English Studies Forum

Legoland

Tim Morris

            Parents recognize the sound.  It's not quite like anything else.  From the other room, you hear a few rattling falls mount into a cascade till with a whump! the crisis comes, and the tinkling after-patter is unmistakable: your kid has just tipped over a huge box of Lego.

             All things fall and are built again, says Yeats.  And those who build them again use Lego.  From the chaos of a thousand pieces bouncing onto the floor come houses, villages, cities, planes and cars.

            Lego has many ironies.  Made of tough little bits of inflexible plastic, it is the most malleable of toys.  It comes in only a few colors and a few useful shapes, yet if you have enough Lego and enough patience, you can represent almost anything.  Most Lego is now sold as model sets of vehicles, castles, and other scenes.  Most kids build the model once, then dismantle it, throw the pieces into a pile, and build whatever they please out of the mess.  Lego teaches the unstable relation of form to content.  Yet it's hardly postmodern.  It's entirely pre-modern.  It's just a set of blocks.  The genius of it is just that the blocks stick together.

            First things first: nomenclature.  "Lego" is a mass noun, like "money," "cheese," or "corn syrup."  It is not a countable noun like "book," "egg," or "lentil."  "Lego" does not form the plural "legoes," let alone "leggoes." 

            This is no mere grammarian's cavil.  The mass noun Lego shows the essence of the toy.  One does not build with "legoes," even though the root of everything is the irreducible brick.  One builds with an amount of Lego, not a number of legoes.  Broken down in the crucible of play--the crucible being a seven-year-old knocking buildings apart--Lego molds like wax into new forms.  Only the most ineducable in spirit could look at the Urstoffe of a heap of Lego and see it as discrete "legoes."

            The basic rule of Lego is a rule of three.  Three plates are as thick as a brick.  Snap together three plates the same length and width, and you have a brick of that length and width.  A building of true bricks resembles a classical edifice of marble.  A building of plates is like a homelier construction of tile.  In practice, nearly every building has a mix of plates and bricks.

            The Lego that comes in model sets is color-coordinated.  It forms gleaming white spaceships, yellow construction vehicles, black-and-red robots.  When these models are dismantled and brushed into the heap, it's hard to sort the Lego into separate colors again.  To build a white temple or a red firehouse takes patience and logistical skills.  Most Lego buildings are piebald, out of necessity.  A Lego city is a collage of multicolored edifices.  Even Luxor, in Lego, comes out looking a bit like Times Square.

            They snap together in a macaronic mess, but Lego colors start out heartbreakingly pure.  For many years, Lego had a strict primary-color policy.  Classic bricks are blue, red, yellow, white, and black.  New model sets over the years have added new colors--first greys and pinks, then green (still a rarity, though), then brown.  A whole range of pastels and earth tones then filtered in with new sets of desert explorers, Wild West figures, ninjas and creatures from Star Wars.

I remember reading, in some promotional article that has filtered into the common sump of information in my head, that the nature of these colors is one of Lego's proudest trade secrets.  Danish scientist-adventurers, I imagine, comb the world for the purest tints.  Pure Zambian reds and pristine Kirghiz whites arrive in Copenhagen in sealed containers under armed guard, to be fused with Lego plastic.

            That plastic is a marvel.  Many companies make competing or compatible building bricks, and many a parent has unwisely bought a carton of these bricks.  The contents look vaguely like Lego, but no initiate is fooled for long.  The colors are impure.  The impostor bricks come in pastels, gummy or waxy hues, mottled or swirly, in a way that real Lego never never never ever does.  The ersatz bricks are rounded, too brittle or too soft; they match up unevenly and don't stick tight; mixed with Lego, they throw off the three-to-one proportions of the real thing.

            Touching fresh Lego is a sensual delight, akin to wearing new sneakers or popping a new toothbrush out of its case.  New Lego has a cool feel, a satiny, sometimes staticky finish.  One brick snaps to another with just the slightest hint of a vacuum kiss.  The resulting unit looks seamless from a distance.

