“You gotta serve somebody,” Bob Dylan once sang. And whatever their faults may be, the Minions at least get that.
We’re not into the movie three minutes before its narrator tells us directly what they’re built to do: Serve the biggest, baddest, most evilly evildoer imaginable. Well, at least until they accidentally kill him. They serve the Tyrannosaurus Rex until they knock him off a cliff. They serve a medieval vampire until they open his crypt’s curtains for a little surprise party.
And in 1968, they began a short spat of servitude to Scarlett Overkill, the best-dressed villain around.
Scarlett would say that that’s only right: If she was allowed to rewrite Dylan’s song, it’d read, “You gotta serve me.” After all, this bouffant-coifed baddie believes she was meant to be master, not slave. She takes no orders. She follows no laws—even, really, the laws of physics. Heck, if she showed up at a 1960s-Spectre meeting, she’d likely knock Blofeld off and eat the cat.
But even if she doesn’t acknowledge a master, she still serves her own despicable nature.
You can see it in everything she does, really. Scarlett has a hunger for wealth. For power. And more than that, she wants to fulfill—in the very worst of ways—a childhood dream of being a princess. And as such, she covets one object that can give her all three: The crown of Queen Elizabeth II. See, if she gets the crown, she automatically becomes queen. (An odd little rule, but we’ll just go with it.) And so she sends her three dedicated Minions—Kevin, Stuart and Bob—to fetch the thing on pain of death.
It’s hard to draw too much spiritual meaning from Universal’s Minions (which came out on video yesterday), but I still think there’s a few lessons we can pull from its overall pockets.
1. Dylan was right. We all do serve somebody—or something. I believe that’s the way we, like the Minions, are built. And while our culture loves its edgy rebels and wandering loners, while our own egos tend to rankle at the thought of someone (or something) controlling us, we tend to do better—and be our happier—when we’re serving others. We serve as spouses. We serve as parents. When we give of ourselves, as the Minions do, we’re our best selves.
I think that’s why religion has been such a powerful—and I’d argue, good—force in the world. When we acknowledge something greater than us, our attention is drawn away from our own desires and predilections and is forced to focus on something outside ourselves. And I think that tends to be a good thing. But …
2. It matters who (or what) we serve. While the Minions’ devotion is cute and, perhaps in its own twisted way, noble, it’s still pretty obvious that they’re trailing the wrong horse. That’s particularly true in the case of Scarlett, who proves to be even too villainous for our yellow antiheroes.
But when they realize their mistake, the Minions stop fawning over their duplicitous dame and save the world (or, at least, Great Britain). And I think there’s a lesson there for us, too. Sure, it’s in our nature to serve, but we don’t always serve the right things. Like Scarlett, we can become a servant to our own desires. We can suffer under the tyranny of our own addictions. Sometimes we can follow the wrong people or ideals. But while we’re built to serve, we’re not meant to be slaves. If we see these masters for what they are, we can begin the process of breaking our servitude to them and transfer our allegiance elsewhere. It’s not always easy, of course … The Minions show us that, too. But it can be done.
3. If we’re servants, we’re sometimes terrible ones. The Minions, it seems, often love their leaders to death. Practically every bad ‘un they’ve aligned themselves with has died unwittingly by the Minions’ yellowed hand of doom.
It reminds me a lot of us Christians, at times—how sometimes we make it so difficult for anyone to see Christ through us. And like the Minions, we’re slow to learn from our mistakes. There’s been a lot made of the assaults on Christianity, be it from other religions or secularism or commercialism or whatnot. And indeed, in many parts of the world, persecution is a truly terrifying danger. But here in America, I sometimes wonder whether Christianity’s greatest threat is found in some of its own followers.
Yep, Minions has some fine lessons to teach us. But perhaps the biggest one of all is this: Never work for a woman who totes missiles in her dress, no matter what sort of lava gun she might offer you as a perk.
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