In 1990, Jason was a helicopter. His teacher, Vivian Gussin Paley, wrote about it in her book The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter. Each day, Jason would come into nursery school and build an airport around him—tall walls made out of large blocks. He’d hide behind the walls, and, at frequent intervals, emerge making loud Brrrrroooooom-ing engine noises. He was the helicopter, but would also have toys of flying machines accompany him as if to bold the story he was telling. It didn’t matter, notes Paley, what stories Jason’s classmates were trying to tell, or what games they were engaged in. His existence as a helicopter was unstoppable and solitary. Paley, being an experienced teacher, tried to integrate Jason into the rest of the class, knowing that pro-social behavior is a valuable skill to teach toddlers. Her success came not just from her students, but her classroom toys. By connecting the stories students told using their toys and their selves, Paley managed to craft a learning environment that needed not just a helicopter, but Jason’s helicopter. Over time, Jason slowly found himself more and more a key part of his group, on his own terms.
Because ultimately it wasn’t that Jason wanted to be a helicopter. It was that he didn’t want to be lonely.
Gerard Johnstone’s 2022 film M3GAN begins with a saccharin toy commercial about in-your-face loneliness. The jingle goes, “I had a dog and she was my only friend/but she got old and died now I’m alone again.” From the moment we see this ad for Purrpetual Petz roboplushes, we know that M3GAN’s project is not to replicate the process of creating a fad toy, but parody it. As such, the film doesn’t have to spend much time with the corporate details of toymaking. It can exchange lengthy meetings about consumers’ repeat purchases for lines about “kick[ing] Hasbro in the dick.” It can skip the lengthy emails from legal about toy industry safety standards—you know, the ones that grounded your Sky Dancers—in favor of jabs at Gemma’s (formerly) mint-in-box collectibles. It can forgo discourse about the potential for licensing so that M3GAN can dance her smock off. And all of that delightful camp works because, at the core of it all, M3GAN plays with the same story Jason and so many other kids told:
Kids’ toy obsessions are conduits for the stories that help them feel less alone.
M3GAN’s Cady, traumatized by her parents’ untimely death, has difficulty finding solace in her sudden guardian Gemma. Comfort instead comes from Gemma’s passion project, the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN, essentially a straight-outta-Stepford My-Size Barbie with built-in ChatGPT. It is this doll that, yes, is responsible for much of the movie’s extravagant mayhem, but, beneath that, M3GAN participates in, and disrupts, a long history of toys, and toy stories, that intersect with children attempting to understand the colossal world before them for the first time. This is one reason why children often don’t tire of stories that reinforce the idea that someone is next to them: The world is big. It’s bigger alone.
When Vivian Paley was interviewed in Episode 153 of This American Life, she reflected on this repeated theme of loneliness in childhood storytelling. She said kids want others to “tell [them] again and again that when you’re lonely, someone will come up and say ‘I’ll play with you.’” Horror films frequently exploit this innate story-driven push toward connection to hit their most terrifying notes. The truth in Paley’s statement is what gives horror icon Chucky’s catchphrase “Your friend ‘til the end” its frightening gravity. It’s why the Grady sisters in The Shining are so scary when they say, “Come and play with us.” It’s not that we don’t want to play. It’s that we know our earliest selves would love to play, to find connection, but it’s scary to imagine a world where the toys and stories we created and wove together could be replaced by monsters over which we have no control.
Thankfully, Vivian Paley had, instead of demon dolls and ghost children, students like Joseph. Joseph created a play story in which dolls trapped inside a “tall building” would require a savior helicopter to come to the rescue. The thought was that Jason would pick up on this cue to build upon a devised play narrative and, as the helicopter, save the dolls. However, it didn’t work. The story, Paley later theorized, was one that needed a helicopter, but it wasn’t one that let Jason simply be the helicopter. The helicopter was not just a literal vessel, but a figurative one, containing all of the anxieties Jason felt about the world. He flew it alone because he moved through the world alone. Jason had to learn to use the helicopter as a tool to tell his story to others.
No one else could do this for him.
No one else but Cady can tell the story she needs either, but she is stymied by an ever-more-sentient, insidious doll, who becomes less and less of a toy with every passing scene. M3GAN can contain story exceptionally well. My favorite moment in the film is when Cady interacts with M3GAN in a demonstration session. Cady feels sad remembering the joy she felt when her parents were alive, and M3GAN picks up on this. Instead of going through the planned test routine, M3GAN asks Cady about her feelings, and prompts Cady to tell a happy story about her mom. Cady tells M3GAN about a time when a cockroach crawled out of her schoolbag and up her mother’s arm, causing her mom to comically start “screaming like a maniac.” M3GAN records Cady telling the story, and preserves it verbatim, telling the girl, “Anytime you wanna tell me something about your parents, something funny or sad or anything at all, you just tell me, and I’ll keep it safe.”
Here, M3GAN is no longer what Vivian Paley calls dolls: “the bulwark against loneliness.” M3GAN is a blunt dead end to story so that she can be not a doll, but an autonomous being whose power runs on the manipulation of Cady’s loneliness, control made possible by the cultural role toys play in forming childhood bonds through aiding storymaking.
