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I sat down to write a review of the Lego Movie, and this came out instead.
When I was a kid, I loved making things. Expert testimony has it that I was drawing as a toddler, primarily trucks and sharks, which visually speaking were more or less interchangeable.
When I was about five, we got a book out from the library called Easy Origami. By then I’d made a hundred paper airplanes, and we had other craft books at home, but for some reason just folding paper and making REAL THINGS (by which little me meant 3-D models) lit a fire in my child brain that has dulled and flared over the years, but never dispersed.
The key to making origami was the rules: you start with a square piece of paper, you were never allowed to use scissors, just folding, and you could only use glue when two pieces had to fit together and the official folding and tucking wouldn't join them strong enough to play with. It was all in the instructions: follow them carefully and in the end you get a little boat or a duck or a man. Or a frog, one that really jumps!
Soon I started getting new ideas, ideas that weren’t in the instruction book. They were mostly copies from movies. Or from TV, or sometimes from books; the key was always plucking something from a story that'd come alive in my head, and making a part of it my own to continue the story from myself.
The problem is there were no instruction to make what I wanted. I couldn’t figure it out, not with just careful folding anyway, it was too difficult to see what you were doing, and there was always extra paper bunching in the corners.
So I cheated on the origami rules. I would fold sometimes, but most often if I wanted a piece of paper a certain shape, I’d just draw on it, then cut it out. Soon I was cutting without drawing first. When I wanted to make something more complicated than a single sheet of paper could make, I started gluing pieces together, or better yet, using scotch tape.
From there things got messy, and started developing quickly.
I don’t remember when it clicked, but I saw that these materials could be cut up and put together any way I liked. Forcing my ideas into shape was often tricky, as there were always surprises waiting in the material. Often it was easier to get ideas from the surprises in the materials themselves: a pair of milk cartons became a jetpack, single pair of egg carton cups became the head and body of a little bird. Some things were tough to do, but if I wanted a model of something, if I was patient enough, and if had enough tape, I could just make it.
From paper I moved up to cereal boxes and egg cartons, then to corrugated cardboard. I needed plastics and would cut up kool-whip containers. I learned there are two kinds of paper towels: most have a tube glued in the middle, that you have to work your way to the end in order to use that are of (these days most are this kind). But some have a tube that can be carefully pulled out of the middle easily, no waiting, and I was on my way. The towels are tubeless, but no matter, I didn’t need them for my project.
I learned to ball tape, and to run tape all the way around a tube and then cut it into little strips that could flower out and flatten, and the tube end could be attached to a flat surface. Scotch tape became a regular grocery, and the family room floor was perpetually covered in tiny triangles of cardboard.
My parents were in on this pretty much from the start. Everything I put together was examined with praise and shown off to visiting family members. I remember my Grandma Betty, my mother’s mom, especially liked the clever things I could figure out, and would ask for another of whatever I’d made most recently. Everyone encouraged me to try new things, and it became the thing I was really good at.
However, a roll of paper towels without the tube is a sad and floppy thing to try and wield against the three or four kids and their messes running around. When Mom saw how things serving a purpose were quietly lifted, cut up, and taped into something new, she didn’t get angry or discourage me; she made a very sensible compromise.
She set aside an otherwise underutilized cupboard in the kitchen. I think up to that point it was mainly used for Tupperware and bowls and a cake carrier or two, and those up-cycled kool whip containers she saved for leftovers that I was devouring. She said she’d put anything that wasn’t needed there, anything that I could cut up, and that should be where I got my materials from, and nowhere else. A family of six goes through a lot of groceries, and it was generally pretty well stocked. We called it the Idea Cupboard, and if I ever complained that I was bored, I was told to either go outside and run around, or look there for something new, then make it.
Then I grew up, and over time this practice flagged. Why didn’t it become my career?
I took a technical drawing class in high school, with the thought of one day becoming an engineer, but the rigor was disagreeable -- so much effort, just to be sure one line is in the right place!
And then there’s the math. Lots and lots of math to make anything really work. If there’s anything my creative process doesn’t seem to have time for, it’s careful measurements and working out endless little problems by the rules, the way we’re told to in school, until all the little answers are right. “This making stuff is a lot of fun, but you know what would send it over the top? Math homework!” It always seemed like a lot of pointless legwork that got in the way of the fun. But the thing about engineering is, without the math, without the legwork, it just won’t work.
