%0 Journal Article
%T The cultural tragedy of production and the expropriation of the brickolariat: The Lego Movie as consumer
%A Matthias Zick Varul
%J European Journal of Cultural Studies
%@ 1460-3551
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/1367549417718208
%X 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
%K Capitalism
%K consumerism
%K Coyote
%K film
%K Lego
%K myth
%K prosumption
%K Plato
%K producerism
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549417718208