Occupy Legoland

The Lego movie has a cutting-edge social message, writes Ben Walters in The Guardian:

“The film’s exuberant, kid-friendly larks – Wild West! Robot pirates! Unicorn kittens! Batman! – are laced with satirical digs at surveillance culture, built-in obsolescence and police brutality, as well as inane positive thinking. Its opening sequences show a world in which a pliant, consumerist populace, mollified by overpriced coffee and dumb TV shows, is exploited by cynical leadership; political and corporate power are conflated in the villainous figure of ‘President Business’ (Will Ferrell).”

Walters sees analogies to the Occupy movement: “The value of that movement wasn’t in its ability to present a viable alternative model for the organisation of society. Clearly, it hasn’t done that. Its value was in its insistence that it’s worth exploring the options. The Lego Movie does something similar. I’m not proposing it as a work of leftist agitprop – it remains, after all, a giant billboard for a multinational company – or suggesting it offers a viable blueprint for post-neoliberal civics. But, like Occupy, it asserts that it’s OK – exciting, even – to consider how society could be structured differently. It invites us to imagine other worlds.”

In the current disarray, few thinkers are more relevant than  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. He understood revolutionaries, and understood that rotten systems will collapse. He wanted them to collapse. But he was also aware that revolutionary change leaves destruction in its wake.

One wonders if the Lego movie shows any awareness of the mayhem caused by movements imagining radical change. One suspects not.