution of The Lego Movie. However, as Christopher Miller has explained: "Our fear going into it was [Warner-Lego] were going to say, 'We wanna sell this toy and this toy. Kids love race cars, so we need to have a race car in the movie.' They never did anything like that. They said make the movie you want make. We'll make toys based on that.” (Steinberg, op. cit.). Miller seems to be telling the truth; there hasn’t been, at the moment I write, publicized indication that Warner-Lego conceptually or thematically hindered Lord and Miller in any major way. Without contrary evidence, an auteur-oriented read of a film as idiosyncratic as The Lego Movie seems not only acceptable, but reasonable. Still, this topic should open up further research and discussion. For example, Lego’s strategy to make toys based on Lord and Miller’s vision certainly supports Wallace and Jameson’s assertions that even ironic, postmodern critiques are “bend[t] … to the ends of spectation and consumption.” Perhaps Warner’s willingness to absorb Lord and Miller’s rebellious narrative can be interpreted as an example of what John Fiske labels “a strategy of containment” (see Understanding Pop Culture, page 18, 29 [1993]). 8  The particularity resides in the fact that, unlike in Hall’s analysis, their position occurs within the process of producing a text rather than receiving a text.  9  Scott, A. O. "Toying With Ideas Outside the Manual." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Feb. 2014. Web. 04 Dec. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/movies/the-lego-movie-toys-with-thinking-outside-the-manual.html?_r=0>.  

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In a broader sense, Lord and Miller use an allegorical narrative in order associate Lego play

with broader modes of cultural “play.” The best way to understand Lord and Miller’s assertion is to

employ John Fiske’s distinction between products as forms of “mass culture”––“completed objects”

put out by “culture industries” “to be accepted passively”––and products as resources for popular

culture creation.10 Unlike mass culture, “popular culture is made by people at the interface between the

products of the culture industries and everyday life. Popular culture is made by the people, not

imposed on them…” (25). Popular culture creation is “performed in the cultural sphere rather than

the economic” (14).

For Lord and Miller, Lego sets are problematic when they’re treated as products of mass

culture, passively consumed according to The Lego Group’s pre-made designs. Lord and Miller’s

oppositional proposal suggests that Legos can and should be sites for popular culture creation.

Therefore, their allegory proposes that society should turn from passive mass-cultural consumption to

participatory popular-cultural creation. Lord and Miller ultimately propose that popular culture should

be generated through a reasonably structured form of creative, collaborative bricolage.

In the very first scene we meet The Lego Movie’s antagonist: Lord Business. Like every character

in the film (until the final mise-en-abyme reveal), Lord Business, voiced by Will Ferrell, is personified by a

Lego character or “minifigure.” Lord Business strides around wearing, presumably, a giant robotic

extension of his own body,11 like similar machine extensions used in District 9 (Neil Blomkamp, 2009)

and Pacific Rim (Guillermo Del Torro, 2013). While this giant frame communicates his dictatorial

power, his name points to Lord and Miller’s greater aim. The title “Lord” is used classify evil

dictatorial rulers in popular fantasy films like The Lord of the Rings (Lord Sauron), Harry Potter (Lord

                                                                                                               10  Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. 10. Print.  11  I say “presumably” because, ontologically, the “robotic body” consists of CGI-simulated Lego bricks. Determining what any object in The Lego Movie “is” requires correspondence-based responses to diverse “brick” combinations. For more on CGI and correspondence-based theories of cinematic perception, see: “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory” by Stephen Prince (Film Quarterly 49.3 [1996]).  

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Voldemort), and Star Wars (Lord Vader). By combining the title “Lord” and “Business,” Lord and

Miller conflate dictatorial, totalitarian omnipotence with the dominion of multinational capitalism.

They foreshadow how, in their satirical diegesis, there is no difference between the private sector and

the public sector: Megaruler and Megacorporation are one in the same.

This point is cemented and expanded in the second scene. As Emmett, the film’s “everyman”

protagonist, goes about his morning routine, he turns on the television in his apartment. Lord Business

is giving announcements, although he’s calling himself “President Business: President of the Octan

Corporation and the World.” With this irony––the title “President” seems to refer to an elected leader

in a representative democracy, whereas the ruler of “the Octan corporation and the world” sounds like

a totalitarian dictator––Lord and Miller draw associations between Lord Business and other

benevolent-sounding totalitarian titles: Stalin calls himself “comrade”; the intrusive government of

Orwell’s 1984 is personified by the protective “Big Brother”. Like these leaders, “President” Business

codes his more sinister aims: “Take care to follow the instructions,” he proclaims before quickly

whispering “or you’ll be put to sleep,” and then immediately yelling: “Taco Tuesday is next week!”

