This is the beginning of the cartoon The Lego Movie ("Lego Movie"). The content of the movie is not new, it is nothing more than the story of ordinary man Emmett leading his companions to overthrow the dictatorship of Lord Business after awakening. This is a popcorn movie suitable for all ages. Children see adventure, friendship, and courage. Movie fans pay tribute to the film’s tribute. Adults, just like my companions, may be The political and cultural metaphors in it generate interest. This article will focus on the background of the entire movie (that is, the dictatorship of Lord Business), and analyze Foucault's thoughts in "Discipline and Punishment" implied in the movie from three aspects: dictator, rule object and rebel.
one. Dictator
movies can be said to have a lot of focus on the dictator Lord Business, and it is undoubtedly the tall building he built that best reflects his supremacy. The towering black building is equipped with protective equipment such as mechanical police and laser sharks, and his own office is located on the top floor of this skyscraper, which is inaccessible to ordinary people. In fact, buildings are often the performance of the privileged position of those in power, highlighting the nobility of their status ("the magnificence of the palace"), or providing them with a vantage point to monitor their subordinates and enemies ("the structure of the fortress"). Whether it is the architectural rules of ancient Chinese capitals (the palace is located in the center of the city, it is tall and majestic, and no building can be higher than it), or the tall building of Lord Business, it is just this kind of thinking in a different social environment. Variations only.
In addition to the height of the building, the dictator Lord Business also equipped himself with a sophisticated set of "armor." The role of this "armor" is not only defense, but also to make the dictator appear tall and condescending. In the movie, whenever he speaks to his subordinates and the ruled, he will put on this "armor" to put himself in an unattainable and unshakable position in height. The picture is often from the angle of looking up, which emphasizes the dictatorship. The "high" of the person. Such shots are not uncommon in movies. For example, we can see similar scenes in "The Lost Wall". This passage in "The Wall" is usually analyzed as an allusion to Nazi Germany, with the same anti-dictatorship connotation. I think this setting in "Lego Heroes" is not unfounded.
two.
The actions of the dictator and president Lord Business, who is the rule object , to his citizens are the direct manifestation of the "discipline" written by Foucault in "Discipline and Punishment".
First, there is discipline training that runs through the entire society. Everyone, including Emmett when he was not awakened, is a "good citizen" under the rule of Lord Business to "abide by the law". They live on the same schedule every day, work according to the guidelines, listen to the same music and watch the same TV shows. Even after the protagonist Emmett was awakened, when his companions asked him to build an escape vehicle, he reluctantly stated that he could not do it because he was used to building buildings according to the drawings. The blueprint is a kind of discipline, a code that people should follow as it should be, and the dictator is the designer of this discipline. In such a society, everyone is the result of the dictator's discipline training. Foucault wrote in "Discipline and Punishment" that the distinctive feature of disciplinary training is that, first of all, its realization approach is not through direct control of the entire body, but through detailed control of specific parts of the body. If we want to teach soldiers how to use a rifle, we will break down the entire process into several orderly precise steps. The core of training is not only to achieve goals, to ensure that soldiers will do what we want them to do in one way or another; the key is to achieve training goals through a set of specific procedures. This is what Foucault calls a modern disciplinary system. Its purpose is to create a "docile body." Those bodies will not only do what we ask them to do, but also do it in the way we want.
The result of disciplinary training is the production of standardized judgment, which is another distinctive feature of modern disciplinary control. In the movie, Lord Business, the dictator, has established uniform standards for everything, especially industrial procedures and products, and insists on not allowing outrageous things to happen. He strives to maintain his rule, transforms people into "good people" through discipline training, and uses standardized judgments to build a country without innovation. Under the brainwashing of these methods, everyone is a brick of the same shape, and the brick is built into a wall, which constitutes a small building in this uniform society. However, not everyone is a brick on the wall, and the rule of Lord Business is not so stable. In the movie, the awakened protagonist Emmett and his fellow architects[4], and even the policemen who assisted him in achieving dictatorship, have been persecuted to varying degrees by the dictator. "Punishment" in "Training and Punishment".
three. Rebel
Foucault discussed two different types of punishment in Discipline and Punishment, namely the punishment in the pre-modern period and the punishment in the modern period. What's interesting is that although the story in "Lego Heroes" takes place in a highly developed modern society (although it does not give a specific age, but a completely fictional society), both types of punishment are reflected in the movie.
