First of all, lets get one thing straight: it’s LEGO. It’s always LEGO. There is only LEGO. There are no LEGOS. The small objects that you connect together are LEGO bricks.
Sorry for getting a bit Lord/President Business on you all but this bit of linguistic pedantry has a point. The word LEGO is contracted from the Danish phrase ‘Leg godt’, which means ‘play well’. The elegant appeal of LEGO, as anybody born in the last fifty years knows, is in its blend of uniformity and variation, wholeness and fragmentation, labour and play.
Any LEGO brick manufactured at any time can interconnect with any other brick. They are unimaginably profuse: there are only 200 billion US pennies in circulation at this moment but 400 billion LEGO bricks have been manufactured since 1949. Admittedly many of these bricks have been chewed up by dogs, lost down drains and in sandpits, disappeared down lavatories (after navigating their way through infant digestive canals,) and been thrown out of windows by enraged parents who have stepped out of the shower only to find one suddenly lodged in the pain center of the foot.
But they are all one. They are all LEGO and there is no brick that is not LEGO: there are no ‘other’ LEGOS.
This interplay between conformity and bubbling variation, this brickolage, has become a part of our collective consciousness. When geneticists speak of DNA being ‘the building blocks of life’, who doesn’t visualise the double helix as a model built of multicolored plastic units? In some sense, we imagine that the universe must fit together in as rational a way as LEGO. It is a dream of ordnung: LEGO snaps together with a satisfactory sound of mini-completion that is denied to bricks of stone, clay or wood. It is the sound of rightness: a child’s first intimation of success.
- LEGO poster 1981
The very best toy commercial in poster form is the one that shows a sturdy little red-haired girl in dungarees beaming mischievously from behind her LEGO creation. The inevitable, idiotic, adult question is predicted, evaluated and dismissed by the tag-line: ‘What it is, is beautiful.’ From its earliest days, LEGO has been marketed not as a simple object or objects in itself, nor even as a complex system (thought it is both,) but as a conduit for infant thought: an expression of pure creativity. It is the only thing of plastic that has ever rivaled the crayon, and is regularly voted the greatest toy ever manufactured in the age of mass-production and precision engineering. The absence of LEGO from a house where children live is now charged as a form of criminal neglect under European law.
That last part is not true. But I bet a part of you thinks it should be.
The company itself has been through some tough times, though that seems hard to believe today. Still privately owned, it has faced bankruptcy on at least one occasion, and rebuilt itself, not by selling its soul but by making fundamental changes to what we can happily call its business model.
During the 80s, kit-based LEGO appeared, with a picture on the box of the one object that the bricks included would certainly make if you followed the instructions. I had one of these kits: an early LEGO castle in uniform grey, which I broke down and reassembled, following the detailed instructions, (it must be said that LEGO instructions are themselves masterpieces of lucid technical drawing,) and can testify to an sense of anticlimax. My LEGO castle literally gathered dust from then on. A friend of mine used quite blatantly to invite himself over for the sole and obvious purpose of ‘playing with’ my LEGO castle. By playing with it, he meant playing around it and admiring its little portcullis and drawbridge (raised and lowered with thread: a minor cheat,) its prison cell and trapdoor; its rigid little plastic pennons fluttering in the non-breeze. But he never suggested pulling it to bits and making anything else. And its uniformly grey bricks and prefabricated wall-panels with their little arrow slits, never got mixed into the basket of coloured LEGO. The idea was unthinkable. It was a thing apart.
Then came LEGO Technic, which included gears and other moving parts as well as a power source that made the whole thing move. All very well for the advanced builder and LEGO engineer but still marketed with the implicit assumption that the picture on the box was, if not the only thing that could be made with the pieces, then surely the biggest and best thing.
The new LEGO movie deals, quite skillfully, with the problems of LEGO’s uniformity and variation, and the problems that arise when the two overlap, interlock, and click. The story is a tried and true formula straight off the back of the box: an insignificant LEGO everyman, considered dull even by the standards of his colleagues, happens across a source of power that threatens the rule of Lord Business, a Legolomaniac obsessed with conformity, division and perfection in the universe of little plastic blocks. Assisted by an assortment of LEGO comrades, our little nobody develops himself as a person whilst thwarting the not-so-dark Lord’s plans to literally glue the world together into immoveable stasis.