Emmett cries in excitement: “Taco Tuesday?!” The notion of delicious food softens the threat of

death.

Despite this Eastern-Bloc-style setup, the next sequence demonstrates how this totalitarian

domination not enforced by explicit Stalinist or Maoist terror, but by a “free” market economy run on

the production and consumption of mass cultural goods. Emmett walks onto his balcony overlooking

Bricksburg: a modern, Western city made of Lego bricks. As the “camera” flies around, frames are

packed bustling, multicolored, advertising-ridden (billboards read: “Single Apartments Available,

Apply Within!” and “Enjoy Popular Music!” [a riff on ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola!’]), traffic-filled streets.

Buildings made in various historical and national styles all coexist within the same frames. A later shot

features an angled Lego-block version of Manhattan’s Alamo Cube on Astor Place (see Image 1). The

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same shot reveals scrolling, electronic messages that travel alongside skyscrapers like scrolling tickers

on Wall Street. Bricksburg features none of the mass-manufactured, barren, Brutalist-style architecture

that proliferated under Soviet rule. It is a capitalist, western city.

And yet, as we soon realize, every citizen in this bustling city voluntarily engages in the same

activities. They giddily follow the state/corporation-endowed “Instructions On How To Fit In, Have

Everybody Like You, and Always He Happy”. Instructed activities include: repeatedly listening to the

exact same song (“Everything Is AWESOME!!!” written for the film by Tegan and Sara. It features

lyrics like: “We’re the same/I’m like you/You’re like me/We’re working in harmony”), purchasing

thirty dollar coffee, cheering for the local sports team, discussing the same television show, and

blowing up “everything weird” found on their construction sites.

Lord and Miller visually emphasize how every Bricksburg citizen engages in these acts

uniformly. Minifigures drive their own individual cars, but all cars move at one consistent velocity;

viewed from above, all moving cars look as if they exist as contingent parts of one interconnected

snake. All citizens parallel park their cars at regimented, identical moments in time. A bus pulls up and

figures unanimously yell “Go Sports Team!” The interconnected human snake continues into a

Laundromat and onto a construction site. Lego minifigures walk in straight lines; their jerky strides are

both functionally entailed by their stiff Lego joints and emphasized by stop-motion-style CGI.

These moving parts look choreographed and regimented, but not drably militaristic; every

frame is paradoxically packed with overwhelming varieties of vibrant, whirring, multicolored Lego

“bricks” and senses of mechanical order, structure, and regimentation. This echoes George Simmel’s

observation that, on one hand, all the “elements of metropolitan life… are constantly touching one

another in… unceasing external contact” and, simultaneously, “the technique of metropolitan life in

general is not conceivable without all of its activities and reciprocal relationships being organized and

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coordinated in the most punctual way into a firmly fixed framework of time which transcends all

subjective elements.”12

By conflating free market capitalism with a totalitarian rule, Lord and Miller’s satirical critique

bares striking resemblance to the social critique posited by Theodor Adorno in “The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” 13 Adorno writes: “Culture today is infecting everything with a

sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself

and all are unanimous together.” This unanimous system attempts to exert fascistic control over

individuals: “Today works of art, suitably packaged like political slogans, are pressed on a reluctant

public at reduced prices by the culture industry” (129). They do so with advertisements (“The blind

and rapidly spreading repetition of designated words links advertising to the totalitarian slogan”), and,

even though people are technically free to dissent, “everyone must show that they identify

wholeheartedly with the power which beats them… Individuals are tolerated only as far as their

wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question (124). As individuals prove their loyal

identification, “the whole inner life compartmentalized according to the categories of vulgarized depth

psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into… an apparatus which… conforms to the

model presented by the culture industry” (136). Adorno’s model is nominally democratic, but,

ultimately, it forms a top-down, vertically integrated system: the culture industry forces commodities

onto individuals, individuals identify with products (and, thereby, with “the power which beats them”),

and, finally, products turn individuals into “apparatuses.” Even in their inner life, individuals conform

to “the model presented by the culture industry.”