But I think the real reason this didn’t go further than making things that were pretty, or similar to what I saw on the screen, is the same reason it captivated me in the first place. It wasn’t really the thing itself I was working to recreate, but a way to get into the story the thing was from, to participate in the adventures of the characters. No plot, no props. Who wants to lug around a proton pack if they can’t make any good jokes about it? (Okay, bad example, I would take the proton pack and run.)
Since then I’ve been pursuing another childhood passion, also started and encouraged by my parents. It’s a much simpler and much, much more powerful system for taking things apart and making something new: words. And since words are the heart of storytelling, their study and use has gradually replaced crafting things as my key ambition, though I still love tinkering out some new thing from time to time, still always from movies and mainly to impress people.
Like I said before, this all started as a review of the Lego Movie. So what does all this have to do with a hundred minutes of tiny cartoon plastic people cracking jokes and running around? Possibly everything.
The Lego Movie, for those who haven’t seen it, is surprisingly good. It’s a lot of different things at once; like many great stories, both its tone and meaning keep peeling away to reveal another aspect of the material and the characters. It’s mostly eye-popping and funny, but it’s also incredibly heartfelt and touching, at times it passes for sharp satire, and in general it manages the difficult task of delivering a gripping plot with a light-hearted, unpretentious attitude.
But the best thing about it, my favorite thing, are the action sequences.
These are different from action I have seen in movie up to this point, with the possible exceptions of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Like any great action scenes they’re both thrilling to the story and mesmerizing to watch, executed with the same deft brilliance of fluid motion and sense of space as the rest of the animation (I could go on and on). What’s different is what the point of the action sequences are, or rather what the characters are trying to accomplish while they’re going on.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has escaped the snake pit but the Nazis have got the Ark and are getting away; he gives chase, runs the motorcade of the road one vehicle at a time, and retakes the Ark (for now). But at one point he pauses, when asked by his friend how he’ll meet them later. “I don’t know,” he says, “I’m making this up as I go!”
In Die Hard, the hero John McClane comes under gunfire. He runs, he hides, he figures out a way to return fire and wins. Fighting in, fighting out; pay the problem back to its source and there’s your solution. The villain’s game is violence, and the ingenuity of the hero is employed to make them a little better at that game, and then they win. We dislike the bad guys because they’re violent, we like the heroes because they’re clever and violent, and because the bad guys had it coming.
In the Lego movie, our heroes are cornered and the bad guys are closing in. Time is up, the heroes have just one chance. What do they do? They don’t run, they don’t hide, they don’t run vehicles off the road, they don’t return fire. They build.
They start taking the world around them apart, whatever they can get their hands on, and they start making something to get them out of the jam. Granted, the thing they make usually helps them by running or returning fire, but only after the emotional emphasis of the scene is laid down, not on the fighting, but on how cool the thing they’re making is, and how they came up with it out of scratch.
It's an ingenious twist, albeit likely the most logical result of staging an adventure story in a world of building blocks. There’s a larger, tidy parable too about following instructions to get to success, and whether those instructions can cope with the inevitable surprises that come out of the materials. The film itself does a better job of illustrating it and I’ll leave you to watch for yourself, but at its heart is a very simple premise, and the heart of this my article:
1. The world is made of building blocks
2. The blocks can be re-made to make an awesome story happen.
3. You don’t have to be one of the characters, or the movie makers, or anyone special to re-make the blocks however you want.
It can be done by anybody, that’s what’s special.
You can just see the pitch the filmmakers must have made to the executives at the studio, and at Lego: an action movie about toys where playing with the toys itself is part of the action, in fact the most important part. The studio executives nod to each other. This movie could sell a ton of toys.
But as an ad campaign, this premise backfires, or at least it did for me. I love to think that it was at least partly intentional on the part of the filmmakers. The problem is, it doesn’t just apply to the rules of the movie, but to the world itself.
I came out of the theater not wanting to run to the store and buy toys. I came out thinking about the Idea Cupboard back when I was a kid, about possibilities, about how we live in a world made of building blocks, made of a crazy pile of amazing, that can be re-arranged however we want. There’s no one configuration of making things that’s better than another, so long as it works.
What’s important isn’t following the instructions exactly, it’s in not being afraid to mess up and find something new.
So it's time to make something new! And since stories are what has held my attention all along, I’ve decided to make something about storytelling, about trying to be patient and to find the way to measure carefully and solve little problems, and to make it work.
