Be a Child, My Son
by Andrew Collins
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” — C.S. Lewis
Like it’s brick-laden predecessor from two years ago, the LEGO Batman Movie raises an interesting question about the state of today’s cinema: At what point does a shameless embrace of tropes become an art in itself?
At first glance, that’s all there is to the LEGO Batman Movie: movie trope after movie trope after movie trope, blasted like an evil henchman’s machine gun nonstop for 104 minutes.
It’s enough to make one wonder whether LEGO’s contract with the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises includes movie rights, because Sauron, Voldemort, and a plethora of iconic pop-culture villains make appearances in a purposefully excessive all-out assault on Gotham city. Only Darth Vader is conspicuously absent, (and the Marvel universe of supers only gets a shoutout via Batman’s password to the Batcave: “Iron Man sucks”), but aside from these few no-shows, it’s a lineup only a YouTube parody flick could match.
At some point I think this barrage does become an art, but the LEGO Batman Movie straddles the line. At points it rises above the tropes it mocks, but at other times it falls prey to them. I suspect this swing between the amusing and the kinda-lame stems from the movie’s beautiful ability to target a twofold audience: it makes it cool for fathers to take their young kids to the movies. The parody of the movies becomes art when it resonates with adult viewers like myself, who went to see it with a fellow twentysomthing friend. It capitulates when it appeals to the decidedly less refined tastes of the five-year-old.
Either way, the LEGO Batman Movie has a self-conscious eye toward the audience at all times, starting from the very first frame during which Will Arnett’s Batman declares that all important movies start with black screens. He goes on to provide color commentary on the shimmery logos of the production studios as they appear at the beginning of the film.
Essential to the cleverness of this commentary is its meta-critique of the Batman franchise. The caped crusader has been around for 80-some years now, yet he still has these dark, brooding tendencies. Wouldn’t you think he’d have gotten over it by now? Is there really any depth to a man who is impeccably badass when it comes to fighting crime, impeccably suave in the public limelight as playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne, yet so empty on the inside that he returns night after night to a cave to reheat lobster in the microwave and watch rom-coms in an empty home-theater?
Of course there isn’t any depth to this characterization, so the movie rounds out poor Bruce by serving up a cliche message that nothing is more meaningful than friendship and its antithesis: hatred of one’s archenemies (namely the Joker).
Oh, and chiseled abs are important too. Nothing’s better at bringing a city together—literally—than rock hard abs.
The LEGO Batman Movie arrives at this conclusion at a frantic pace. It never slows for meaningful reflection. The only sense in which it has nuance is that the tropes come at the viewer so quickly that I’m sure if I watched it again I’d find I’d missed dozens of references. Meanwhile the moral of the story is spelled out like the instructions for assembling a LEGO model. This makes for a technically weak plot, but somehow it feels appropriate. No kid wants to learn life lessons from a LEGO set, he wants to play. The instruction manual is only a means to an end. But sometimes in life that’s okay. Play is a noble end for a child, especially when undertaken through a medium like LEGOs that draws out the robust work of creativity, engineering, patience, and imagination.
I’ll permit myself to love this movie if the assumption is granted that the LEGO Batman Movie takes place in the same universe as the first LEGO Movie (which is to say, the mind of a child). If so, I offer my endorsement with these words of C.S. Lewis in mind: “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
I am twenty-six years old. I keep a LEGO model on my desk. I went to see the LEGO Batman Movie. No one can make me ashamed of that.