Bricksburg presents an exaggerated incarnation of this process. The Culture Industry––in this

case, the Octan Corporation––produces a culture of “sameness” through their products and                                                                                                                12Simmel, Georg. "The Metropolis and Mental Life." The Blackwell City Reader. Ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2002. 13, 15. Print.  13  Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Gunzelin S. Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 94-136. Print.

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Instructions. Every citizen gladly proves his or her loyalty to The Octan Corporation: they listen to the

same lyrically repetitive song over and over again, purchase the same overpriced coffee, love the same

food (chicken wings, croissants, giant sausages, and tacos), offer identical greetings and responses,

watch and discuss the same television show––a show that repeats same gag (a man walks into a room

without pants and asks: “Honey, where are my pants?”) endlessly.

For this reason, Emmett is hesitant to engage in any activity that is not preordained by the

Instructions––i.e., any action that does not involve consuming mass cultural, Octan-provided goods;

destroying “weird” things; or constructing according to rigid, pre-set instructions. Emmett’s “whole

inner life is compartmentalized.” We glimpse Emmett’s internal “compartmentalization” when

Wildstyle asks him: “What is your favorite restaurant?” “Any chain restauraint,” he answers. “Favorite

TV show?” “Where Are My Pants?” “Favorite song?” “Everything is awesome.” Emmett, a passive

receiver of mass cultural products, internalizes these products as his own Pavlovian preferences. We

get little sense that he thinks beyond this rigid “consumption preferences checklist” pressed on him by

The Culture Industry.

In a shot that most clearly conflates Octan’s mass cultural products with The Lego Group’s

own mass cultural products, Emmett and his identical co-construction workers receive a Lego

instruction booklet in a plastic tube. The booklet is pulled out of the tube by a crane. Placed on an

easel, the instructions in the film are scaled in the same way that a real Lego instruction booklet would

be to real-life Lego minifigures. The intended association is clear: Octan is to Bricksburg construction

workers as The Lego Group is human Lego builders; both culture industries press their rigid designs

onto those willing to build according to their pre-made designs. But because Lord and Miller treat

Bricksburg as a self-sufficient society, this sort of Lego building exemplifies one manifestation of a

larger social problem: it exemplifies one of many ways by which people passively consume and

embrace predesigned mass cultural objects.

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Bricksburg illustrates Phil Lord’s complaint that: “a lot of the creativity in our world is

outsourced… we do a lot of consuming but not as much creating because we have cool movies and

we have the Internet and we have recorded music but it was only recently that that could be consumed

that way.”14 Mass cultural products, even at their most appealing, encourage consumption (and, in the

case of Lego, rigid reproduction), but that’s all they do. If we merely consume, we “outsource” all

creativity to the Culture Industry, and the products of mass culture reify “the triumph of invested

capital” rather than the triumph of unique individual visions (Adorno, 98).

However, although Adorno’s analysis lends itself to Lord and Miller’s satirical city, it doesn’t

quite account for their broader critique. After Emmett looses his set of instructions, meets the

rebellious Wildstyle, and is whisked out of Bricksburg in a Dark Knight-style motorcycle race, we learn

that Lord Business’s society isn’t just problematic because it enforces “sameness” in Bricksburg; it’s

problematic because it bars any sort of intertextual interaction between homogenized, genre-specific

worlds. Bricksburg is only one of them.

Wildstyle explains Lord Business’s master plan as she and Emmett try to blend into an “Old

Western” town. This “world” is immediately recognizable, signified by the extradiegetic title “Old

West” and a variety of American Western tropes recreated with Lego pieces: Delicate Arch from

Arches National Park, cacti, cowboy hats, pistols, handlebar mustaches, patterned southwestern-style

ponchos, covered wagons, and a tan-and-brown color palate contrasted with a light blue sky. Lord and

Miller “even got the guy from Ennio Morricone out of retirement to whistle on the movie.”15

Percussion and a harmonica accompany this whistling, just like in Morricone’s own “The Good, The

Bad, and The Ugly” theme.

                                                                                                               14  "The Lego Movie: Directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller On Set Movie Interview." YouTube. ScreenSlam, 25 Jan. 2014. Web. 03 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJsFRJw0IYk>.  15  "Interview: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the Men Who Built The LEGO Movie - ComingSoon.net." ComingSoon.net. Craveonline Media, 5 Feb. 2014. Web. 02 Dec. 2014. <http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/114405-interview-phil-lord-and-chris-miller-the-men-who-built-the-lego-movie#/slide/1>.  

