Lord Business is dead – long live Lord Business!: Second order ideology in The Lego Movie

Abstract

Abstract Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The Lego Movie (2014) was touted by some popular critics as a kind of celebration of collective emancipation in the face of corporate domination. Obviously, such a reading, given the corporate framing of Lego and the commercial film in general as product, is immensely problematic. However, what is particularly provocative about Lord and Miller’s film is not that it addresses the viewer as infantile, hapless consumer-dupe, as has traditionally been the case in advertising models, but that it does, in fact, the very opposite: it invites the ‘hip’ viewer to laugh along with its lampooning of its own ontological status as commercial brand-film. This is ideology in its most seductive, persuasive form. This tendency – overtly challenging one’s own ideological frame whilst at the same time essentially supporting it – ‘second order ideology’ – is not particularly new, but has become increasingly widespread throughout contemporary popular culture in recent years.