Legless in Legoland

I've become mildly obsessed by this image:

"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!"

How do you get a Lego figure to look traumatised by the death of the woman it loves, and the supposed deaths of its newborn children, and the loss of its legs, and third degree burns over all of its body?

And what kind of a culture is it that even tries?

(Of course, as Richard Pilbeam - who brought the image to my attention in the first place - remarked, the Lego figure does a better job than Hayden Christensen.)

It strikes me that, the more Lego tries to cope with reconstructing scenes from movies - especially from movies like the Star Wars  prequels or the later Harry Potter  movies, that are self-consciously 'dark' - the more it has to bring in elements of painful 'realism', i.e. scars on Anakin's face... but the addition of such features to the Lego aesthetic has an unfortunate effect... it starts to make it look like they're taking the piss, South Park  style, by representing things like serious injuries in crude, cartoon form.

This is particularly evident in the way the figure above simply has no Lego legs provided.  Is there any child who ever played with Lego who didn't, at some point, hold up a Lego torso/head combination without the legs attached and scream, on behalf of the figure, something along the lines of "AAAARGH!  WHERE ARE MY LEGS????", thus causing themselves wild hilarity?  I know I did.  (I hope I'm not telling you things about myself that I shouldn't... but, to be honest, I write a blog that tries to subject Doctor Who to Marxist analysis, so, realistically, what have I got to lose in terms of being taken seriously?)  The thing is that this exact same strategy - the leaving off of the legs - is now being deliberately employed by Lego to depict horrific mutilation.

Partly this is to do with the fact that a generation who grew up watching Star Wars  are now writing and filming stories... and, in common with the fan mindset everywhere, they want to do the same kinds of stories, but better... more serious, more 'dark', etc.  This is a double edged blade.  It gave birth to the good and bad of the Virgin New Adventures, the good and bad of 2005+ Who, the good and bad of modern SF/fantasy fiction and film making.  The apotheosis of the bad may be the awkward attempts to do 'realist' but bloodless and politically illiterate depictions of urban terrorism in the Nolan Batman films, with the urban terrorist opposed by a moralist ninja in a 'realistic' bat outfit.  One side effect of this is that, increasingly, SF/Fantasy tries to be 'serious' and often tries to do this using what we might call The Gatiss Manoeuver, i.e. it tries to bring in pain and suffering.

Of course, there is a big dose of knowing, sly-winking, in-on-the-joke irony inherent in the whole Lego Star Wars / Harry Potter / Pirates of the Caribbean  thing, the toys and computer games and film-recreations.

I think it goes back to the fact that my generation had Star Wars  and stuff like that (and the Potter  and Pirate  films are, indisputably, the offspring of Star Wars ) AND we had Lego... and there was a conceptual connection between them which took the material form of Kenner Star Wars toys... and yet, somehow, Star Wars and Lego never met... even though they lived side-by-side in our toy boxes... even though they both existed as piles of plastic figures and plastic places... even though they both allowed us to construct and deconstruct and reconstruct material worlds in miniature...  even though, in short, we always kind of thought they could and should.

Of course, they did meet... but only when we made it happen.

I mixed up Star Wars figures and Lego all the time.  I had Lego people inside my Millenium Falcon.  I knew kids who never did this... who looked at it askance, as though doing it were, in some way, conceptually indecent... but even they tended to use Lego to build characters from non-Lego worlds.  I certainly did.  I built my own versions of Star Wars characters using Lego.  For that matter, I built Lego Doctors and Lego TARDISes.  I built Lego Masters of the Universe and Lego Clash of the Titans.  I built Lego James Bond.  I built Lego E.T. and Ghostbusters.  I built Lego Blade Runner and Lego Hitchcock films.

Increasingly, there is an attempt on the part of the marketers to close the space in which children to do this kind of thing themselves.

We adults take delight in the Legoification of imagery that we recall from childhood, or from the fan experience (which is, I suspect, intimately psychologically linked with childhood)... we all, I'm sure, have felt that peculiar pleasure of recognition, solidification, interpretation and miniaturisation that comes from seeing a model of something that is embedded in our memory of visual storytelling.  (It is, by the way, entirely different to the non-recognition / surprise / disappointment that comes with seeing the visual or physical realisation of something that had previously only existed as a set of descriptions in a book.)  The more obscure, unlikely and intricately accurate the image that is solidified, miniaturized and recognised, the greater the pleasure.

For instance:

Of course, Lego Star Wars works in a different way to the above figure.

