So I watched The Lego Movie. A fun movie but I feel its message was contradictory.
Okay, so the message was supposed to be about how everyone should be free to break out of their assigned roles and be free to do whatever they imagined.
But…they never actually did that. As we saw in the live action sequences, all of the characters were just doing what the people playing with them did. They didn’t even have the autonomy of the toys in Toy Story. All the battles they were fighting - and even their personalities - were just the game that Flynn was playing. The only reason Emmet was a hero was because Flynn picked him and started playing with him. Flynn was walking Emmet and all the other characters (including Lord Business) through the story.
I thought the message was that toys are meant to be played with, not kept as museum pieces. But I do hope that the father was allowed to keep a few of the more collectible sets in good condition.
That was the message of Toy Story but I don’t feel that was the message here. The apparent message was about being free - but freedom wasn’t really an option. The alternatives were being glued down by the father or moved around by the son - but neither alternative allowed the Legos any actual freedom. It was just a choice of who controlled their thoughts and actions.
The only one who even came close to freedom was Emmet. He was aware that the father and son existed so he had at least seen the forces that controlled his world. And he had a few minutes of semi-autonomy when he was outside the Lego universe and in the live action world. But even when he has the nominal freedom, he only used it to follow the script that Flynn had written for him.
The people in the lego universe don’t have any freedom because they’re not actually people–it turns out they are figments of the kid’s imagination. Any freedom they’re encouraging each other to have is actually freedom the kid is encouraging himeslf and his father to exercise.
But what Little Nemo is calling out is the sequence where Emmet moves himself, in real life. If Emmet was just a figment of the kid’s imagination, how did he move himself? And if he isn’t a figment of the kid’s imagination, what does it say about his life and freedoms that he is only ever able to follow the script the kid wrote for him?
I agree that Emmet’s moving seems to present a kind of existential dilemma about the movie and it’s message.
The OP mentions that moment of semi-autonomy in a later post, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the argument of the first post–and even when he later mentioned it, it was only to downplay it as not really demonstrating actual autonomy.
I saw the moment, myself, as not showing that Emmit had actual autonomy (as opposed to imagined-by-the-kid autonomy), but rather, as being another example of imaginative confabulation on the kid’s part.
Okay, I was accepting the stuff that happened in the live action segments as real. I figured Emmet did move which shows he was capable of awareness and movement.
But I can see your interpretation as well. The kid was just imaging that Emmet was moving on the table just as he had imagined all the stuff that took place in the diorama. In reality, Emmet was just a piece of lifeless plastic that laid there motionless on the table. Flynn imagined he was moving and picked him up and put him back in the diorama to continue his game.
However that raises a different disturbing possibility. We saw Emmet moving on screen. If that wasn’t real then we were seeing things in the live-action scenes that only existed in Flynn’s imagination. And what does that say about the father’s sudden turnaround at the end of the movie? Which is more likely: that the father had a change of heart after years of indifference or that Flynn imaged his father acting the way he wanted him to? It makes the end of the movie very poignant if you realize Flynn was actually in the basement by himself, imaging his father was there playing with him.
Before the movie started, Flynn had killed his father with a butcher knife, and buried the body under the basement floor. The horror of his crime distorted his fantasies, and eventually he will become dual personality, father and son, and open a motel off the highway… and murder stray construction workers who stop there and take a shower.