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As they ride into the town on horses, Wildstyle explains: “Your home, Bricksburg, is only one

of many worlds in the universe. There’s also this one, Pirates’ Cove, Knight’s Club, Clowntown, a

bunch of others we don’t need to mention.” As Wildstyle names these worlds, extradiegetic still

photographs of them fill the frame in rapid succession. Not only are these worlds actually sold by the

Lego Group as individual sets, but every picture appears to have been taken from actual Lego box art

and promotional materials. The fact that these sets are presented as “worlds,” exactly how The Lego

Group contextualizes every set, makes sense in light of Lord and Miller’s desire to “treat Lego as a

medium more than a product” (Steinberg, op cit.). Since The Lego Group markets a variety of

“worlds,” Lord and Miller incorporate various “worlds” into their film.

However, when Wildstyle refers to “a bunch of others we don’t need to mention” and

publicity photographs flash by in even shorter increments, she speaks in the self-referential, authorial

voice of Lord and Miller. They’re clearly trying to avoid name-dropping every Lego world in their film

because every time they mention a marketable Lego world, that reference inevitably functions as Lego

product advertisement. They want Lego Worlds to serve a diegetic purpose, but they try to avoid using

these worlds as blatant extradiegetic advertisements.16

To this end, as Wildstyle continues to speak, it becomes apparent that Lord and Miller do not

think of these worlds in a particularly positive light. She says: “Lord Business, or, as you think you

know him, ‘President Business,’ stole the Kraggle, the most powerful object in the universe. All the

people in the universe were once free to travel and mingle and build whatever they wanted. But

                                                                                                               16  In my research, it seems that many of the worlds in the film have been either discontinued or renamed by Lord and Miller. For example, Lego did release a clown minifigure in 2010 (it can be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-8683-Minifigures-Series-Clown/dp/B003NYX70K), but “Clown Town” was never sold as a stand-alone Lego world. Similarly, Pirates’ Cove exists as part of the Legoland Florida Resort (http://florida.legoland.com/en/EXPLORE-THE-PARK/Park-Map/Pirates-Cove/), but it was never sold as a pre-packaged Lego product. The closest product to “Pirates’ Cove” is actually called “Forbidden Cove” (http://brickset.com/sets/6264-1/Forbidden-Cove). Although the images pictured in the film do appear to be slightly doctored publicity photos (the “Speed Racer,” “Bionicle,” and “Fabuland” images certainly are), this name switch-up seems to be, for Lord and Miller, part of a deliberate attempt to disassociate The Lego Movie’s worlds with any intentional product placement. The fact that The Lego Group allowed them to do this is another indication that Lord and Miller were given authorial latitude.

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President Business was confused by all the chaos. So he erected walls between the worlds and became

obsessed with order and perfection. And he hired bad cop to hunt down the master builders who were

always changing everything. And those of us who remained went into hiding… We searched for the

piece of resistance, the only thing that can stop The Kraggle.”

This exposition clarifies the full extent of President Business’s (and, by allegorical extension,

The Lego Group’s) oppressive ends. He not only imposes totalitarian control over Bricksburg through

“The Culture Industry” of Octan; Lord Business also makes it impossible for various worlds to

intertextually mingle and collaborate, too. When Wildstyle explains how people “were once free to

travel and mingle and build whatever they wanted,” Lord and Miller cut to a desaturated picture. It

features several diverse characters in one large group: Marvel’s “The Flash,” Jane Goodall with an ape,

“Swamp Creature” (an homage to Creature from the Black Lagoon [Jack Arnold, 1954]), William

Shakespeare, a 19th century aristocrat, Star Wars’ Chewbacca, a pirate, and a knight.

Then, when President Business “erects walls,” they cut to a cement, barbed-wired wall coming

down like the Berlin Wall or the Israeli West Bank barrier. As President Business explains his plan to

carve up the universe into various worlds, we see him pointing to a map that looks reminiscent of a

divided Europe. Fat red lines surround every isolated “world.” This shot appropriates its mise-en-scène

from a shot in Apple’s Macintosh advertisement, 1984 (Ridley Scott, 1983). The 1984 shot is low-

angled, with Big Brother projected on a giant screen above his subjects, sitting in rows separated by a

central isle (See Image 3). Bodies on either side of the isle form two low diagonal lines that approach

the bottom-center of the screen. In The Lego Movie, Lord Business’s subjects form two similar diagonal

lines; the map is projected on an equally massive screen (See Image 2).  