For a start, Star Wars is mass culture on a scale that old-Who can't match.  It's images are recognisable globally, to a huge number of people, part of the visual alphabet of Western culture, whereas the figure above lives in the collective memory of a comparatively small fan-gestalt.  Only a few images from Doctor Who even begin to be as widely recognisable as Star Wars.

Next, the figure above is meant to be faithful in a very literal, plodding way.  It is meant to appeal to that bit of the fan soul that cherishes 'seriousness' (something that toy-collector Charles Daniels subverts with his usual genial ingenuity).  It might even be treasured by the fan because it, in a way, reclaims and straightfacedly re-presents an image crucial to the history and internal mythos of the show but also long found risible.

The whole concept of Star Wars Lego contains a degree of self-mockery that is possible in the context of a huge, global audience of viewers and customers who are not fans in the way that you probably have to be a fan to buy and cherish the model of the 'Tenth Planet' Cyberman.  There is something inherently, nose-tappingly, insinuatingly 'knowing' about Star Wars Lego.  It not only trades upon the memory of those self-created elisions between the fundamentally not-joined-up narratives of Star Wars and Lego that so many of us engaged in during childhood, it also seems to use the Lego aesthetic to quietly insult - in that self-conscious, too-cool-for-school way that is almost always an attempt to obscure insecurity above a genuine but unfashionable devotion - the Star Wars aesthetic.

This kind of double-dealing is endemic in a culture that relentlessly sells things created to cater for deeply-ingrained human tastes (i.e. stories about monsters) while also insisting on supposedly contrary standards of behaviour (i.e. grow up, stop thinking about monsters, don't be childish, be cool not geeky, etc.).

I'm not taking sides here, by the way.  I'm not riding to the defence of Star Wars  (or indeed of Doctor Who, or anything else), shouting "lay off our wholesomely geeky pleasures, you 'ironic' philistines!"  I'm trying to think through some ways in which commodification works... and commodification is not something that Star Wars was ever free from in some pure way, anymore than was Doctor Who.  Star Wars is being commodified in new ways all the time... but it was always a commodity, as was Doctor Who, to which similar things are happening....

This is 'character building', apparently.
Wouldn't there have to be characters in it?

This is the further-commodification of that which started as a commodity anyway.  It isn't like the mass manufacture of inflatable versions of Munch's The Scream (which is, in any case, the sort of thing that is inevitable in a culture like ours).

Still less am I riding to the defence of the poor, downtrodden, misunderstood geeky fan.  Most active fans, in my experience, are relatively privileged people (and I include myself in that) and nothing is less appealing than their/our occasional lapses into self-pity and feelings of thwarted entitlement.

But, back to the point...

One way to square the get-people-to-buy-what-other-bits-of-culture-tell-them-they're-sad-for-wanting-to-buy circle (so you can continue selling them both supposedly contradictory sets of ideas and stuff simultaneously) is to package the uncool things (i.e. monsters, childhood nostalgia, models, etc) in ways that seem overlaid - or underwritten - by irony, by apparent self-mockery, by a ready made set of excuses utilising the concept of knowing play.

But there is a problem here, which is the fact that play is supposed to be creative, a way of thinking rather than a way of not-thinking.  If these methods of commodification that use play to elbow-out any feeling of unfettered engagement with stories were confined to adults, that would be bad enough.  But it isn't.

It seems to me that the current official and licenced Lego versions of film franchises are symptoms of an invasion - by the increasingly all-pervading neo-liberal capitalist market system - of a childhood prerogative: the task of using the tools of childhood (i.e. toys) to express, mimic, recreate, reinterpret, comprehend and appropriate, for one's own mental use, the culture into which one has been born.  In short, there is an extent to which Star Wars Lego is an appropriation of childhood play - or, at least, one strategy of childhood play - from its rightful owners, i.e. children.

Of course, selling toys of any kind - especially toys with a pre-written narrative behind them like Star Wars  figures - is, in a sense, to appropriate play from the child.  You're imposing an external structure upon the play.  Even vanilla Lego imposes a structure of shops and cars and tractors and 'everyday life' on to play... but then play always mimics the world around it.  In children, that's part of what its for.  And it isn't always a bad thing to impose external per se... and it is often ignored or subverted by the very act of play.  But it's that very avenue for subversion - through the child's own cross-referencing of narratives - that is being encroached upon.

