What happened in Jeremy Bell's Toronto office last week was probably the last toy takedown of 2009. It had all started so innocently: As a little pre-Christmas treat, Bell had ordered a replica Glock handgun off the Internet. He's a creative director; he likes things that are beautifully put together. This was beautifully put together of Lego bricks. "I've always liked Lego," Bell tells me "But I'm not some kind of Lego geek."
There's no shame in being a Lego geek - the world is full of them, as we will soon discover. But first: the gun. Bell, a partner at the digital agency teehan+lax , closed the door to his office, spilled the pieces on his desk, and assembled the Glock (purchased from BrickGun, purveyor of "the coolest Lego weapons in the world.") He brought it out to show his colleagues, who expressed varying degrees of toy envy. One of them got all Terminator, slammed the magazine, and broke the gun. They put it away and began to play a computer game; this is the way of things at a Web design company.
Then a SWAT team burst through the door. One of Bell's neighbours had seen him through the window with the gun and, mistaking it for the real thing, called the cops. After a few moments of alarm, during which Bell told the officers, "guys, seriously - it's Lego," the misunderstanding was solved, and everyone went away to wipe their foreheads.
As he moves into his 16th minute of fame after this strange episode, something's bothering Bell. "There were all these people who said, 'What are adults doing playing with toys at work?' But lots of adults play with these things. There's nothing wrong with it. We're a creative company. And come on - it's Lego."
What began more than five decades ago as a material for children to make tiny buildings has stealthily transformed itself into a tool used by adults, mostly male adults, to construct entire personalities. Lego has insinuated itself deep into the psyche. It's hard to imagine a corporate team-building exercise built around Barbie and Play-Doh - unless the team is involved in the production of adult films. What other toy company could have a division like Lego Serious Play, in which managers and employees at companies around the world are brought together to hash out their corporate visions using thousands of tiny interlocking bricks and hundreds of the wee yellow people known as mini-figures.
Or "mini-figs," to use the terminology of the AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego). Until 1989, all Lego mini-figures wore the same smiling expression, which strikes me as a comfortingly Scandinavian detail. Equally Scandinavian is the precision of Lego mythology, which pinpoints the patenting of the Lego brick to 1:58 p.m. on Jan. 28, 1958; which states that all bricks conform to within .005 mm of each other; that tells us a child needs only six classic bricks to form 915,000,000 shapes. You can get lost in this stuff.
You can also see how it appeals to the male mind - and yes, I know that women and girls play with Lego too, and more power to them, but in the vast majority of cases it's Billy playing Lego Indiana Jones on the PC while dad downloads Lego Digital Designer (so he can create his own bricks) while mom tears her hair out trying to source the sold-out, exorbitantly overpriced Titanium Command Rig to put under the Christmas tree. There is something essentially male about Lego, in its straight-edged precision, its satisfying "click" when all goes well, its solution to every problem.
The pink "Belleville" bricks? Bleh. A half-hearted sop to the girls' market. And this in spite of the number two Lego rule ("for girls, for boys") on the list of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who inherited the company from his old man, Ole Kirk Christiansen, the man who started it all by making wooden ducks and monkeys in a workshop in Billund in 1932. Godtfred would probably be pleased to know that his company's sales have increased by 27 per cent this year, and that at least two of his other rules ("always topical" and "enthusiasm for all ages") show no sign of flagging, and neither does unwritten rule 11, "mom and dad will mortgage house to buy more sets, and learn not to scream too loudly when they step on pieces in the night."
It's a tabula rasa of hard plastic; no wonder it's so appealing to artists. The White Stripes' Fell in Love With a Girl video, made in Lego, took director Michel Gondry two months to make, and even then he needed the help of his mathematician father to create the stop-frame animation. There's also the utopian aspect, familiar to any parent who's watched squabbling boys calm down and unite to build some alien-blasting space rocket. The Icelandic-Danish architect Olafur Eliasson took this one step further with his sculpture the cubic structural evolution project , a collection of 400,000 white Lego bricks which he brought to Tirana, the impoverished capital of Albania, and invited everyone - "cigarette-selling street urchins and pensioners" - to construct their vision of the future city. Nobody actually got to go home and sleep in a clean white box, and around them the city still crumbled, but it was the metaphor that mattered.
In one corner of academia, a scholar is studying the way humans construct their identities, by using Lego. David Gauntlett is a professor of media and communications at the University of Westminster in London, and he's interested in how people making things changes their perception of the world. His research involves people creating metaphors in Lego: What does Monday morning feel like? What does the boss from hell look like? (He's usually sitting on a tower, or contained in a box, where his minions can't reach him). Some people feel awkward at the beginning, Gauntlett says - it's a toy, for God's sake, how can it be academic research? They're often surprised, at the end, by the self-image they've created. "People tend to have a warm feeling about Lego," Gauntlett says. "It's playful, but also serious."
In Toronto, Jeremy Bell still has his Lego gun, though he may not be pulling it out any time soon. He and his wife are expecting a baby son, and he plans to pass on the tubs of Lego from his childhood which his parents never threw out. It's never too early for a bit of male bonding.