What Makes LEGO LEGO?: An Interview with Jonathan Rey Lee (Part Three)
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Artwork by Mike Doyle
Throughout the book, you sprinkle case studies of art projects which in one way or another deconstruct the playscripts you associate with LEGO. What are some examples? What allows these artists to expand the creative potentials of LEGO that are ideologically discouraged elsewhere? Are these artists cheating or are they operating from a different conception of creativity? How has the company responded to these alternatives?
I absolutely loved working on these sections and strongly believe there much more work to be done in analyzing LEGO art and fan productions. I call these sections “Post-scripts” because how LEGO scripts its toys is only the beginning of actual play. Artists and fans not only prove that the LEGO system can do more than its messaging suggests but also show us playful ways of questioning and challenging this messaging.
One example from the book is how Mike Doyle builds stunning decaying housesusing LEGO that completely subvert the usual geometrical regularity of LEGO construction. Doyle simultaneously reimagines construction play by finding clever ways to twist LEGO construction techniques into irregular forms and by challenging the suburban ideals of LEGO architecture with profound artistic meditations on decay. Other examples I explore include experimental brick-built poetrythat explores the relationship between LEGO and poetic composition, a Death Star refashioned in LEGO Friends stylethat plays with gendered stereotypes, a working Turing Machinethat uses LEGO elements to demonstrate core principles of digitality, stop-motion brickfilmsthat reimagine Star Wars, a series of artistic mediations on emotional detachment in LEGO, and an interactive art installationwhere passersby build a collaborative LEGO city. In the spirit of bricolage, many of these examples partially support the prevailing LEGO ideology by retaining some of its core elements while simultaneously remixing these ideological elements in transformative ways.
For the most part, I think LEGO would embrace these examples. Because LEGO is so comfortable sending mixed messages, it’s often happy to either overlook or playfully acknowledge these creative departures even if they would never integrate these ideas into official playscripts. Unfortunately, there have also been some very contentious situations where LEGO has reacted badly to art (see work by Ai Weiwei and Zbigniew Libera) that has political leanings that it feels would tarnish its brand image. What’s interesting is that no matter how carefully LEGO cultivates its brand, the broader cultural significance of LEGO manages to evolve beyond its control. To be sure, a lot of this creative work ultimately bolsters LEGO’s bottom line, but it does so in a way that shows the potential of the medium to transcend its corporate messaging.
Erica Rand (Barbie’s Queer Accessories) has discussed the broad range of transgressive play children engage with around Barbie and its associated products. What room is there for children to engage with transgressive play with LEGOS?
One of my favorite things about toys is that no matter how strongly they are infused with ideological content, the nature of play leaves ample space for players to reinterpret and potentially transgress their implicit meanings. For instance, while Barbie might be saturated with heteronormative messaging, the physical toys offer no material barriers to playing out same-sex relationships. Contrast this with fans trying to disrupt the heteronormativity of a narrative television show like Star Trekby creating Kirk/Spock slash fic or fan vids. To do this, fans have to essentially become amateur media producers, an investment that goes well beyond typical media consumption. Because toys are designed for retelling narratives, the actual play performed with any toy will always vary more than the messages built into the toy itself. This is the greatest potential of LEGO as a medium of bricolage.
At the same time, there might be ways in which it might be harder to perform transgressive play with LEGO than with Barbie (although I should dig much deeper into Barbie before I definitively state that). When LEGO provides scripts or norms that allow for a high degree of creativity, it becomes easy to innovate within those norms in ways that only reinforce those norms. Because creativity produces newness, it can feeltransgressive even when it’s actually not. So, when some consumer activism rejected the Barbie-like gendering of LEGO Friends, it sometimes called for a return to a nostalgically misremembered ideal of LEGO abstraction that itself contained implicit norms that were much more difficult to see and transgress. Transgressive play in LEGO would ideally not only challenge the surface social messaging of LEGO toys but would also reimagine LEGO’s core ideologies surrounding creativity and play. Even my own deconstructive work is not always transgressive when it exposes but does not actively refashion what LEGO means. That’s why it was particularly invigorating for me to draw on some of the playfully or pointedly transgressive work that fans and artists are already doing to reimagine the meaningfulness of LEGO.
Given the stress on materiality that has surrounded LEGOfrom the start, what have been the consequences of the increasing number of digital games (and now digital animation) that have been released under the LEGO brand? How has the brick been remediated in recent years?
How does the kind of digital thinking involved in LEGO construction change between material and virtual environments? In LEGO Worlds, interlocking material elements are represented as pixilated shapes that snap to an invisible grid.
I think the ongoing success of LEGO remediating the brick helps demonstrate that the material and digital are not as opposed as the often-panicked rhetoric triggered by the rapid rise of digital technologies might suggest. If anything, our contemporary media culture increasingly embraces the convergence of material and virtual and—despite initially faltering by overreacting to the rise of videogames in the 90’s—LEGO keeps proving that.
LEGO seems to somehow transcend material/virtual distinctions. LEGO makes physical toys that have a kind of digital, pixilated feel, it makes videogames that have a kind of analog, toy-like feel, and it makes hybrid products like LEGO Dimensions that integrate material and virtual components. To explain this blending of digital and analog experience, I try to nuance and expand our ordinary definition of digitality beyond just naming the presence of computer technologies. Instead, I like to look at digital thinking as any kind of thinking based on dividing the world into discrete and countableelements. Thinking this way, material objects can absolutely embody digital logics (think of an abacus as a tool for materializing digital information). In my opinion, the digitality always already in LEGO toys meant that LEGO was poised to pioneer the convergence of material and virtual play long before it started producing videogames and became a major transmedia phenomenon.