It is, in a way, yet another example of the 'primitive accumulation' of capital.  Marx identified 'primitive accumulation' as the historical origins of capitalism, during which the rising capitalist class seized much of the property that had been 'common' under the feudal system, i.e. the enclosures.  David Harvey has suggested, plausibly, that we can see neo-liberalism as engaging in a fresh round of 'primitive accumulation', what he calls 'accumulation by dispossession', i.e. the re-conquest (privatization) of much that had been placed in the socialized or public sphere; increasing financialization, asset stripping, austerity schemes and structural adjustment.  There's the commodification of public space.  There's the opening up of new markets and forms of commodity exchange, like intellectual property rights, etc.

I'm not suggesting anything but an analogy here, but it seems as though the colonization of what had once been a task of the child - the appropriation of the toy for the creation of the child's own versions, stories and interpretations - has been subject to a kind of enclosure by the neo-liberal merchandise industry.

Or rather, something of that kind has been attempted and - as noted above - is leading to increasingly uneasy, almost self-satirising, results.  The fact is, people are still creatively appropriating and misappropriating toys by using them to appropriate and misappropriate stories they were never 'meant' or 'designed' to represent.  What Adam and Joe started in the 90s has now become endemic on YouTube.  The results range from the pathetic and embarrassing to the genuinely brilliant.

I've long hankered for staggeringly inappropriate Lego.  Lego Schindler's List, for example.  Or Lego Human Centipede.  (I mean, why not - is there anything in the logic or ethics of neo-liberalism that puts Lego Operation Enduring Freedom beyond the pale?  No, and that's the point.)  I mentioned as much on Facebook and, in a trice, Dom Kelly found me Lego Human Centipede on YouTube.  Whatever the intention of whoever made it, this monumentally inappropriate (and thus revealing) collision of two commodities is a sign that the ability to play still cuts both ways.

Stark Contrasts

Here is the logic:

We live in a society that touts the pursuit of self interest.  That tells people they should look out for themselves.  And yet we also tell people pretty tales about community and cooperation and mutual respect.

Enterprise and initiative... but we're all in this together.

The former ethic is for those who succeed to live by.  The latter ethic is for those who have to budge in together in crowded conditions because, for whatever reason, they have not acquired enough material success to allow them to live the separated, isolated, private, individualistic life of the rich.  The former ethic is for those with a private drive, detached dwellings, grounds, boundary walls and closable gates.  The latter ethic is for those in terraces and flats with cardboard walls and laundry racks on their small balconies.

In short, if you live in a tenement or a housing estate, you must be public spirited.  You must behave.  You must get on with your neighbours.  Your lack of wealth is your own fault; it is itself evidence that you do not have the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement... ergo, you must embrace community spirit because you are so inadequate that you must live in a community.  Those with the necessary thrusting spirit of ruthless self-advancement can leave the graffiti-daubed, dog-shit-smeared romper room of community, and so need not attempt the cooperativeness that their very success shows to be against their nature in any case.

This is, in a roundabout way, a reiteration of the myth of innate and inborn destiny.  It is the same myth that class societies have always told themselves, filtered through the hypocritical bad faith of modern liberalism.

It is not a scripted conspiracy, it is manufactured ideology.  As such, it has all the chaos and contradiction of delusion.  It is believed, even if it is a convenient piece of bunk.  It is applied in a scattershot way, in all sorts of mixed-up and contradictory forms.

The apartheid inherent in it is not seen, is not admitted to, is often sincerely repudiated.  And yet its persistence is tolerated, its expansion promoted.  Nobody, after all, is 'in favour' of divisions between rich and poor.  It's one of those things that everybody formally disapproves of and yet continue.

When the people living in the cramped and dirty corners decide that they will no longer behave themselves, then we see the skull of class society beneath the moisturised, botoxed skin of liberal democratic discourse.

When the poor tear up their hovels, they are ticked-off for damaging their own 'communities' - as though this might not have occured to them, as though they might suddenly realise that they are trashing places that they actually find congenial, as though their behaviour speaks only to their own self-destructive madness and does not suggest that they actually find these 'communities' to be frustrating, grim, tedious, miserable, degraded places in which to be confined.

It is the same as the witless consolation that is offered to the suicidal.  Do not hurt yourself, say people to those who hate themselves.  Do not end your life, say people to those whose lives are miserable.

