Scholarship on the finance-security nexus has typically been concerned with ‘first order’ phenomena, such as the interpenetration of the finance and security sectors. This article contributes to the debate by turning to an apparent epiphenomenon, namely The LEGO Movie, and using it to address some overlooked intersections between popular culture and the finance-security complex. The analysis first focuses on how finance and security are represented in the film, through the plot and the fictional company at the centre of the film’s conflict, to its LEGO minifigure characters and the playsets featured therein. The focus then shifts to how the LEGO Group’s business model informs the film in significant ways, from the plot’s motivation and structure, and the mise-en-scène, to how the film was produced. My argument throughout is that a seemingly innocent or insignificant film in fact participates in the financialization and securitization of daily life through its very style and status as a cultural product. Key here is how The LEGO Movie does this in ways that confound possible critique through the use of irony and cute aesthetics, as well as through its own supposed triviality.
This article considers LEGO’s fans and how their labor was mobilized to create The LEGO Movie. Many aspects of this film make it a compelling case study for ludic economies, such as the film’s self-conscious humor that suggests an awareness on of the company’s brand-growing strategies. My argument will address fans’ response to how LEGO has farmed their labor and the lack of resistance encountered in the extraction thereof. I will suggest explanations as to why this is the case, including the kinds of affect generated by LEGO and LEGO narratives as they are transmediated across platforms, from bricks, to animation shorts, to The LEGO Movie. This investigation will include a discussion of LEGO’s staying power in light of one particular aesthetic—cuteness—that contributes to the affective bonds people form with the bricks and the impact of this bond on consumer subjectivities.
This chapter supplements the introductory and contextual discussion of Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders provided by Meijer in 1892, with an updated consideration of the play’s continuing historical and cultural value. It explores cultural stereotypes of various “foreigners” that appear recurrently in these Dutch texts, particularly in the figure of John Law, portrayed as a Frenchified Scotsman; the French more generally; and outsiders, particularly the Jewish community. The popular theatre was a medium in which social anxieties were frequently expressed - focused in this instance on a fear of contagion from France and its corrupt financial schemes. This chapter explores how Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders culturally expresses this fear at the level of language and character. It shows how national identities were shaped and challenged by the desire to trade in an new, globalizing market that encompassed several countries in Western Europe, and it shows how national stereotypes hardened in the rush to attribute culpability and cupidity, or rationality and innocence, as apparent financial catastrophe loomed. And because these plays enjoyed an afterlife in the nineteenth century with the publication of Meijer’s edition, Quincampoix is discussed in this chapter as an early example of the thematization of finance in popular culture.
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