This sequence equates totalitarian rule with regimented, genre-divided difference. Bricksburg

characters must remain in Bricksburg; Old Western characters are forced to remain in “Old West”;

Middle Zealand character must remain in Middle Zealand. The intertextual freedom of old, when

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characters from diverse cultural spheres could mingle and build together as bricoleurs, is gone. Because

of this, when Wildstyle enters an Old West saloon, minifigures stare at her until she spits into a

spittoon and proves that she belongs in the Western genre. When Bad Cop comes looking for

Emmett, people don’t recognize Emmett’s face until Bad Cop draws a cowboy hat on his mugshot.

These characters are unaccustomed to any intruding tropes or characteristics from external

environments. Yet Master Builders are still able to pass between worlds. Because of this, Lord

Business plans to use the Kraggle––a giant tube of Krazy Glue with some letters rubbed off––in order

to literally glue world elements into their proper positions so they will never be able to mix or mingle

again.  

Considering how Lord and Miller are “using Lego as a medium,” this critique is a clear

indictment of The Lego Group’s own homogenized, stratified “worlds,” and the company’s tendency

to sell products as world-specific––or, in the case of externally licensed products, Intellectual-

Property-holder-specific. “If we allow Lego to pre-create worlds for us according to genres and

intellectual property licenses,” Lord and Miller seem to say, “we’re outsourcing our creativity.”  

The time before President Business implicitly refers to a time when The Lego Group didn’t

encourage this sort of mass culture “outsourcing.” As Lord noted in that “outsourcing” quote, this

high degree of mass-cultural consumption is a fairly recent development. In 1974, for example, The

Lego Group even included a note with their products that said: “The urge to create is equally strong in

all children… It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the

way you want it… The most important thing is to put the right material in [kids’] hands and let them

create whatever appeals to them.”17 The first externally licensed Lego products appeared in 1998 (Star

Wars figures, anticipating the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace [George Lucas, 1999]).

Before then, Lego sets were sold according to general tropes and worlds, but child-created bricolage                                                                                                                17  Gonzalez, Robbie. "These LEGO Instructions from 1974 Are Awesome (And Yes, They're Real) [UPDATED]." Io9. Kinja, 22 Nov. 2014. Web. 02 Dec. 2014. <http://io9.com/these-lego-instructions-from-1974-are-awesome-and-yes-1662169567>.  

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was emphasized more than the notion that children should merely reconstruct “other people’s stories

in Lego form,” as Jill Wilfert, Lego’s vice president of licensing and entertainment, puts it (Steinberg,

op cit.).  

“The piece of resistance,” therefore, represents Lord and Miller’s own desire to resist

reconstructing “other people’s stories,” rearticulating the “completed” narratives and products of mass

culture. They position themselves as “Master Builders” in their own right. Like Master Builders, they

use mass cultural products as pretexts for their own popular culture. Utilizing what Fiske calls “guerilla

tactics”18 they “change everything” and create “chaos.”19 Unwilling to follow pre-made instructions,

they are determined to do what Vitruvius commands of Emmett: “create the instructions in [their]

minds.”

This strategy becomes especially apparent with the reveal of The Lego Movie’s only major

character based on franchised intellectual property: Batman. He arrives driving The Bat, a jet used in

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012), and, as voiced by Will Arnett, he mimics the husk

Christian Bale sported as Batman in Nolan’s trilogy. Nolan famously darkened the Batman franchise,

returning the character to his post-war, hard-boiled detective fiction roots. As Roger Ebert noted in

his Batman Begins review: “The movie is not realistic, because how could it be, but it acts as if it is.”20 In

Nolan’s films, if the Batman character is not technically realistic, he is nevertheless tinged with the sort

of psychological angst often reserved for characters in more “realistic” prestige dramas.

In The Lego Movie, Batman acts as if he were in a moody Christopher Nolan film. Immediately

after his character is introduced, he shows off some music he’s recorded. “It’s about how I’m an

                                                                                                               18  Fiske, Op. Cit., page 19  19  It could be argued that Lord and Miller are did not create true popular culture, in Fiske’s sense, since they made the film for their own economic advantage. True as this is, I stand by the notion that The Lego Movie’s main economic “use value” can be found at different “discursive moments” in its production and distribution. If I cannot adopt Fiske’s definition of “popular culture” in its totality, Fiske’s framework nevertheless illuminates the general character of Lord and Miller’s creative bricolage.  20  Ebert, Roger. "Batman Begins Movie Review & Film Summary (2005)." Rogerebert.com. Ebert Digital LLC, 13 June 2005. Web. 01 Dec. 2014. <http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/batman-begins-2005>.  