In Foucault's view, punishment in the premodern period is a public performance or spectacle, a display of force majeure that the monarch must not violate. Punishment is manifested in the brutal torture of the criminal’s body, content with retaliation and power through pain, and the implementation of power itself has a high degree of visibility (such as garrison in towns, public executions), and those cognitive objects are Invisible in the dark. In the movie, this kind of pre-modern punishment appeared more than once. For example, the dictator Lord Business blatantly killed the leader of the master builders, the wizard Vitruvius. He was also not merciful to his subordinates and the sheriff who assisted him in realizing the dictatorship. After the sergeant questioned some of his actions, Lord Business harmed the sergeant's parents, using the old couple as a bait to force the sergeant to become his own tool.
On the contrary, punishment in the modern era claims that the purpose is not to retaliate, but to make criminals reform and re-behave. Modern punishment requires the criminal to undergo an internal transformation, requiring him to convert his heart to a new way of life. The control of the mind by modern punishment is a more obscure but more thorough physical control, because the purpose of changing mental attitudes and tendencies is to control the behavior of the body. In Foucault's words, in modern times, "the mind is the cage of the body". In the movie, the sheriff as an important supporting role has two sides: a "good guy" and a "bad guy". After kidnapping the sheriff's parents, Lord Business even erased the sheriff's kindness and completely blackened him to become his accomplice. Although it uses comic expressions, this behavior of the dictator is undoubtedly controlling the hearts of the people, causing the sheriff to fall into darkness, and since then he has been conscientiously chasing down the protagonist Emmett and the architects. Although the sheriff is not strictly a rebel, he has questioned the dictator after all, and this questioning has brought him punishment, that is, the human heart is controlled.
In addition to the two forms of punishment, the "panoramic prison" design proposed by Jeremy Bentham, which Foucault agrees, is also reflected in this film. In such a prison, the realization of control depends not on the fact of surveillance but on the possibility of surveillance. In fact, the monitor will only look at a certain cell occasionally, but the prisoners living in the cell do not know when this "occasional" happens, so they must assume that they are always being monitored. As a result, the monitor "creates a conscious state and lasting visibility in the prisoner, thereby ensuring the automatic operation of the power mechanism." In the movie, the "rebellion" of the architects was once frustrated. The vast majority of architects were caught by dictators and imprisoned. The place where the architects were imprisoned was a typical "panoramic prison" design. Different from Bentham's "panoramic prison", the architects are not locked in a cell, but an electric chair that can be energized at any time, and the monitor in the middle is Lord Business himself.
While the audience is indulging in this story of ordinary people and superheroes joining forces against the dictatorship, the movie suddenly turns into the real world in the last twenty minutes: it turns out that everything that happened in the Lego world is just a boy's imagination. The boy ignored his father's ban and used his father's Lego model to perform such a wonderful play in his heart. When the boy's stern father appeared, the audience was surprised to find that the image of the father was exactly the same as the Lord Business in the Lego world, and the boy's face showed a look of panic and fear. It wasn't until this point in the movie that the second layer of "discipline and punishment" implied in the movie, namely the relationship between father and boy in real life, surfaced. Why did the father impose so many prohibitions on the boy? Did the father kill the boy’s imagination and creativity in any way, like his projection of Lord Business in the Lego world? These questions will involve the family and education section of "Discipline and Punishment". Due to space reasons, I will not list them here.
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