As fortune would have it, I was born on the 27th of December so that my parents could factor my birth into their 1996 tax returns, since the doctor overseeing the procedure didn’t want to induce me on Christmas, my mother’s birthday (“but you’re Jewish!” she said. “Doesn’t mean I want to work on Christmas,” he responded). Because of that, every year my birthday falls into what could be considered an extended Christmas season, falling in that surreal week between Christmas and New Year’s where nothing is real. Because people are traveling during this period, my birthday party is always sometime in the middle of January so that people can get back from their celebrations of profound things so they can celebrate far more worldly, insignificant things (me). More pleasantly, it means I get all the year’s presents crammed together, and it was this year I got something I hadn’t played with in fifteen years: LEGO Star Wars sets.
One is a bust of the head of Captain Rex from the Clone Wars, and the other is a rather large set - over a thousand pieces if memory serves - of R2-D2. During the two nights I built these sets, there was a lot of blue and white. I found myself enjoying the experience just as much as I did when I was a kid. It was an unfamiliar experience, doing so much work with my hands, having graduated to being a faceless bureaucrat among an army of faceless bureaucrats in the Washington DC blob who sits at a desk and presses buttons to earn his pay.
But there is something doubtlessly mesmerising about putting all these little pieces together. On one occasion, I got up to use the restroom and found myself feeling almost dizzy, a feeling I’ve only ever felt after gaming for a long time and then standing up. It also reminded me of my grueling job-hunting stretches after I graduated in 2019, and then had to ram into the pandemic and omnipresent discrimination against the autistic (as I am); I found myself investing more time in various writing projects or other things, because they gave me results. If I wrote a short story or an article, it was there, in front of me, an indication that I had worked. For job applications, it was flushing effort down the drain with nothing more than a confirmation email to prove that I did it. Here, again, was labor in physical form - evidence for Marx’s labor theory of value, perhaps.
One of the things that struck me when putting these little pieces together was how colorful the insides of these sets were, and how all of that color was to be covered up by the blue and the white and the gray. There was something fascinating about all that color, reds and browns and greens, being hidden by a shell for which the real aesthetic value comes in. It was, as I soon figured out, a multilingual way of keeping everything straight. LEGO famously does not use words in its instructions, but does everything with pictures. The colors on the inside of the set is a natural extension; red parts connect with red parts, yellow with yellow, et cetera (this is how the designers had me build R2-D2’s head, making sure each portion is connected to the right side of the set). There’s something sad about all that color being hidden; exposing it may make some sort of interesting abstract art piece, akin to those lavishly drawn books that show you the inside of any number of vehicles (including licensed Star Wars ships, at least one book of which I read as a child).
On another level, it was strange to see a LEGO set be a sculpture and not a toy. I grew up with LEGO Star Wars, Bionicle, and other themes that were designed to be played with. I have a LEGO Star Destroyer on top of one of my bookshelves, serving a purpose as a sculpture, but if I look at it from the right angle I can still see the minifigures inside. The massive R2-D2 set I built have smooth parts on its feet so that you can glide it around, but it still feels larger and so fragile that you just want to leave it there. The head of Captain Rex is even more a sculpture, as I cannot see any way to play with it. I took to calling it the ‘severed head,’ and proudly called it such alongside a picture of the set in a group chat for my extended family. Both sets are now in a TV room, on top of a shelf, looking down at you as if you are a threat.
I have seen those big master builder sets in bookstores and in other public places, where LEGO is clearly angling for the adult market. Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs, as they are called in the fandom) have a saying: you get into LEGO as a kid, then abandon it in an attempt to be more adult as a teenager, and then get back into it as an adult. I lost interest in my freshman year of high school (fourteen years old, for non-Americans). As C. S. Lewis said:
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
But it does feel like LEGO has exploited that; the adult fans are not just going back to something they enjoyed as a child, but rather that LEGO has successfully found a new market for its products, and is happily making money hand over fist because of it. It’s like how a lot of licensed toys for small children (like a buggy shaped like the Millennium Falcon, for example), are really marketed toward their parents, as the parents are the ones who are spending money, and children of that age can only object so much. On some level, it’s another manifestation of how late capitalism has made it even harder to imagine things that are truly new, rather than repackaged nostalgia (writes he who spent eight days catching up on The Bad Batch on Disney Plus, hypocrite that I am - the positive is that I got to see Captain Rex on screen while Captain Rex’s severed head was looking down upon me). We have been given our fantasies for money, and we are all too happy to fork it over.
I can accept that my joy in building these sets is in some sense an act of deliberate regression. But as Lewis says in the above quote, that is not necessarily a bad thing. All too often we allow what is new and ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ and whatnot glom onto our basic humanity, the humanity that we had as children. Likewise, it was good to get back to basics in a sort of metaphysical sense, to do things with my hands rather than via a mouse and keyboard. But if moving away from these things is progress, what does our notion of progress really mean? And, above that particular discussion, what does it mean when that refreshing inversion of oppressive norms comes when a corporation profits from it? There has got to be some French philosopher from the 1960s who has a pithy quote about that which would illuminate the conundrum, or barring that a quote from the works of Mark Fisher. In any case, I enjoyed the experience, as I have enjoyed so much of Star Wars and so much of LEGO. But it made me think of all the things wrapped up in this, all the pieces that make it up, and how they all click together.
--
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
