5 secret political meanings hidden in ‘The Lego Movie’

With a huge opening weekend ($69.1 million gross), “The Lego Movie” is shaping up to be a franchise-launching monster hit. But the film, about a simpleton who hooks up with Batman (and Batman’s girlfriend) to save the world from an evil businessman, has a secret political meaning as well. Too bad no one seems to agree on what that message is.

It’s Marxist!

This “practically communist” film is about “a proletarian LEGO revolution,” writes Bilge Ebiri at Vulture. Emmet, the movie’s bland and feeble-minded hero, inspires his fellow citizen-toys to break the chains of routine and rise up to be whatever they want. “Something rather politically loaded, almost transgressive, emerges,” Ebiri writes. “It is, of course, a fantasy of equality and revolution, but it’s in keeping with the disruptive, anarchic spirit of the film.”

It’s anti-Marxist!

“One of the great subversive films of the age,” writes John Hayward at Breitbart.com, who calls it “a joke played at the expense of knee-jerk leftists like Michael Moore, who rushed to embrace the movie as a socialist primer for the tots because the villain is named ‘President Business’ and bears a passing resemblance to Mitt Romney. The joke is on the lefty fools who didn’t see the movie, because it’s evidently a devastating slam at socialism, particularly the Obama model of government-business cronyism . . . capitalists have sold socialists the LEGO bricks they need to bury themselves.”

It’s anti-business!

Fox Business News host Charles Payne said the movie’s bad guy, Lord Business/President Business, “looks a bit like Mitt Romney” and lamented that CEOs seem to be easy targets for Hollywood satire. “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?” he asked. Guest Monica Crowley chimed in that Hollywood can “embed these kinds of anti-capitalist messages and get away with it.”

It’s pro-business!

“ ‘The Lego Movie’ isn’t just pro-business, it might just be the most classically liberal film in the history of film-making,” says Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. “It’s also about the importance of hard work, creativity, ownership, innovation and human dignity . . . it really is anti-crony capitalism, which only furthers the classically liberal message. Even if the big corporate interests in this country prefer thwarting competition via massive legislation, onerous regulations and other barriers to entry over the risks of a free-wheeling market, cronyism is not the same thing as capitalism.”

It’s a radical paradigm shift and Hollywood’s answer to the Occupy movement!

After years of “scaring us with the threat of calamity,” writes Ben Walters at The Guardian, Hollywood is finally “inspiring hope for the new” with “a way out of the impasse.” The film’s comedy is “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.” And 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.”