            Like tools or relationships, Lego fits the hand better when new.  The wonder is that it stands up so well past the honeymoon phase.  Old Lego frequently shows nicks and dents.  It's not impervious to wear and tear.  It won't stand up to your dog's teeth.  But a fortunate piece of Lego will keep its snap for well over a decade.

            Dirt is the real enemy of Lego.  Unhealthily neat myself, I have stood guard over the pristine condition of my son's Lego for years.  Few things are sadder than a grubby, sandboxed, finger-rubbed set of daycare Lego.  The nubs atop each brick, untold trillions of them worldwide, each saying the word LEGO in tiny type, glaze up over the years with crud of every description--Fig Newton crumbs, peanut butter, Play-Doh, the stuff that builds up wherever children are in intimate contact with floors.  When the spaces between the nubs fill with this crud, the bricks lose their snap.  The color is last to go, as everything subsides toward a general grey.  Unless melted down by fire, though, Lego bricks, like all plastic items, are ultimately incorruptible.  I imagine the landfills of America inhabited by legions of Lego bricks, washed fresh by each new rain that dissolves the paper, disintegrates the food scraps, and rusts the steel cans around them.  After we are gone, our successor species will map American culture by lodes of disheveled Lego.

            Though I sound like a Lego partisan, I have a confession: I never played with Lego till I had a kid of my own.  My childhood buildings were made of Lincoln Logs.  Tragically, I never had enough Logs to build anything more than a one-room cabin.  I sighed for the massive compounds that the instruction booklets suggested were possible.  I also had Tinkertoys, whose rods splintered, leaving their business ends wedged irremovably in the doughnut-shaped connectors.  Saddest of all aspects of Tinkertoys were the gay-colored trapezoids of paper that were supposed to serve as windmill sails.  These little chits got frazzled after two or three wedgings into the cloven ends of the rods.  They flapped in dog-eared fashion as you pushed the mill around, pretending you were the wind.  Tinkertoys taught you that your imagination was no fun to be around at all. 

We had no Lego.  Other kids had Lego.  It was part of those mysterious domestic spaces inhabited by People Not Quite Like Us, people who brushed their teeth with Colgate, watched The Virginian, and ate Velveeta--alien customs in our Crest / Bonanza / cheesefood-slices household.  When my little brother and I met kids who played with Lego, we regarded them with a mixture of envy and abomination.

As with all such superficial distinctions, the fact that we didn't play with Lego acquired a kind of moral self-approbation.  Those other, Lego-playing kids had indulgent parents.  Tinkertoys were better, after all; they were more natural, more homely.  Lego was for fussers and fitters, kids who had to rely on a snap-fit to spark their imaginations.  They could never fully appreciate the delicate design compromises that had to be made when faced with a boxful of loose-fitting Lincoln Logs.

Of course, that was all sour grapes.  Lego was great.  God, what wouldn't I give now to live my childhood over surrounded by shiny Danish bricks.  Some parents spend their kids' early years in a flood of nostalgia.  Others finally get to play with the toys they never had. 

My son was still a baby when I bought my first Lego.  Passing through a toy store on my way to the diaper aisle, I noticed a little box set, no more than 20 pieces.  It was a pirate on a raft, holding off a shark.  I didn't have tenure at the time, and I hadn't published much either, and I felt for that little pirate.  I bought him and put him on a bookshelf in my office.  The box showed how you could take apart the raft and rebuild it as a pier.  Or (I discovered) you could drape the pirate over a lone log and have him stare into the shark's mouth.  He was equipped with a Lego pistolet and a Lego broadsword, neither of which bothered the shark very much.  As a final grim gesture, you could detach the pirate's legs, set his torso on your bookshelf, and float him there in a sea of black steel, bracing himself for the end.

Then I started to get some articles accepted, and I looked on the plight of my pirate as a road not taken instead of inevitable fate.  One day my son, now four, was in my office.  It was his custom, whenever he came there, to take home a treat of some kind: a binder clip, an eraser, a back issue of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.  That day, he spotted the pirate instead, and a collector was born.