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orphan,” he explains. A bass-heavy track, featuring a growing Batman, plays: “Darkness/No

parents/Super rich/Kinda makes it better.” “Batman’s a true artist,” Wildstyle tells Emmett, “Dark,

brooding.”

This scene’s humor hinges on the ironic distance between Batman’s seriousness, as if he were

in a Nolan film, and the character’s actual absurdity. By imagining Batman as a self-made musician,

Lord and Miller effectively create their own fan fiction in order to answer the question: What does

Batman do as a hobby when he’s home alone?

In “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,” Henry Jenkins III

observed how female fan fiction writers manipulate characters in Star Trek, a generally male-oriented

text. “The result is a type of genre switching, the rereading and rewriting of ‘space opera’ as an exotic

type of romance.”21 Jenkins points out how this reworking has an explicitly feminist thrust.

Lord and Miller engage in a similar, if less socially conscious, reworking of Christopher Nolan’s

Batman character. They take a genuinely “dark, brooding” figure of adult masculinity and imagine him

as if he were a narcissistic, overly serious teenage boy––the kind who writes grungy, angst-ridden songs

about his family problems. Lord and Miller’s Batman has teenager-like relationship issues: he’s dating

Wildstyle, but they have continual romantic difficulties. Batman has romantic subplots with Rachel

Dawes in Nolan’s films, too, but those subplots are used for the sake of nuanced character

development. In The Lego Movie, Batman’s romantic troubles stem from his own petty narcissism and

total lack of empathy. They function as an ongoing gag.

Within The Lego Movie’s diegetic bricolage, the serious, brooding Batman––a mass cultural

figure, disseminated through Nolan’s mega-grossing trilogy––forms the pretext for Lord and Miller’s

own deadpan take on the character. About halfway through the film we meet all of the Master

                                                                                                               21  Jenkins III, Henry. "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching." Critical Studies in Mass Communication (1988): 482. Print.

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Builders, and Lord and Miller treat all of them similarly: any preexisting seriousness or psychological

nuance is used as a pretext for absurd deconstruction. Consider this conversation:

GREEN LANTERN: Hey, Superman! Do you want to sit together at the meeting?

SUPERMAN: Uhhh… I have to go back to, uh, Krypton.

GREEN LANTERN: Did – didn’t Krypton blow up?

This joke imagines that Superman, rather than wanting to partner with Green Lantern in crime

fighting, doesn’t actually like Green Lantern very much. Superman, the paragon of “truth, justice, and

the American way,” avoids sitting next to the Green Lantern with a lie. This lie trivializes the explosion

of Krypton, his home planet. Lord and Miller mine this explosion––an event treated seriously in most

Superman texts––for a simple gag.

Dumbledore and Gandalf, the wise, patient mages of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings

franchises, argue with Vitruvius about how he should pronounce their names. When Emmett fails to

present a solid plan for defeating President Business, Gandalf yells a line unimaginable in any faithful

Lord of the Rings adaptation: “You’re a butt!” Abraham Lincoln then says: “A house divided against

itself would be better than this,” and leaves the room. This line literally rewrites a famous Abraham

Lincoln quote from the speech “A House Divided.” Lord and Miller use Lincoln’s reconciliatory

reputation as a pretext for their humorous reversal: the “great reconciler” immediately leaves a site of

conflict.22

The implicit contrast between this sort of popular culture creation and mass cultural

consumption is made explicit in The Lego Movie’s third act. Unable to stop Lord Business, Emmett falls

through a “black hole.” The film suddenly shifts from CGI simulation into live action recording. As

                                                                                                               22 Interestingly, neither Abraham Lincoln nor William Shakespeare were sold as Lego products until The Lego Movie was released. Lord and Miller seem to imply that, not only are Legos mass-cultural commodities, but mythologized American historical figures are also pushed on Americans like mass cultural commodities. They are the products of, if not the capitalist Culture Industry, the American “Mythmaking Industry.” By including these characters, Lord and Miller encourage a sort of historical free play. This is not a new approach; as early as 1989, Fredric Jameson noted that postmodern films often produce a “recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (op. cit., page 296).

