198
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
finance itself. 55 As Appadurai has argued “even a simple housing mortgage is
a mysterious thing,” structured as mortgages are on “immeasurably complex”
derivative packages whereby “unlimited distances” separate “the instrument
[of credit] and underlying commodity,” such that they become “opaque
quantitative forms that are illegible to the average citizen.” 56 In other words,
as Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) so aptly explains to Jordan Belfort
(Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Wolf of Wall Street, finance is a “fugazi, a fugazi.
It’s a wazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust.” And this is where we now find our
enchantment – and perhaps excitement, horror, and entertainment – namely,
in the vicissitudes and functioning of the market, upon which the story at
the heart of The LEGO Movie is built, and of which the film and the company
provide such excellent, animated, toy illustrations. If we then connect this
with recent work on myth and the market, along with my earlier observations
about myth and simple story templates, and view both through the notions
of narrative spreadability and transmedial profitability, then we finally
begin to get a fuller picture of where contemporary enchantment comes
from, namely the financial market and the way it structures imagination
and creativity, and disseminates narrative today. 57
And, given all of this, I feel compelled to conclude that one can only look on
in awe at the cheeky corporate cleverness of a film that closes by suggesting
that T.A.K.O.S. Tuesday will be superseded by “Freedom Friday.” This, once
again, ties into the larger argument of this essay about how laying open and
poking fun at the very mechanisms that structure our capitalist realities
and the LEGO franchise’s increasing spread across media in a world-weary
defeatist “amusing ourselves to death” fashion manages to boost the very
sale of the movie and the larger franchise. One shudders to think what form
of Kragle will be created to cement such a motivational tradition in place.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010.
Anderson, Ben. “Modulating the Excess of Affect.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 161–168. Durham and London: Duke UP.
55 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8.
56 Saler, 101, 107.
57 On myth and the market, see the introduction to Miriam Meissner, Narrating the Global
Financial Crisis (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 1–20.
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
finance itself. 55 As Appadurai has argued “even a simple housing mortgage is
a mysterious thing,” structured as mortgages are on “immeasurably complex”
derivative packages whereby “unlimited distances” separate “the instrument
[of credit] and underlying commodity,” such that they become “opaque
quantitative forms that are illegible to the average citizen.” 56 In other words,
as Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) so aptly explains to Jordan Belfort
(Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Wolf of Wall Street, finance is a “fugazi, a fugazi.
It’s a wazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust.” And this is where we now find our
enchantment – and perhaps excitement, horror, and entertainment – namely,
in the vicissitudes and functioning of the market, upon which the story at
the heart of The LEGO Movie is built, and of which the film and the company
provide such excellent, animated, toy illustrations. If we then connect this
with recent work on myth and the market, along with my earlier observations
about myth and simple story templates, and view both through the notions
of narrative spreadability and transmedial profitability, then we finally
begin to get a fuller picture of where contemporary enchantment comes
from, namely the financial market and the way it structures imagination
and creativity, and disseminates narrative today. 57
And, given all of this, I feel compelled to conclude that one can only look on
in awe at the cheeky corporate cleverness of a film that closes by suggesting
that T.A.K.O.S. Tuesday will be superseded by “Freedom Friday.” This, once
again, ties into the larger argument of this essay about how laying open and
poking fun at the very mechanisms that structure our capitalist realities
and the LEGO franchise’s increasing spread across media in a world-weary
defeatist “amusing ourselves to death” fashion manages to boost the very
sale of the movie and the larger franchise. One shudders to think what form
of Kragle will be created to cement such a motivational tradition in place.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010.
Anderson, Ben. “Modulating the Excess of Affect.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 161–168. Durham and London: Duke UP.
55 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8.
56 Saler, 101, 107.
57 On myth and the market, see the introduction to Miriam Meissner, Narrating the Global
Financial Crisis (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 1–20.