I don't imagine we have an excessive number of cubic feet of Lego in our front room.  It still has space for a piano, a herpetarium, and a 27-inch TV.  But we have an uncountable number of Lego characters.  We have pirates and redcoats, cowboys and rustlers, Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn, robots, astronauts, footballers, adventurers in retro pith-helmets, aquanauts, paramedics, pizza men, and Lego skeletons -- which, unlike most tightly-strung Lego people, jangle loosely after snapping together.

These characters inhabit a nightmare world-turned-junkyard.  Their civilization lies in decay around their ears, if they had ears.  Stray bricks litter the bottoms of the boxes where these men are stored.  Façades of buildings and disused machinery are packed in on top of them.  Everywhere, as in real junkyards, are tires, in all sizes from Lego-lawnmower scale to truck-pull-truck type.

In and around the tires and the people, when the Lego is tipped out onto the floor, you find exquisite treasures in miniature.  Some of it is real treasure, at least in this plastic world: Lego money of various denominations, all in gilt plastic specie.  Gathered together, it makes a barrelful even a pirate captain wouldn't sneer at.  Other items are more perplexing, at least when one has forgotten what set they originally came from.  There's a poker hand on a single plate of Lego.  There's a circular saw.  Seven identical pizza pies lie fortuitously next to a Lego loaf of French bread.

Weapons are everywhere.  This little community is armed to its teeth, or at least to its have-a-happy-day smiles.  There are blunderbusses and daggers and ninja knives, cutlasses for the pirates and lances for the knights-at-arms.  The Wild West men have six-shooters; the yeomen sport crossbows.  I turn over one tiny plate, expecting to see another hand of cards, and find instead that it's a bundle of dynamite.

But just as prominent are tokens of the domestic.  The tiniest Lego of all comes as flowerets, minuscule disks of color that have fallen off their green plastic stems.  Among this rain of petals lie goblets that can be capped with single red plates to suggest brimmers of red wine.  Frail bicycles lie alongside old computer keyboards, fragments of some Lilliputian yard sale.  And of course, there's not only everything; there's also the Lego kitchen sink.

All this paraphernalia would be no good to anyone if there weren't Lego people to use it, of course.  I almost wrote "Lego men," but there are a few females and a fair helping of neuter beings among Lego people -- not to mention the grinning and sexless skeletons.  But Lego people are mostly men.  Their action-filled worlds align with the boys' fiction and boys' movies that Lego recreates.  If I'd had a daughter instead, I wonder if my Lego life would be different.  There are some distinctly feminine sets of Lego, with girl figures and pink-pastel design motifs, but one senses in them a half-hearted gesture towards gender equity.  Real Lego people are men with hats on.

Lego men wear hats, because if they didn't they would reveal the functional yellow nubs on the top of their heads.  Lego women sometimes wear hair instead of a hat.  The hair goes just like the hat.  When taking off the hair or the hat, you frequently pull the head off along with it.  That's fine, because you can just snap another head onto the body.  Decapitation is not only easy, painless and reversible for Lego citizens, it's also the way they get dressed in the morning.  When a soldier wants to don his epaulettes, when a white-water rafter needs to wear his life vest, he has to take his head off and put it back on over the garment.

A Lego population goes through cycles of dismemberment and restitution.  Bionic robot heads end up on striped-shirted sailor bodies.  Grizzled fighter pilots wear strings of pearls.  A Lego box, quite apart from its skeletons, quickly becomes a boneyard of body parts: legs detached from trunks detached from arms detached from hands, with heads thrown aimlessly here and there.  Convening the people can be a matter of "to your scattered bodies go."

They are multicultural, those bodies.  The basic Lego head is bright primary yellow, reflecting not jaundice but a determination not to represent any possible ethnic group.  Arms and hands and legs are molded, however in a whole range of colors, giving Lego men an ethnically improvisational quality: black and red hands fit white and green arms, with grey legs and the ever-yellow head suggesting a most hopeful monster.