The movie is not really a movie at all, but quite simply the greatest, funniest and most ravishing commercial ever made for the world’s most beloved plaything. The longevity, nostalgia, pleasure and reverence that LEGO represents means that people have quite simply forgotten that LEGO is a brand, like Starbucks or L’Oreal. Decades of happiness have invested LEGO with a significance that crosses boundaries of race and culture, overcomes the generation gap and invests it with an almost sacred power. The cast is packed with brilliant comic voice-actors in the service of a script so bursting with jokes and visual gags that, no matter how fast the visuals race, they always seem to be one step behind the writing.
And HOW the visuals race. At certain points, something about what I was looking at almost frightened me. Let’s call it the fear of myriad. How many of us, as children, sat staring at raindrops on a window pane and suddenly realized that each one contained a mirror image of the observer? Or examined one grain of sand, and then looked up at the beach and saw it, and realised that this is ALL REAL: this is a world made of parts so tiny, and so many, and interweaving in a pattern so mysterious that just brushing the idea filled one with a holy dread? Stars, planets, gases, rocks, me, germs, molecules, atoms, quarks, up, down, bottom, top, strange, charm.
Everything is…wait for it.
The LEGO Movie perhaps accidentally evokes that awe; engineering an atomic world of tiny parts in constant flux: there is an image of a LEGO sea, slate-grey and heaving, that stopped my breath. The entire film is thronged with comparable images of vastness: still or in motion, contending ceaselessly with the intricate fabric of its own creation. LEGO explosions, LEGO splashes of water, LEGO waving and swelling and bursting and shrinking and rearing up and collapsing.
It’s terrifying, and it’s enormous fun.
I’m not in the spoiler business but let me say that the movie does a pretty good job of reconciling LEGO’s strange contradictions, the chief one being the tension between the inherent discipline that LEGO represents (particularly when following the instructions,) and the freedom it once promised. Lets just say that tyranny is understood, forgiven, and allowed to disassemble itself, rather than be smashed to pieces. The LEGO man triumphs over ignorance, rather than evil. Creativity’s mandate is restored and disaster averted.
Along the way, the movie pays homage to recognizable types of LEGO, including the many hilarious pop-cultural tie-ins (Batman, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings,) that have made the LEGO video games an enormous success. The fact that video games are diametrically opposed to the most basic principles of LEGO is ignored in plain view, or at least pushed to the side. So, as eye-popping, unstoppable and clever as the LEGO movie is, there’s no escaping a basic problem.
Delirious passive entertainments like this movie, and semi-passive diversions like the LEGO video games ultimately undermine and overcome the simple, quiet satisfactions of LEGO itself. LEGO is not this kind of fun at all. LEGO does not rage unchecked, dance, collapse or explode with tremendous detonations. LEGO is a child sitting engrossed on the carpet over something only they can see, and the only sound that breaks the silence of concentration is the rattle of a hand in the bricks and a quiet click.
LEGO is big business but it’s also little busy-ness, and the film never really squares that circle, no matter how hard it tries.
The contradiction at the heart of The LEGO Movie is encapsulated by the maddening jingle, performed by hipster favorites Tegan and Sarah, and jock-hipster favorites The Lonely Island, that pervades the movie. Is it meant to be idiotic? The LEGO people seem to hate it and love it at the same time: it’s virtually an anthem to conformity and mindless positivism, brimming with all that snort-worthy nonsense about ‘living our dreams’ that everybody seems to hate and nobody seems able to get rid of. It’s a irresistible anti-parody, as addictive and deadly as sugar . You can’t stop humming it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTqXEQ2l-Y
LEGO movies and console games do not make children want to play with LEGO: they make them want to see more movies and play more console games. LEGO’s true successor is Mindcraft: which is true virtual LEGO: communal, organic, boundless, and incomprehensible to most adults. The LEGO movie is a brilliant entertainment, and some say it is a brilliant commercial, but I think the only thing it is really advertising is itself, or an idea of LEGO that is rooted in parental nostalgia.
It is mostly definitely awesome, in both the literal and the modern, degraded sense of that once-powerful word.
And perhaps what it is, is beautiful.
But is it really LEGO?
Everything is Awesome: The Lego Movie
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