Abstract
The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part seems to provide a scathing critique of toxic masculinity, but it manages to reaffirm a less openly malevolent version of the patriarchy in a firework of humorous and educated intertextuality. In this chapter, author Matthias Zick Varul argues that the film’s openly conducted gender discourse, which plays out mainly between Emmet and Lucy, the two protagonists from The LEGO Movie, is interwoven with a covert discourse on race that the film introduces through a space invasion plot that affords Emmet the role of a “white savior.” Both lines of discourses connect to an ontology of capitalism as envisaged in the first movie, negotiating the mirror fears of total order and total chaos by gendering and racializing and thereby externalizing the fear of excess, the accursed share (Bataille’s part maudite).
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Varul, M.Z. (2019). The Accursed Second Part: Small-Scale Discourses of Gender and Race in The LEGO Movie 2. In: Hains, R., Mazzarella, S. (eds) Cultural Studies of LEGO. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32664-7_6
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