2014: The Lego Movie
March 26, 2019
By AHNZ
Of course you realise that the Theory of Moral Cultures (TMC) is also a school of literary criticism. Here’s a review of The Lego Movie (2014) employing also Strauss-Howe Generational Theory ahead of the release of this year’s sequel.
Dramatis Personae
Baby Boomer; Outgoing Generation: Vitruvius. Old man yet looked up to, powerful. Wizardly. Has had his day and now dethroned seeks someone to pass the torch to and seeks to ensure it is not the Millennials.
Generation X: Wyldstyle. The mysterious woman archetype. Black hair with shocks of pink and blue. Black leathers with 90s splash of graffiti colour. Self-confident yet grim and brooding and dissatisfied.
Millennial: President Business. Master of Victimhood Culture, commander of the Micromanagers. Not satisfied with his fair share at the top of mainstream culture, seeks to enshrine to be forever lasting.
Generation Z: Emmett. Lives in a Slave Culture dictated to strictly from the top by a Victimhood Culture feeding him propaganda and instructions. Escapist, deluded, distracted by idiotic TV shows and the comforts of consumerism. Relentlessly positive: Everything Is Awesome to Emmet and his generation. Lacking initiative and individuality, Emmet is called upon to be a Masterbuilder and The Special but it is dubious that he is up to the task of claiming his birthright and reviving Lego society.
Story
Millennial President Business overthrows Boomer Vitruvius who is already old and has held on to power past due. We are skipping over Generation X completely because just as in real life the Boomers are too selfish to pass the torch or housing stock or territory or even back off and be grandparents. They want to be young forever and live forever and that has cost Gen X their day in the saddle running society. Meanwhile, Millennial President Business has come of age and steps up to take power and two other things from Boomer. Firstly, he takes the Kraggle which will allow Millennials to freeze the world and give their generation unnatural long life just like the Boomers had. Second, he takes the Boomer’s sight away which affords dissociation so the Boomer never apologises or takes personal responsibility for what he has set in motion.
A suspiciously specific time after the power transfer, 8.5 years, Gen Z strays from his routine to follow the mysterious Gen X down the proverbial Rabbit Hole into the Underworld on his hero’s journey. After a brush with the supernatural, Gen Z is interrogated by a split-personality figure named Bad Cop who is torn between allegiance between Millennial and Gen X. In a sub-plot to the film, Bad Cop ultimately resolves his ambivalence and switches sides when his Millennial Master oversteps his bounds by threatening Bad Cop’s Boomer parents.
Ultimately, Gen Z Emmet does prevail by taking up his destiny and overcoming the Millennial. The extra-generational Kraggle Millennials and Boomers have used to entrench their time in the seat of power with unnaturally long life is banished. Interestingly, Gen X plays a vital supporting role but neither Wyldstyle or Batman save the day and nor did they take the opportunity to do so in their time. They were a generation whose time in society’s seat of consciousness was stolen and divvied up between greedy Boomers and Millennials by the power of the Kraggle.
It really did seem touch-and-go that Gen Z would be able to shake off enough Slave Morality to realise their own birth right. The generations in exile, including Superman, Wonder Woman, Gandalf, Abraham Lincoln etc, didn’t rate him at all. Looking around at these teenagers today who were raised Slaves under the thumb of Millennial teachers and parents and police it does seem a forlorn hope. We may instead trust in the young Generation Z+1, as yet unnamed, represented by Princess Unikitty in the film. She is another split-personality who represses painful, unhappy, feelings that come out in a rage sometimes. Escaping into Cloud Cuckoo Land is her sanctuary away from Millennial micromanaging toward which she has an unhealthy oppositional defiance disorder complex.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Emmett does unseat the Millennial Victimhood Culture by appealing peacefully and empathetically to President Business. This is a wonderful and unique climax also told in live action as a father and son come to terms with their Lego toys as means of expression rather than static plastic brick sculptures never to change. The Millennial relents and softens in union with his Gen Z son. We would love to see that but as I have written elsewhere I fear that is a long shot in the main..
The ones to restore the balance will not be Gen Z, I think, but the new rising Honour Culture generation. They will actually be Conans while Z can only dream it and consume endless Marvel movies depicting it.- 2000s: Generation Z
Yeah. My money is on the grown up UniKitty to bring us the Chosen One. Certainly we need the poor old disenfranchised Gen X to provide support but who knows? Gen Z are only just coming of age in 2019 and may pull an Emmett and surprise us all in truth as in fiction. As the Millennial’s Enormous Turnip grows and grows, it’s important that we do two things. One, do away with the Kraggle forever as was achieved in the film. Two, that Victimhood Culture and the supremacy of the Millennials now come to an end rather than grow the turnip further. The longer we wait, the more the collateral damage.
My greatest wish is that we handle the transition as well as was modelled in the Lego Movie. The solution was not for a terrorist to gun down 50 of Emmett’s co-workers in Bricksburg city to accelerate some awakening. We are yet to know what the sequel, Lego Movie 2, will entail because it hasn’t screened yet. My understanding is that Gen Z’s younger sister, Gen Z+1, will feature. This is the new and very young children being born into the world right now. So young they’re playing with Duplo rather than Lego. TMC’s prediction for this group is that they will be an Honour Culture so more interested in tribal hierarchical place and hands-on brute problem solving than laws and rules and institutions. The character of Unikitty is a clue,…
“Here in 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. [Wyldstyle: “You just said the word ‘no’, like, a thousand times.”] And there’s also no consistency!”
Besides which, the Lego Movie 2 trailer has already shown us scenes resembling a Mad Max setting which is of course utterly a depiction of post-apocalyptic Honour Culture. These guys writing the movie have an artistic grasp on all of the above if not a philosophical or historical one.
Bright, dissociated, Everything is Awesome, Gen Z Emmett will become boring and need to grow up though. This transition is already in place in the form of…”The name’s Rex Dangervest. Galaxy defending archeologist, cowboy, and raptor trainer!” This character is a future version of Emmett (perhaps literally so in the film’s plot, I wouldn’t wonder) who has become Dignity Culture. He is a renaissance man with multiple specialities, focus, confidence, and carers. Tellingly, the voice acting for Rex is also supplied by Chris Pratt.
Emmet Brickowski : I don’t get it.
You will.
UPDATE & Spoiler: “Rex (Radical Emmet Xtreme)…main antagonist in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. He was a bitter version of Emmet Brickowski from the future.”- thelegomovie.fandom.com
OK so we don’t need to wait until April 11 to test my theory…the creators have leaked the plot twist and it’s even more convoluted as we face a post-Millennial menace!
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