When the poor steal, they find themselves at the recieving end of the wagging fingers of the liberal moralisers.  Do not do what society constantly exhorts you to do, they are told.  Do not obey the lifelong conditioning of adverts and media images.  Do not consider material goods to be signs of success and status and worth.  Do not long for distraction.  Do not fetishize stuff.  Do not consider consumption to be a palliative.  Not if you can't or won't pay for the privilege.  Do not, in short, be a consumer without feeding your subsistence back into the system of capital circulation.  Do not, says the moralising columnist, obey the instructions that are encoded in every page of this newspaper, in every advert that surrounds my column, in every billboard and commercial and brand logo in the marketplace where this newspaper is sold, unless you can stump up the cash.

Here the two ethics meet in the concept of law.  Be a ruthless acquirer, but be law-abiding.  But the law is written so that 'Community' may be disregarded by those who don't have to live in communities (this being, as often as not, a code word for ghettos, slums and rundown, decaying urban battery farms).  The law is written so that the grand theft of exploitation through the employment of wage labourers is legal, so that tax-dodging is legal, so that obscene wealth is legal, so that the fraud of electoral manifestoing is legal, so that the exercise of influence through wealth over the state is legal, so that the waging of war by the state upon the domestic and foreign poor is legal.  The law is written so that the comparatively minor thefts and cruelties and invasions and abuses of the small fry is its target, its main proccupation.  In short, wealth and power - with all their attendant large-scale vices - are legal.  Poverty - with all its comparatively minor misdemeanours - is illegal... that is to say, it is not illegal to make people or allow people to be poor, but it is practically illegal to be poor.

None of this is to say that poor people don't do terrible things.  They do.  They rob and rape and murder and torture and abuse.  But none of them own media empires that have systematically befouled public discourse, degraded journalistic standards, engaged in wholesale political corruption, stoked racism and homophobia, degraded women, centralised monopoly power over the flow of information to the point of self-satirising absurdity, broken unions, driven down wages, and extracted billions of pounds and dollars of surplus from the labour of workers.  None of them have taken the decision to carpet bomb civillian population centres.  None of them have organised the ethnic cleansing, brutalisation, immiseration, systematic humiliation, mass-murder and apartheid-style tyrannizing of the Palestinians.

In short, poor people are not the problem, any more than black people (or black 'culture') is the problem.  Most of the misery of the world is down to rich white blokes.

The comparison is beyond comparison, especially when you take into account the fact that the obscene pinnacles of wealth in the world - wealth which allows and propels some to commit such incomparably worse crimes - are created by the vampiric extraction which creates swathes of poverty, alienation and frustration in the first place.

The system creates poverty and needs poverty and fosters poverty.  Where would the system be without a reserve army of unemployed to act as a disciplining factor upon those allowed to work?  In any case, most poor people are not unemployed.  Where would the system be without labour that it can use for the creation of profits and then requite at a bare minimum much lower than the profits the labour has created?  Where would the system be without the entirely unrequited domestic labour of mothers who raise the next generations of workers?  This is the extraction of surplus from those at the bottom and its redistribution upwards.  This is the trickle-up effect.  This is capitalism, and it made the sinkholes and urban warzones that now erupt in protest, anger, alienation and opportunistic consumption.

David Harvey:

...the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world. 

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day. Does anyone believe it is possible to find an honest capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper or an honest police commisioner any more? Yes, they do exist. But only as a minority that everyone else regards as stupid. Get smart. Get Easy Profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of corporate malfeasance.

What I say may sound shocking. Most of us don’t see it because we don’t want to. Certainly no politician dare say it and the press would only print it to heap scorn upon the sayer. But my guess is that every street rioter knows exactly what I mean. They are only doing what everyone else is doing, though in a different way – more blatently and visibly in the streets. Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.

This is the new normal in which we live. This is what the next grand commission of enquiry should address. Everyone, not just the rioters, should be held to account. Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature.
Sadly, this is what these mindless rioters cannot see or demand. Everything conspires to prevent us from seeing and demanding it also. This is why political power so hastily dons the robes of superior morality and unctuous reason so that no one might see it as so nakedly corrupt and stupidly irrational.

How can the system condemn those who have the enterprise and initiative to go out and take what they want?  How can it frown upon their opportunistic consumption?  After all, these are the values that the system claims to praise.  Who is a more self-reliant, self-helping, enterprising, utility-maximising rational actor than the looter?

Here, again, the concept of law steps in to discriminate between the laudable ruthless and selfish violence of the wealthy and the powerful (their very success being their own alibi) and the sometimes ruthless and selfish violence of the poor, which must be condemned, which must also be decontextualised, the misery and frustration and alienation of poverty being no excuse, no alibi, not even any legitimate context.

Oh, and David Starkey is a racist cretin.