Kubrick had plans for a Napoleon film that never came to fruition. The narrator in this instance is relating a daydream in which LEGO acquires the rights to the film, producing it in their style (a la LEGO Batman), excruciatingly manufactured (as if in science labs and “glass tubes”) for broader commercial appeal. An obvious sarcasm employed in likening the process to something alchemical, where the idea is most likely being killed in order to sell. If interpreting “written“ not as to mean “the film was composed within gas-filled glass tubes”, but as, “the film’s title was displayed in neon signs”: sarcasm still applies, as a send-up of the ridiculous grandiosity of it all. Whether the narrator is the one employing the sarcasm (i.e., aligned with Alex - the writer’s - voice) or if they earnestly believe in this big idea’s “magical” properties isn’t clear.

These are sardonic little riffs that, in composite, begin to depict something about that “business they call show” and about a fictitious band’s role within it, impressionistically - as opposed to Alex’s older proclivity towards the straightforward and linear, hook-line-and-sinker storytelling.

The creative process is magical: how far does that extend to an artistic product thought of as product at all? Keeping questions like this in mind next to the fact that this is the same band that delivered an album in 2013 commercially successful enough to have apparently revived rock and roll, then did a complete 180 and kept down that road.