This is slightly off-topic, but I’m working on similar arguments for games as well. Videogames are often called “digital games” because they use computer technology, but they often pursue a very analog ideal—after all, the point of VR is to create virtual experiences that feel materially real. And board games are called “analog games,” but they often use digital logics such as dividing a map into discrete and countable spaces. More often than not, it’s the board game rather than the videogame that feels mathy and discrete.
You suggest that Convergence Culture considers “toys not to be full participants in transmedia storytelling.” I think you may be misreading my work. True, toys figure little in the case study of The Matrix in that book but I have written elsewhere about the importance of action figures as authoring tools for transmedia play and stressed the influence that Mattel's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise had on today’s transmedia storytellers. Yet, I am excited by the new directions your focus on LEGO’s material worlds contributes to transmedia theory. What can scholars of transmedia logics learn by paying more attention to LEGO?
I was wondering what you’d think of that, so I’m glad you brought it up! You are absolutely right that I could have expanded that section to include many compelling examples (from you or other scholars) of how play has figured in transmedia studies. I singled out Convergence Culture alongside Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation as field-shaping texts that shed light on broad tendencies in the ongoing discourses of these fields. Since it still feels to me like most discourses around transmedia and adaptation privilege narrative over play, I read these foundational texts with a particular awareness of the primacy of narrative texts as paradigm-shaping examples. I don’t think we necessarily need to revolutionize transmedia studies to permanently shift the paradigm to centralize participatory, performative, or playful media. Yet, from my own perspective as a scholar primarily interested in play, I can’t help but wonder what transmedia studies might have looked like if your He-Man analysis had replaced TheMatrix as the foundational paradigm in Convergence Culture.
That being said, there is a lot of value to narrative-centric perspectives in many instances where media culture has developed a hierarchical relationship between narrative and play. In these cases, transmedia studies understandably tends to theorize how participatory, performative, or playful elements supplement a foundational paradigm of narrative textuality. For instance, the discussion around how toys are leveraged as authoring tools for creating fan videos in Convergence Culture offers an excellent example of how play becomes relevant within a paradigm in which the primary transmedia story is the narrative text (the fan video) rather than the toy. This kind of analysis is important and can productively complement more play-centric approaches, but I believe we still have plenty of untapped potential to analyze cultural moments where toys truly do take center stage.
By demonstrating what it looks like for a transmedia franchise to prioritize storytelling play over canonical narratives, LEGO can offer scholars alternative paradigms for thinking about transmedia phenomena. For instance, what different questions of textuality might arise when we compare how traditional media circulate fully-formed texts as products with how LEGO circulates the material elements of a medium as its primary product? What different questions of participation might arise when we compare how ‘prosumers’ construct media responses with how LEGO players perform scripted creative play with products designed to be reconstructed through materially-mediated bricolage? I believe that asking these different questions will not merely shift transmedia studies in a new direction but will instead help us more deeply consider some of the participatory, performative, or playful aspects already at play in narrative textuality. After all, there an intuitive connection between play and participatory media that suggests we might genuinely expand our understanding of media culture by better accounting for play.
I can only speculate about where all this might lead, but I find something deeply compelling about play as a model of convergence because playis an active verb—it is the interaction and interplay that creates convergences. To me, play expresses something special yet familiar at the heart of mediateness (materiality, bricolage, interactivity?) that I find difficult to express in other ways. While my work doesn’t primarily aim to theorize this, I hope my attempts to grapple with the distinctive media-specificity of LEGO play allow these kinds of questions to emerge in ways that will be explored much more articulately by future scholars.
Much has been made of the self-reflexivity and self-parody of the LEGO films. Are these qualities subversive or are they a continuation of the logics that have long surrounded LEGO?
As others have noted, postmodern irony is not always subversive and may only commodify problematic messages. For example, the “Hulu Sellouts” ad campaign depicts celebrity athletes being paid comically absurd amounts of money to mechanically recite ad copy. These self-reflexive, self-parodic postmodern ads leverage celebrities to sell products precisely by ironically exposing the fiction of using celebrities to sell products. Very entertaining but hardly subversive.
Similarly, LEGO parodies are often more playful than subversive, especially when LEGO commodifies its playful brand image. LEGO often sells its toys by advertising a spirit of playfulness that is not actually included in the box. As I note in the book, LEGO’s videogame and television adaptations often seem much more self-reflexive and self-parodic than its physical sets. But even The LEGO Movieconsistently parodies consumerism while simultaneously celebrating LEGO as commodity. I wonder if LEGO finds it easier to use more author-controlled narrative media to form its playful brand identity be while finding it harder to interject genuine playfulness into its more player-dependent material toys. In any event, the construction of LEGO playfulness is too literally its selling pointto be all that subversive.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of LEGO’s self-reflexivity is their awareness of the medium. Whereas many transmedia franchises want audiences to lose themselves in the story so that they are not thinking about the medium (helping build continuity between the experience of books, films, videogames, etc.), LEGO wants audiences to see the seams of how the medium is put together. This is very compelling, but I wouldn’t call it particularly subversive since it never really breaks free from the consumerism and scripting that drive LEGO toys. Yet, I do have hope that LEGO’s self-reflexivity can inspire players to develop their own self-awareness so they can actively transform or transcend what LEGO means. In other words, there is possibility in players making more out of this truly remarkable construction system than they are given.
And that’s really the tension that defines LEGO’s scripted creative play—finding generative possibilities in playing with a materially and ideologically constrained system.
Jonathan Rey Lee researches material play media, especially toys and board games. He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG. His book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century realist novels and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.