However, this is not to cast a negative light on toys as memory preservers. This is a valid desire adult collectors like myself have for their toys. Our impermanent bodies fluctuate memory as they age, and the allure of an instant flashback via a more permanent item is seductive. CNBC notoriously reported that adult toy collectors make up “one-fourth of all toy sales annually, around $9 billion worth…” Marvel Legends action figure cardbacks consistently call back to ‘90s era ToyBiz packaging in an attempt to evoke in collectors the memory of the first purchase. Everything from G1 Transformers, to G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, to Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, to My Little Pony, to throwback Barbies, to Pound Puppies and more is decidedly back. This is great for a collector like Gemma, for whom preservation of collectibles is part of her practice, but it isn’t of substantial help to a kid like Cady or Paley’s Jason. These kids learn to push stories through toys to forge connection, a priority Gemma left in the dust long ago, with the film even highlighting her detachment from a child’s application of a toy when Cady lets loose her mint collectibles.
Because M3GAN emerged from Gemma’s experience as a preservation-based collector, her creation is a sealed vessel. Stories don’t pass through this doll from person to person. M3GAN pairs with one person, stores their stories, and then hoards whatever else she can learn from the massive database of digital knowledge that floats through our airwaves 24/7. M3GAN eats story, and, given the traumatic, violent, and ugly nature of a lot of the content tumbling through our e-spaces, she becomes what she eats. By ingesting so much, M3GAN’s ultimate self-actualization is inevitable, and Gemma, lacking a child’s understanding of toys, is ill equipped to avoid this outcome until her connection to Cady develops. The joke is: it could have been avoided simply. Kids will build story connections out of sticks and sand. Gemma’s technical knowledge is significant, but, had she done less engineering labor, she might have found greater success with her target consumers. After all, Jason only needed a few blocks to build an entire airport.
And when Jason eventually felt confident enough to lead his own story, with other students as supporting players, Paley’s behavioral hopes for her student materialized. It turned out that all Jason needed was the opportunity to tell a seemingly simple helicopter story. He wanted his friend Samantha to sit in one seat on board his helicopter, and for her imaginary son, played by another student named Simon, to sit next to her. From there, Jason would fly Samantha and Simon home. That was the story Jason needed to tell. It is at once simple and profound. Opening the door of a helicopter and letting two people ride sounds fairly straightforward, unless you are the helicopter, and this is your first time with passengers.
Buy the Book
A House With Good Bones
Toys make it possible to be something else, which make it possible to be ourselves.
In 1994, I was a Velociraptor. What can I say? One morning, I was a second grader, feigning my way through a multiplication table, and then, by afternoon recess—
boom. Velociraptor. It came on quick. My friends and I had just seen Jurassic Park on VHS. Our parents rented it for us. I got a Dimetrodon toy for my birthday, but I would never be a Dimetrodon. They weren’t even in the movie. I don’t know who it was that first shrieked REEEEK! REEEEEEK! and ran through other kids playing in the sandbox, but it didn’t take long for the rest of us to understand. We all morphed within seconds, hands tucked behind our backs, legs awkwardly stomping on playground.
M3GAN let me be the Velociraptor again for the first time in nearly thirty years, which is weird. It’s a horror movie. It’s not supposed to evoke happy memories. But in thinking about Cady’s loneliness, it was impossible for me not to think of my own, and, in a way, that of many children. How lucky young brains are to naturally make a salve for feeling alone, a Jurassic Park out of thin air, rejecting preservation by translating objects and media that can maintain it so well. Give them the bones; they’ll make the dinosaur. No one else has to make it for them. In fact, better if an adult doesn’t. Dinosaurs, and M3GANs, are dangerous.
I sit, now, surrounded by a collection of thousands of toys. There’s a truth buried in all of these plastic shards that I’ve been running from for some time. The pandemic, with its surplus of alone time, made me see it most clearly. It’s that I rarely feel a rush from my toy collection anymore. Many times, I looked to my toys with Cady’s lonely eyes, only to see, well, maybe not homicidal M3GANs (thankfully), but objects growing more and more separate from me. I preserve them. I dust them, less frequently than I should. I sort them. I display them. But my favorite moments are giving them away. Having people over and playing, even when that play is just talking toy history. Connecting with friends of mine who sell toys, from whom I buy, less because I’ll play with my purchases, but because, for a brief moment, we did. That feels like how you defeat a M3GAN to me.
This is complicated because I don’t fully agree with Lydia, Cady’s court-appointed therapist, either, when she says in the film, “If you make a toy that is impossible to let go of, then how do you ever expect a child to grow?” I don’t think you have to let go of the toy. I think you can keep it forever. I think it helps to do so. My childhood teddy bear is next to me right now as I write this. His name is the Blue Bear of Happiness, and, if you sit next to me, I’ll use him to tell you a story that becomes ever more necessary. It’s the story of how I was there. And how I am here. And maybe your toy can tell me the story of how you were there. And how you are here. And I’ll be so grateful. Because then we’ll be here. I feel more and more motivated to celebrate that by the day.
And maybe, if we can’t be Velociraptors or teddy bears or helicopters, we can still find that connection through another method I’ve spent my life developing for this purpose. It may seem tacked on to tell you what it is now, but I’ve actually been telling you all along. You’ve been reading it, in the form of this essay. Toys and letters have this in common: they both blossom when they are arranged into sentences, and those sentences flourish as story, and the stories thrive when they include you.
Because, ultimately, it isn’t that I want to be a Velociraptor. It’s that I don’t want to be lonely.
Jonathan Alexandratos (they/them) is a New York City-based writer whose work tends to focus on the connection between culture and toys. You can connect with them on Instagram @toy_circus.