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Emmett lies on a floor, the camera assumes his point of view. A wide-angle lens with low depth of

field produces a “warping” effect, emphasizing how Emmett is now a small Lego minifigure in a much

larger human world. Emmett sees a boy using Lego parts to act out scenes that have just occurred in

the original diegetic world, leading us to assume that the film’s first two acts were actually part of a

mise-en-abyme story. We glimpse shots of disparate Lego sets (disparate “worlds”) with signs taped to

tables below them that say: “Do Not Touch.” Yet we see they have been manipulated, by the “Master

Builders” of the original diegetic world, and by a boy in this new, external world. Not unlike The

Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) or The Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999), we’re lead to assume

that previous events have been orchestrated by exterior forces––in this case, orchestrated by a young

boy named Finn.

By introducing Finn and his larger world, Lord and Miller give their own bricolage another

author within their total diegesis, an agent that literally manipulates Legos in order to create his own

form of popular culture. With this, they cement the impression that their own film has exhibited a

form of childlike free play.

We then learn that Finn has projected a personal conflict into his narrative.23 This is made clear

when Will Ferrell, as Finn’s father, comes downstairs into the basement where Finn is playing. His

body blocks out the light streaming down from the basement doorway, just as how––we see as Lord

and Miller continually cut back and forth between this “new” world and the original diegetic sphere––

Lord Business blocks out the light in Bricksburg when he hovers above it in, “this big, black monolith

thing.” Because Ferrell voices Lord Business, the connection between the two characters is automatic,

but it’s cemented by the fact that Will Ferrell has curly hair and wears a suit, just like Lord Business.

Once this connection is made, we learn that, like Lord Business, Finn’s father wants to Krazy Glue all

of the Lego sets together in order to permanently separate the genre-specific “worlds.” He’s upset by                                                                                                                23This narrative link is similar to another link made by Spike Jonze in Where The Wild Things Are (2009), although parallels between that film’s fantasy narrative and its “real life narrative” were more impressionistic that the parallels Lord and Miller create here.  

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Finn’s messy bricolage. “What am I holding here?” he asks Finn, picking up a group of connected

bricks. “It’s a battleship,” Finn says. He responds: “It’s a hodgepodge, that’s what it is! What’s Batman

doing on it?!” He also denies that Emmett can be a hero because, according to The Lego Group, the

minifigure is a mere construction worker.

Just before Ferrell applies Krazy Glue––and Lord Business applies the Kraggle on Bricksburg–

–Finn is able to convince him that that he doesn’t have to be the “bad guy.” He is “capable of amazing

things because [he is] the special. So am I. So is everyone…. And [he] still can change everything.”

After this speech, within the mise en abyme, Lord Business and Emmett hug; in the “real world” story,

Finn and his father hug. Then they use the Lego sets to create popular culture together. This

triumphant ending implies that, at long last, Lego bricks are being utilized in their best possible sense.

As Jenkins might put it, “consumption becomes production… spectator culture becomes participatory

culture.”24 Lord expanded on this conclusive point in a postproduction interview:

“Lego was one of the modern inventions that actually facilitates… creativity. It’s not just a toy

that you buy off the self and that’s what it is. It’s something that you participate in. It’s the

equivalent of people sitting around at the dinner table and playing music, and we just want to

highlight what an important human function that is and how that’s something you think is only

the purview of geniuses and great artists, but it’s really something that every human being

practices and should practice.”25

Lord and Miller clearly prioritize the power of participatory culture and creative free play.

However, when the film was released, several critics jumped from this point to a further––and, I

believe, unwarranted––conclusion. Many critics agreed with A.O. Scott (see his quote on Page 2).

Anthony Lane, for example, mentioned that Karl Marx would’ve liked The Lego Movie because of its

moral conclusion that “we should toss away the instructions to our Lego kits and cobble together

                                                                                                               24  Jenkins III, page 490 (op. cit.) 25  "The Lego Movie: Directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller On Set Movie Interview." YouTube. (Op. Cit.)

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whatever takes our fancy.”26 Christopher Orr wrote in The Atlantic: “the moral of The Lego Movie,

repeated frequently and emphatically, is Don’t follow the instructions! Let your imagination run wild!”27

To these critics’ credit, the film does emphasize this message––especially when it addresses

literal Lego building. As Lord puts it: “Our dream was that you would turn the movie off and run

home and build the most silly, ridiculous Lego thing you could.”28 But when Lord and Miller attempt

to make a broader social argument, they actually approach utterly unencumbered free play with

caution, if not skepticism. When we claim that, “Lord and Miller think highly of creative, participatory

culture,” we must not assume that “Lord and Miller think we should deny all structural limitations.

