The film, The LEGO Movie, is a powerful and effective metaphor for the influence of capitalism on society and the way we go about our lives. The film’s superficial critique of marketplace domination from large corporations, through the excessive control of Lord Business, hides the deeper affirmation of the individual consumer as a stalwart of autonomous choice. All of this is in lip service to the illusion of consumer control and autonomy, the greatest myth of modern capitalism today, which paradoxically conceals how little actual freedom consumers have in an era of industry consolidation and where media conglomerates are increasingly sophisticated at manipulating market demographics and content delivery.
Lord Business represents a sclero capitalist in which the entrepreneur committed to innovation regresses into an antique tyrant. Lord Business is cruel, selfish, and obsessed with making sure everyone in the Lego world stays perfectly normal. He is already President of the Lego world – in control of Bricksburg’s entire infrastructure and culture with an infinite army of robots at his bidding. But Lord Business still wishes to control every individual directly. In this way, The Lego Movie makes a villain out of big business, name brands, and the consumer culture they create.
At the risk of stating the obvious, we should remember that this movie cannot possibly be anti-capitalist. The text of the film denounces big business that dominates influential industries and exploits consumer culture, but The Lego Movie in itself might be the largest example of product placement advertising in film history. There’s something a little disingenuous in a film generated by corporate synergy railing against the perils of corporatism. Beneath the satire, after all, is a feature-length toy commercial for a ubiquitous plastic product valued at $14.6 billion and produced by a multinational corporation based in Denmark. 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.
The text also examines the effect of a capitalist system on business culture and its practices. As Lord Business struts through his Octan headquarters, he checks-in on his hoards of comically mindless robots. The robots are seen doing everything necessary for Lord Business to maintain his power without the people suspecting there is anything wrong with their manufactured culture. The robot’s drive police cars, sit as board members for the Octan corporation, write pop songs, and direct television shows. The robots’ only purpose is to serve Lord Business’ system, and they do a very good job since they are incapable of perceiving any negative repercussion their actions might have on their audiences. Their work is extremely effective and strategic.
Charles Payne of Fox Business believed the text was unjustified in its attack on capitalism and promoted anti-business ideals to young kids; “Hollywood has its own agenda. It feels a little bit more threatening when they push this out to our kids over and over. Why is the head of a corporation, where they hire people, people go to work, they pay their rent, their mortgage, they put their kids through college, they feed their families, they give to charities, they give to churches — why would the CEO be an easy target?”. This is a fair point as we noted the hypocrisy of the movies attack on corporations and their influence on consumer culture, when LEGO is a large exponent of promoting creativity and individuality to consumers through their product.
The film develops an extreme idea of the effects a capitalist-intensive society can have on issues beyond business. It turns away from the traditional arguments against capitalism – environmental sustainability, working conditions – and instead examines the ability of powerful corporations to manipulate consumer culture to gain extreme power and manipulate social environments to suit their fiscal desires. Capitalism has ruined the efficiency of the world in this film, as the lack of regulation combined with the incessant infatuation for exponential financial reward has resulted in a single corporation controlling social factors to further their success, a social and economic issue which we see frequently in real life today. In modern society, the big corporate interests in the world prefer thwarting competition via massive legislation, onerous regulations and other barriers to entry over the risks of a free-wheeling market. And Lord Business develops this negative attitude towards growth, creativity and social development in the film, as he enforces regulations and his “micro managers” to control the market conditions to suit his needs. Emmett appears to notice this early in the film; “
The movie emphasises the material aspects of the ‘new’ new petite bourgeois grievances: inability to practice professional creativity; the monotonous standardisation of built space; and excessive business and state control on the middle class (on their skills, their city, and their trade).
Frederick Pollick once anticipated that the final stage of victorious state capitalism would result in “turning from concentrating upon armaments to a genuine peace economy as its only alternative, because if it wants to avoid unemployment, it will need to spend a very substantial part of the national income for the construction of modern ‘pyramids,’ or to considerably raise the standard of living.’ The correspondence between what Pollock said, over 70 years ago, and the context of the film is startlingly close. As war is no longer an option to trigger creative destruction along with social and economic activity (all possible wars are won), the film shows an economy that is sustained with pointless megaprojects (such as the building site where Emmet works). Furthermore, the absence of competition has resulted in a ridiculous inflation where Emmet happily pays $37 for a coffee, and socially, discontent is controlled by a panem et circenses (bread and circuses) approach.