And they smile.  There's the odd scowling pirate to break the mood, but Lego people are on the whole the happiest bunch of bipeds on the planet.  There is something blessed in that aplomb, in the certainty that as his head is transferred from grease monkey to rocket scientist to bank robber to soccer star, before ending encased in the crested helmet of a medieval feoffor, a Lego man will always smile.

There's something campy in that Lego smile, as well, and it can verge, as camp so often does, on the sinister.  A parkful of smiling Lego baseball fans is all quite well, but when you raise two Lego armies and set them forth upon a plain, it's disconcerting to see them charge towards each other, tucked into their hauberks and brandishing their chainéd maces, with those same silly smiles on.

In the Reverend Brendan Powell Smith's ongoing Web project, the Brick Testament, those same smiling Lego characters are pressed into the service of justifying the ways of God to man.  Starting with some key stories from the Gospels and Genesis, Smith, by late 2003, had posted over 1,700 photographs illustrating Bible scenes.  It's almost impossible to say what the point of the Brick Testament is.  Smith tends to zero in on the more gruesome and bizarre stories in Scripture: Noah's son Ham coming upon his father's nudity, or Lot's daughters sleeping with him in his drunkenness.  There's a lot of Lego blood (translucent red plates work beautifully) and quite a bit of Lego sex, sometimes between Lego people and Lego animals.

 But it's all in the Bible.  Smith's text hews unvaryingly to Biblical language, and his pictures are as literal-minded as possible.  At times--as when Smith's Christ bears his cross of brown Lego bricks to Calvary, and is nailed on it with a Lego hammer by a centurion wearing what looks like Lego Ninja armor--the camp value of the project recedes, to be replaced by something very like devotion.  Lego, for Smith, is not just something that puts ironic quotes around the world, though it's that too.  For Smith and other artists, Lego simply is the world.

Artist Patrick Phipps has pressed Lego men into service in a series of high-art reproductions.  Huge in scale, his photographs recreate Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, and Goya's Shootings of May 3, 1808--except that the characters have been replaced by Lego men.  The Shootings of May 3, 1808 becomes especially troubling in Phipps's rendition, as the victims smile with outthrust arms at their killers.

Anyone who's built a large-scale Lego setup can identify with the dissociation that Phipps presents.  One summer my son and I occupied ourselves building ancient Rome from his swollen collection of Lego.  As we assembled palaces, fora, baths, temples, and triumphal arches, we began to critique the social institutions that underpinned such grandeur.  Our Emperor, smiling continuously, was a feeble, foppish character who had to be transported on a litter borne by four stout ex-pirates.  My son brought together a whole army of Lego slaves and arrayed them before the palace.  He deplored all the while the societal forces that had turned them into peons of empire.  We started to care entirely too much about the rights of Lego men.

Lego can mix absurd flights of the imagination with the grittiest of practical obsessions.  If you take it into your mind to build the Millennium Dome, you can dream all you want, but you still have to solve the problem of constructing a hemisphere out of rigidly orthogonal bricks.  (Our Rome, because we couldn't circle its squares, lacked a Colosseum.)

Lego propaganda, like that of Lincoln Logs, suggests that builders are limited only by their own imagination.  But imagination is always constrained by material.  Only in fantasy do you ever really have enough Lego.  In Maurizio Nichetti's 1989 film Ladri di saponette, a bourgeois Italian couple talk, ignoring their son.  He takes out a crate of Lego.  We see the couple's conversation for a while, and then we see the child again.  He has built the entire Kremlin.  St. Basil's Cathedral floats in the middle of the living room, its onion domes reaching up above his head.  It's a glorious throwaway image that took some poor Italian set decorator weeks to concoct.

