The cultural tragedy of production and the expropriation of the brickolariat: The Lego Movie as consumer-capitalist myth

Abstract

The Lego Movie is analysed as a consumer-capitalist myth reworking audience expectations and frustrations under contemporary capitalism into a comforting and consumable story. It does so by summoning two heterogeneous mythical topoi which are available as slates in the Western cultural repertoire, namely that of Plato’s demiurgic cosmogony and Erotic anthropology to represent a producerist engineering ethos, and the Native American Coyote stories to represent a consumerist ethos of bricolage. Posing as a narrative of empowerment, it promotes the activation of consumer inventiveness in ‘prosumption’ as a solution to the Simmelian tragedy of culture while containing the subversive potential in the recognition of extra-organisational creativity. The ideological ‘function’ of the Lego myth is a contribution to the legitimacy of a system whose modus of existence is that of permanent crisis against a nostalgic yearning for bygone certainties. For its audiences, it provides a therapeutic narrative that facilitates the interpretation of their experience of continuously contradictory role expectations as meaningful.