Making Room for Change
A goofy, seemingly innocuous toy movie reminds us to resist the urge to freeze everything as-is, and to instead embrace the creativity of those coming behind.
Review by Gregg Fairbrothers
Tempora mutantur, as they say: “Times change.”
My tenth birthday fell on Friday, October 30, 1964. In New Jersey this was “Mischief Night,” the night before Halloween—no coincidence that it was my birthday, as many loved to say. That Friday morning, I woke to a wrapped box of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene interlocking building blocks: two colors, red and white, an assortment of sizes measured in the number of fitting pegs. Mostly they were four-peggers and eight-peggers, but there were a few sixes, and the really valuable ones had ten, so you could build bridges or make roofs with them. It was my first introduction to Legos.
Over time the building set grew. First a set of windows and doors, and eventually a grey base. (I never did get slanted roof pieces.) I was captivated by the endless fun of playing with those clever new blocks: make something, admire it for a day, then tear it down and make something else. In fact, the first times I consciously recognized what creativity was like were in those quiet moments thinking of things to build with Legos, building those things, and inventing stories to go with them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Lego building blocks and science fiction were the two gifts from my parents that most helped me grow up.
By the time I was in college, Legos had grown up, too—now there were Lego ship sets and human figures. Then, a couple years before my first son was born, I saw Expert Builder Sets in the stores, offering hours of enjoyment creating incredibly intricate and complex structures (usually models of iconic movie or video game sets). For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see the point. The set proscribed what the builder was meant to make, and exactly where each piece should go. What was left for the imagination? Tempora mutantur, I suppose.
Fifty years after my first meeting with Lego, Warner Brothers released The Lego Movie, now happily celebrating its ten-year anniversary and none the worse for the wear. Not every toy movie has been so lucky, nor have many been blessed with the critical acclaim or return on investment (8x their production cost!). The tone remains fully contemporary. The scripting is a gag a minute. It’s still funny ten years later (no mean feat there). The computer animation is set to mimic stop-motion and Lego figure movements, which leaves it looking fresh and contemporary even as animators today can flawlessly reproduce the fling of Moana’s gorgeous hair. By all indications this is a film that will age at least as well as Dr. Strangelove, widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.
No doubt, part of growing up is finding our place, our own moments in Time, and it’s natural to want to hold everything there.
But, at the risk of skirting spoilers, it’s the themes in The Lego Movie that deserve more attention even than its visual and tonal aesthetic. The Lego Movie may be a toy movie, but it offers plenty for us to think about, and to feel. There is the obvious running commentary on corporate conformity and bland mediocrity. But as the wild flight of fantasy unfolds, we begin to see that the real tension is between freezing things exactly as they are—the power of the Kragle—and creating crazy new things, like double-decker couches. Lord Business tries to resist change, wanting to keep things just as they’re built—to, in a sense, never grow up—while the unlikely hero, Emmet Brickowski, stands for the dynamic creativity of youth.
By the end we see how the two viewpoints might be reconciled, and both get an education. The old learn they must make room for the creative change of the young. But, in a fun final twist, the frustrated young learn what it’s like to feel the pressure from those coming close behind. Tempora mutantur. The lesson we all must learn as we grow.
It’s not easy. How often do we find ourselves feeling the pull of some perfect moment, such that we want to Crazy Glue everything in place so we never lose that time or that experience? Himieromai, toska, sehnsucht, hiraeth—many languages have a word for this almost undefinable feeling of wanting to hold onto and preserve something that seems too precious to allow change to ruin. Like the real Lord Business, we want things to stay as they are. But in The Lego Movie, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller persuasively show us that this impulse is selfish and foolish—even, perhaps, futile. No doubt, part of growing up is finding our place, our own moments in Time, and it’s natural to want to hold everything there. But the more important part of growing up is learning how to make room for the ones coming behind… and allow them to change things we may not want changed.
Today there’s a large wooden chest in an attic closet here at my farmhouse full to the top with Legos—plastic figures, pieces that once were some Star Wars thing or other, parts of a soccer field complete with goals and tiny balls that are a sure-fire choking hazard; and yes, those old red and white blocks are still there, almost lost in the welter. I hate to think what the stock market would have made for me in the last thirty years with the small fortune spent thirty years ago on the contents of that chest. I’m still not sure the value would outweigh that of everything I learned, and my kids learned, from countless hours and masterpieces.
Indeed, my kids had their own fun, and no, they didn’t have to worry about Lord Business. I would never think to glue a couple of Lego pieces together. But nor did I see the point of kits that only build one thing, where you would never remember how to find all the pieces to make it a second time, let alone use them to make anything particularly interesting—except, I suppose a crazy MetalBeard mashup. (No wait, there’s now a kit for that too.) And yet, playing alongside my kids, I watched them come up with some wacky things it would never have occurred to me to create.
My oldest grandson is just turning five, and so far I don’t see any Legos in his toy box in Virginia. Someday he’ll find the chest upstairs when he visits, and we shall see then how his father handles growing up!
Gregg Fairbrothers is a founding board member of Fare Forward, and a founding faculty-alum advisor to the Dartmouth Apologia and the Eleazar Wheelock Society.
The Lego Movie was released on February 7, 2014. It was written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. If you’d like to watch it, it is currently streaming on Netflix.