I thought of Nichetti's film when I went to Legoland.  On our way from London to a holiday in the West of Ireland, we took our son to Legoland Windsor.  This park lies near the royal palace west of London, on land carved out of a huge estate.  On lawns where Trollope heroes once courted viscount's daughters, squirming jam-faced youngsters now stand in line to ride Lego-themed roller-coasters.  When Philip Larkin imagined the extinction of rural England in a motorwayed near future, he muttered that "the whole / Boiling will be bricked in / Except for the tourist parts."  I don't know whether he'd be pleased or doubly mortified to know that even the tourist parts would soon be bricked in with Lego.

    Legoland offers all the rides and treats that kids have immemorially associated with fun and just as immemorially looked back on, as adults, in bittersweet agony.  But here the hook, for kids and grownups alike, comes in the form of Lego creations on a megalomaniac scale.  After experiencing St. Paul's, Tower Bridge, and Buckingham Palace in real life, hordes of tourists come to Windsor to see the same sights in plastic. 

Wonder and heartbreak mix at Legoland as you gape at the things built by the first human beings outside of Denmark ever to honestly have enough Lego.  To conceive of the dome of St. Paul's on the scale needed to subtend the arc of its hemisphere, square by Lego square--well, Christopher Wren's task was comparatively simple.  In Legoland's miniature Europe, uniform yellow men populate postcard places.  Holocaust and Blitz will never trouble these statically energetic sweet-sweepers and lorry-drivers.

My thoughts at Legoland were not entirely ones of innocent delight.  I wondered, in no particular order, how you got a job building these things, whether they would take a fortyish American professor, whether strict instructions for the models came directly from Denmark under special seal or whether the Brits could build what they wanted, and finally, how long it took them to build the models, and whether (it being England) someone held umbrellas over them as they did.

Legoland is like only one other thing I'd ever experienced: the Dickeyville Grotto.  I haven't heard much about Dickeyville in recent years, but I would guess it's still there in the southwest corner of Wisconsin.  On the principle that it was the kind of thing a guy ought to see, my grandfather loaded us in the car when I was ten and drove us from Chicago to Dickeyville. 

The name seemed funny, but the Grotto was serious business.  A priest named Mathias Wernerus built the grotto--a kind of chapel with gardens and walls--in the 1920s, using bits of jewelry, broken china, beads, glass, and other junk mortared together into fantastic shapes.  Fr. Wernerus's vision was decidedly less commercial than that of Legoland, but it comes from the same basic urge: to make something out of little bits of stuff.  And to make something hideous.

Strolling Legoland, you get the irrepressible urge to build something yourself.  The Legoland models of Unter den Linden and La Scala don't come apart.  I tried.  I bet every visitor tries.  They're glued together, something one never does at home.  But the Lego people have planned for this building urge.   They provide a big room full of bricks and bases to build on.  You can build a skyscraper and subject it to a Lego earthquake.  You can construct a fabulous suspension bridge; but you have to share with a thousand other tourists.  And there is never enough time, and the good bricks get taken, and you have to go home.  It's daycare on the grandest of scales.

If daycare and Legoland Lego are sad, a collection of Lego, however small, that is clean and yours and play-with-able is a joy in youth and a balm in middle age.  Lego doesn't require patience so much as it enforces patience.  You can't just slap or mold Lego into shape.  Building must happen brick by brick.  It demands foresight.  Time and again you must break a structure in two to add a crucial forgotten layer of tiles.

Distraught?  Possessed by a sickening fear of death?  Build the Statue of Liberty out of Lego.  If you stay on task you will not be able to think about your problems.  Lego problems will displace them.  Scrounging high-quality bits from a mass of undifferentiated supply, you turn into a quartermaster of plastic.  Constructing a cockpit for your Lego pilot to sit in, you are an ergonomic engineer.

The soul has its own demands.  Chiefly, it wants to build something.  It doesn’t really know, and doesn't care, whether what it builds is a great novel, a backyard deck, or the Sydney Opera House.  When I clear space on the living-room floor and lay the foundations of Notre Dame de Paris, I am obeying the work ethic in its purest form.  Out of this dust, propelling itself against decay, rise forms as grand as those of any civilization.