emoji movie and lacan

The Emoji Movie is a fever dream. I don't recommend you watch it because everything it's saying and doing can be summarized in the Wikipedia plot synopsis. I think that's why it's so interesting. It's such an honest film in how it frames its ideas.

Outside of really vanilla analyses of how it highlights capitalist decline and how the profit motive allows slop like this to hit theaters, there's an interesting exploration of how individuality becomes subsumed into capital and integrating with disciplinary mechanisms.

Here's why I think this obvious LEGO movie ripoff is an interesting piece.

Kids movies

I think kids' movies often times reveal systems in a very simplistic fashion. One of the reasons you see video essays about how the LEGO movie is communist or analysing Puss in Boots is because often times kids movies are extremely symbolic.

The Emoji Movie exists in a framework of emojis being sentient actors within a teenage boy's phone. Basically, when he prepares to send out texts, emojis decide to line up and perform their role as part of his text messages. The idea is that within the phone there is a kind of bog-standard capitalist world where emojis do their single task and feel fulfilled by it.

Every emoji has one signifier, one position within language. The poop emoji is self-explanatory, the smiley emoji has to represent joy, etc.

Gene is a "meh" emoji whose parents are upstanding "meh"s as well. They feel concerned about his ability to perform at work because he has a strange condition that allows him to wildly shift and change his expressions on a whim. Alongside him is Chloe Price from Life is Strange and an Australian high-five emoji. Their journeys is to push the boundaries of the symbolic order and find themselves integrated and assimilated with society at the end. Within the framework, the phone Alex owns represents the Other. It's a huge governing authority that defines value within the context of the movie. The phone is God, state, markets, reality, infrastructure, etc. Within this reality, Gene wants to be normal and fixed, recognized as a useful cog.

The director being gay

This is one of the things that made me realize what the film is probably trying to say. The Emoji Movie is about deviance in gender and sexuality. Gene shifts from many different roles on a whim: happy, sad, dead, angry, in love, etc. The idea is that he's gender non-conforming and queer-coded.

oh my god

And I started to see it. I might be going insane but it's really apparent to me how similar the story is to LiS. Gene is an average emoji with an uncommon esper power. He finds a rebellious white girl with blue hair and a beanie on that works alongside him as the backdrop of complete destruction of the world is one step away.

Unlike Life is Strange, which offers the liberatory choice of ending Arcadia Bay for a queer relationship, the equivalent in the Emoji Movie is walked back. They have the ability to "escape into the cloud" via "Dropbox" as Alex's phone threatens to be retired. The notion is the same: deviance and homosexuality offers the threat of bringing down the entire symbolic order, of bringing down all of the stable values that our conservative society relies on. If the Emoji Movie was woke enough, it would have ended with the three deviant emoji escaping to the cloud and not being subject to the Big Other of Alex's phone being factory reset. Instead, they walk it back and choose to become integrated into the whole.

Emojis do not exist outside of the Big Other. It's not just authority, but the symbolic gaze allowing him to exist whatsoever. Gene's fear and discomfort isn't just not being picked, but falling out of the framework of the phone that expects him as a subject. This is the queer subject's nightmare: social death through invisibility.

Gene uses his deviance to save capital, to save the state, to revive the system. Because he's proven his usefulness, he's integrated into the whole. Any radical potential, any boundary pushing he enjoyed beforehand has disappeared. Chloe Price is revealed to be a Princess covering up her crown and natural hair with a wig. Her resolution is just being exactly the role expected from her: to be a princess that wants to love another. What's weird is she makes a conscious effort to distance herself from the heterosexual expectations placed on her but just caves anyway. She was always a princess, she just took a roundabout path to it.

The intersection with technology

The Emoji Movie has a fierce optimism in the "apps city!" kind of capitalism that encompasses tech. Ultimately, it believes that phones are a powerful tool in allowing for nuanced communication.

It draws an early parallel to hieroglyphics as they're akin to emojis in a lot of ways: both symbols integral to language. The Emoji Movie highlights the relationship emojis have with modern language and how its subjects maintain it.

I guess if you read things that way, the notion of Gene re-integrating into the phone makes sense. Just like how language adapts itself to accommodate various groups over time, Gene's uncommon expression is just him being a new kind of signifier. I think this reading falls apart when Gene is also framed as a young adult trying to integrate into capitalist society. He's not just a tool of language but an independent actor, and it's kind of hard to have its cake and eat it here. Is Gene's deviance linguistic innovation or simply a problem to be managed and subsumed into

Rainbow capitalism

And just like the director, the queerness of Gene and Chloe Price have become yet another part of the system. Being queer in itself is not revolutionary or radical or boundary-pushing anymore, there's nothing transgressive about simply existing as a minority identity group. Gene is a singular token whose perspective is useful in terms of diversity.

Queer excess, genderfluid-ness, refusal to follow categories. These ideas are the Real akin to Lacan disrupting the dynamics of Textopolis' symbolic identities. It's domesticated and treated as yet another tool. What a shame.

Leondis, as a gay director, becomes his own character. He's gobbled up into corporate structures where his gayness is deflated to marketability. The movie's mediocre not just because it's aesthetically two steps removed from Sora AI shorts, but because it highlights how queerness has lost its radical potential. I think this movie is fucking insane because of how honest it is. Modern deviants don't try to dismantle and liberate but integrate with the system that declared them as such. They want normality.