They want us to toss any sort of ‘instructions’ away.”

This point is primarily emphasized by the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” world. CCL exemplifies the

contradictions inherent to any society formed for the sake of ensuring unencumbered creative free

play at all costs. When Emmett enters the land, he observes: “There’s no signs or anything. How does

anyone know what to do?” Unikitty responds: “Here at Cloud Cuckoo Land, there are no rules.

There’s no government, no babysitters, no bedtimes, no frowny-faces, no bushy mustaches, and no

negativity of any kind.” Wildstyle observes: “You just said the word ‘no’, like, a thousand times.”

Unikitty adds: “And also no consistency!”

Wildstyle’s comment points out an irony: eliminating all limitations actually requires severe

limitations; in CCL, several rules are enforced for the sake of prohibiting all rules––hence “no

consistency.” CCL demonstrates how an “absolutely free” world is almost totalitarian in its own right

because any structural limitations are banned; an elaborate, totalitarian structure is created for the sake

of disavowing structure. Lord and Miller intuit that, therefore, unmediated free play is ultimately

impossible without all sorts of rigid, “structure-disavowing” rules. By including this irony within the                                                                                                                26  Lane, Anthony. "Following Orders." Newyorker.com. The New Yorker, 3 Mar. 2014. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/following-orders>.  27  Orr, Christopher. "The Lego Movie Is a Blast." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 07 Feb. 2014. Web. 13 Dec. 2014. <http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/-em-the-lego-movie-em-is-a-blast/283656/>.  28  Ibid.    

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text, Lord and Miller implicitly advocate for establishing reasonable structures, instituting reasonable

rules, and obeying reasonable instructions.

This point is developed when Emmett tells the Master Builders: “Guys, you’re all so talented

and imaginative, but you can’t work together as a team. I’m just a construction worker, but when we

had a plan and we were all working together, we could build a skyscraper.” Emmett’s knack for

structure, combined with the Master Builders’ knack for unrestricted free play, allows the team to

collaboratively plan and successfully infiltrate Lord Business’s tower.

In this sequence, Lord and Miller encourage a form of bricolage akin to, as Lord puts it,

“sitting around the dinner table and playing music.” Even improvisational music must conform to

basic structural norms like rhythm, tonality, and pitch. But improvisational musicians can free play

within the confines of mutually accepted rules. When improvisational musicians “sit around the dinner

table” and collaborate on certain sorts of songs, they accept certain “instructions”––but only insofar as

those instructions provide sensible constraints for their intended creative projects. In a similar way, the

Master Builders constrain their creative freedom in order to work together, for the sake of completing

a mutually agreed-upon project.

Finally, this scene implicitly reflects a version of Lord and Miller’s own creative process. When

Lord and Miller decided to “treat Lego like a medium,” they decided to limit the types of settings

(“worlds”), characters, and objects they could work with. They constrained themselves by making a

film that would, inevitably, advertise the wares of multinational capital. And, even on a narrative level,

by tracking Emmett’s “Hero’s Journey”––from naiveté to adventure to social mastery and self-

confidence––Lord and Miller ultimately conform to the semantic, if not the syntactic, norms of

archetypical genre fiction.29

Of course, this sort of tension––between submission and rebellion, constraint and liberty,

                                                                                                               29  On the difference between syntactic and semantic genre elements, see: “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Rich Altman, Cinema Journal, Vol 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1984).

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homogeny and heterogeneity––makes up the very definition of Hall’s “negotiated position.”

Therefore, by referring to this tension within their diegesis, Lord and Miller project their own

“negotiated position” into their text and encourage others to adopt a similar position: accept

reasonable ground rules for collaborative teamwork and, then, creatively build away.

Images:

< Image 1. Cars parallel park at identical moments in Bricksburg, in front of evenly spaced shrubs. Behind them, minifigures walk in straight lines In the center of the frame stands a Lego brick version of the Alamo sculpture, framed on either side by scrolling digital tickers. (©2014, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Accessed under Fair Use.)  

  ^Image 2 Lord Business displays his map of divided “worlds.” The mise-en-scène is clearly appropriated from <Image 3, a still from the Apple Computer advertisement 1984, directed by Ridley Scott. (©2014, Warner Bros. Entertainment, ©1983, Apple Inc., Accessed under Fair Use)