Fox Business host Charles Payne, lashed out at the new commie blockbuster Lego movie. In high dudgeon,the host claims the children’s movie is the ‘latest example of Hollywood’s anti-business agenda.’ To prove his point, the host invites his guest Rentrak senior media anualyst Paul Dergarabedian, to view the movie villain named President Business, stating – “Looks a little like Mitt Romney.” (pictured here) I have never seen Romney turn red, even when it was warranted. What do you think, similarity or no? The cartoon figure does appear to be rigid and one dimensional with unmovable hair.
Hollywood liberals it seems, will stop at nothing in their systematic indoctrination of the nation’s youth! Boy, am I glad Donald Duck, Yogi and Boo Boo, Bullwinkle and the other cartoons of my childhood weren’t politically motivated…Or were they? Given time and motive, I have faith that FOX News could find the hidden meanings in them.
“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?” It happens all of the time, Charles. The assembled panel names several movies in which the wealthy ‘makers’ have been made to look bad. Monica Crowley – startles viewers with her defense of Old Man Potter in “It’s A Wonderful Life!” This quote was worth the entire story for me.
As you might have guessed, Payne & company have missed the boat. The character Charles Payne believes is a charactarization of Mitt Romney, or President Business – is an uptight CEO who has a hard time balancing world domination with micro-managing his own life. He operates a successful business front that creates music, TV shows, surveillance systems, history books and voting machines, in addition to all dairy products and coffee. Secretly, he is Lord Business, the most evil of tyrants who oversees a robot militia militia with plans to take over the world by gluing it together with a substance called Kragle which is actually a tube of Krazy Glue.
Believing imagination to be weird and messy in a world of order, he considers anyone with creativity in mind to be a threat–including Emmet who, despite not having a creative bone in his body, possesses the “cap” to seal his defeat.
Emmett Rensin wrote an extensive piece on Fox’s attack of the Lego Movie. He sums up his anualysis in a piece which should assure Fox fanatics that socialism isn’t the goal of the movie. As Fox demonstrates daily, it’s easy to miss the point entirely while rushing down a favorite and familiar ideological path.
Despite Fox’s claims, the function of capitalism in our society isn’t the target of The Lego Movie. Lord Business isn’t so-called or so-hated because he’s “the head of a corporation where they hire people” and “[people] feed their families”—he’s called that because he’s the projection of a young boy whose obsessive-compulsive father wears a tie and does some kind of business-y job that, being ten years old, the kid doesn’t have a more precise word for. He’s hated because he’s a boorish control freak spoiling his son’s attempt to have fun with Legos. The kid isn’t upset that his dad pays employees a wage for their labor, he’s upset that his father is so fixated on his paranoid need to make everything the way it’s “supposed to be” and so self-conscious about any questioning of his “adult” use of the toys that he’s going to literally glue them in place, preventing his child from using his imagination again.
This movie isn’t revolutionary; at bottom, it’s more about empathy than politics. President Business is a villain because despite having everything, his overwrought sense of victimhood transforms him into a caricature of megalomania at even slightest hint of criticism. That sort of privilege-blind persecution complex is the real target of The Lego Movie’s scorn, and ironically, Fox’s full-scale meltdown over its “anti-capitalist” message is a pretty good case-in-point.