Everything Was Connected

I had a LEGO room. Not a shelf, not a corner of the floor—an entire room dedicated to the stuff, with a club membership card tucked somewhere in a drawer. And still I never watched a single LEGO film, never played a LEGO game, never visited a LEGOLAND, despite one sitting practically around the corner from where I grew up.

Because none of that was the point. The point was the bricks—as many different, strange, and exotic pieces as I could acquire, so that my friends and I could build a city that spread across the carpet and kept expanding. Secret rooms behind sliding walls. Spaceships docking at glass towers. Pirates in tense negotiations with superheroes. The narrative was completely unhinged and it was entirely ours.

Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson made Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary to document what that feeling actually is, and to trace how a plastic brick from a small Danish workshop became one of the most genuinely obsessive subcultures on earth. There are grown men in this film who spend thousands of euros a month on LEGO—who build to architectural scale, who sort their pieces by color and type with the devotion of archivists.

I find myself weirdly envious. Not of the expense or the storage requirements, but of the fact that they never stopped. Somewhere in my teens I put the bricks down, and I’m still not entirely sure what I thought I was trading them for.