It’s 27th December1. The grandiosity of Christmas is starting to fade, but the lustre of the new year is still in the distance. You’re bored. Your family are bored. Yet tradition dictates you need to collectively vegetate as a family, like Joseph, Mary and all those interlopers two thousand years back. You all despise board games by now. The pubs are all a little weird. It’s raining. Luckily, TV will help, filling the grey silence with technicolour chatter. And inevitably, there’s a 27th December film showing. You know a 27th December film. These films can’t be too taxing – 3 days of turkey, Quality Street and alcohol have rotted your cerebral cortex too much to follow anything with a plot. They need to be bright, animated, and feature overly loud actors from American sitcoms. It’s Shrek 3, Madagascar, Kung-Fu Panda, the one with Bruce Willis as an animal, Bee Seinfeld. But the most 27th December film ever is Despicable Me.
If you’ve not seen Despicable Me, Steve Carrell adopts some
orphans, undergoes some character growth to become a better person,
whilst plot sporadically happens in the background. It’s fairly inoffensive and forgettable fare.
Except, for the Minions. Jaundiced dungaree wearing tic-tacs, their original
role was to be comedy foils to Steve Carrell’s abuse. Yet, from their
irritating beginnings, they have far outgrown the celluloid boundaries of
Despicable Me. Like a zootropic disease, they have leapt from their original
host to colonise all forms of media. They incoherently babble whilst
demonstrating the benefits of Sky Broadband. They even got their own movie, the
inventively titled Minions Movie. I have no idea what happens in this
film. It could well be a reimagining of Sex Lives of the Potato Men for all I
know. It has Jon Hamm2 and Michael Keaton3 in! Not only
that, but at one point it was the 10th highest grossing film of all time!
It earned more at the Box Office than Return of the King. Turns out, in the
battle of short people, the bile-coloured ovals will batter hobbits.
With this context, the news that the second Minions movie is
to feature a Diana Ross and Tame Impala collaboration makes complete sense. Why
wouldn’t the queen of Motown and the Antipodean poster boys of psychedelia team
up to soundtrack the capers of Kevin4, Stuart5 and Bob6.
The rest of the soundtrack is a veritable Guardian magazine feature list – St
Vincent, Brockhampton, Phoebe Bridgers. It makes sense that all of these very
well respected artistes are clamouring to feature on the pinnacle of culture in
our time. If Minions are ubiquitous, maybe associated music will be reflected
in their glory.
And Minions really are ubiquitous. They are the mascots of
the social media era. Regularly a Minion picture requests that you repost if
you remember the 3-day week, beans or ITV; like a static Peter Kay sketch. But
it’s so much more than that. Take a deep breath, and dive into the murky depths
of Facebook. Those people you added when custom dictated you had to add
everyone in your school; ex-partners of relatives you’ve never really met; the
hilarious parody profile of cat bin lady. In these dark corners, the Minions
lurk. And these Minions aren’t trying to get you superfast broadband. These are
hard-right, authoritarian Minions. Sure, they’ll look jovial enough, but
they’ll be juxtaposed with some fairly terrible slogans. BRING BACK HANGING shouts
a smiling Kevin, punching the air. A grumpy Stuart implores us that COVID
VACCINES ARE A POPULATION CONTROL DEVICE. Even Bob, the most socially liberal
of the minions7, isn’t afraid to state opinions more commonly held
by those with a proclivity to book burning.
But why? Why Minions? Why not the Toy Story aliens? Why have Minions monopolised terrible memes? My own ill-informed guess is that the rise
of Minions coincides with the boomer generation stumbling onto Facebook. They were
funny-looking characters to complement allegedly funny jokes, in a way that was
incredibly easy to share. And as a generation finding its feet on the feed,
everything was shared, regardless of quality. This feedback loop continued –
you saw Minion memes shared and so would share Minion memes. And those grumpy Minion pictures were a good base for you to speak your mind about how the world
was going to hell. They will get shared, because kids nowadays are snowflakes. Minions
become the post-it notes of the social media age, communicating the hysteria
and menace of an increasingly vocal minority. Blank, staring canvases for
whatever you want. It’s less to do with what the Minions are – they were in the
right place at the right time. It could’ve been the Toy Story aliens, or the
Chicken Run rats. The Minions just chose their moment better.
So when the annals of time are reviewed down the line, Minions will take their rightful place in history. Not as a cultural artefact,
but as cultural medium. And if we can have songs about films, about books,
about paper – why not minions. Thank you, Diana Ross and Tame Impala for memorialising
the cornerstone of our cultural transmission. Not bad for the sideshow act of a film everyone sleeps through.
1 Obviously not, but it’s called poetic licence.
2 Don Draper!
3 Batman!
4 The yellow minion
5 The minion with goggles
6 The minion wearing dungarees
7 Probably. Who cares.