Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

The reason is simply that, despite the compensating attractions of glue, the activity of model construction goes to its final rest in one’s memory as a long, gradual disappointment. You think deludedly that you want to own the finished thing, joined, puttied, painted, decaled, and set under glass in a diorama made of bits of hot-mounted sponge and distressed Kleenex. But what you really want is to own, say, the Monogram MiG-29 kit at the apex of its visual complexity, where it can stimulate every shock and strut of your craftsmanly ambition, before it has been harmed by the X-acto knife and pieces of things have been bonded in permanent darkness within other things; you want it to be yours when both lateral aspects of each three-dimensional component, numbered for quick reference, hang symmetrically and simultaneously available to the eye in an arrangement of rectilinear runners and fragile jointure as fully intricate and beautiful as the immense wrought-iron gates that protect the fabled treasures in the Armorer’s Chamber of the Kremlin.

Straight from the store, these kits are museums: Kremlins and Smithsonians of the exploded view, wherein you may fully and rapturously attend to a single airplane, which exists planarly, neatly espaliered, arranged not by aerodynamic or military function, but by the need for an orderly flow of hot plastic through the polished cloisters of the mold in which it was formed — the largest and tiniest pieces nearest the sprue , or point of injection, the middle-sized pieces farther away, where they will successfully fill with a lesser fluid impulse. Nothing is hidden on these architectures; all the complex curves of wings and tailpieces are there, but everything is “straightened up,” as a hotel maid rationalizes the top of a bedside table simply by reorienting the mess at right angles, throwing nothing away; one gazes and thinks less of air-to-air combat than of those alluring ads for closet organizers or for garment bags fitted with specialized pockets. A pilot, adroitly sliced in two, headless, awaits recomposition in one crowded narthex. The elegant landing gear, twice as impressive as the real thing, is on view in the south transept. Some of the pieces don’t even offer up their final disposition at first glance: the truth — that they are relatively unconvincing bits of cockpit decor, or segments of a petty canard — would only cause unhappiness were you actually to engage with the kit and prove its necessary unfaithfulness to the real fighter. “It’s real because it’s Revell” was the manufacturer’s tag in the years I was building them; but the realism, I now realize, delights most piercingly when it is taken on faith.

The box, then, is the basilica of the unbuilt. You never quite rid yourself of the illusion that you will want to get to work on it as soon as you find a suitable chunk of time. Meanwhile you are content to wander these galleries of imaginary hobbyistic space with the indefinitely postponed intention of deacquisitioning their contents and leaving their mounts as raw and wanting as stems plucked free of after-dinner grapes. The kit is informationally richer than the completed plane. Yet richer still is the mold from which the kit limply falls, pushed out from the hand-finished, water-cooled steel cavities by a forest of long ejector pins. From this vantage, the model kit becomes the middle term, the precious domestic intermediary between the technology of injection molding and the technology of air defense. And if the injection-molding presses, the sophisticated Van Dorns or the older Cincinnati Milacrons at the Revell/Monogram factory in Morton Grove, Illinois — machines the size of locomotives, capable of animating a few hot cupfuls of viscous gray plastic into palmate arrangements of engine cowlings and smooth leading edges and external “stores” (that is, bombs and missiles), all overgrown with a fioritura of rivet heads, every half minute or so — if these massive presses had cockpits , the model enthusiast would perhaps more appropriately recline here, enthroned in the pacific din of high-volume toy manufacturing, rather than in the Kfir’s or Voodoo’s or Tomcat’s ejector seat. Fighter planes are fussy and expensive to maintain, but with oil and minimal tinkering, injection-molding machines will, in the words of Dan Burden, Revell/Monogram’s plant manager, “just run forever.” The aim of the Pratt & Whitney jet engine is to generate thrust with a spinning turbine; the aim of the Van Dorn is to move plastic along a rotating horizontal screw and force it to submit to prearranged detail with a minimum of flashing. The outcome of the Pratt & Whitney is turbulent exhaust and scattered applause at air shows; the outcome of the dutiful tonnage of the Cincinnati Milacron is a better preadolescent brain. (Hasegawa, the high-end Japanese manufacturer, includes, in a kit entirely devoted to U.S. guided bombs and rocket launchers, this educational word to parents: “It is reported that building plastic-model kits improves a child’s capability in understanding and in patience. Moving fingers helps his brain grow faster.”) The aerobatic F-15A Eagle can exceed the speed of sound in a vertical climb (at least that’s what Revell’s instruction sheet claims); the arobotic Cincinnati Milacron sits immovably anchored to a rubber shock-pad in a hangar full of its hulking, squirting confreres, slowly depreciating, ministered to by taciturn women who, but for their safety glasses, might have been milkmaids in another life. The plastic model you buy at the store is poised between these two rival poles of might, military-industrial and civilian-industrial. Its alliances are unsettled; the cozy homage it pays to lethal force is part of its attraction.

And now, with this mention of homage, we arrive, full of hushed deference, before the large blue box that holds the Stealth B-2 Bomber. Revell’s version ($12.99 at Toys R Us) is molded, quite properly, in black plastic, and comes shrouded in a clear sack with a prominent warning in French and English about the danger of suffocation. The full-scale Stealth is beautiful from a distance, although in a worrisomely Transylvanian sort of way. It is reportedly the result of astounding advances in computer-aided design and manufacturing processes. But unfortunately its continuous curves and unmitigated blackness do not seem to make for a satisfying scale model. Perhaps this is because the real Stealth, so completely the result of composite-molding machinery, itself too closely approximates the fluent, impressionable greatness of molded styrene. It is a model, and therefore a model of it can’t show off the extraordinary talent plastic has for the mimicry of other materials and textures. The kit-makers can’t be held responsible for the fact that the B-2 is so maddeningly smooth, that its featurelessness soaks up the eager radar of the visual sense and sends little back. The Cold War has moved from the upper atmosphere of spy photography to the wind tunnel, and aerodynamic drag has effectively replaced the Soviet Union as the infinitely resourceful enemy. But drag, unwelcome though it is to the airplane designer, is everything to the plastic-model enthusiast, because drag means rivets, knobs, holes, wires, hinges, visible missiles, sensors, gun blisters — all those encrustations that inspire study, and make imitation (in all-time best-selling models like the Monogram Mustang P-51 fighter) difficult enough to be worthwhile. And this consideration, oddly enough, may constitute a compelling argument against the B-2 program: the Bomber may represent an act of industrial will more impressive than anything since the Second World War; it may indeed harbor genius and patents and spin-off potential in every undulant inch; but it doesn’t at this moment look as if it will ever fill the demanding hobbyist with delight when he opens the box. And the fulfillment of that single recreational requirement, after all, given the inevitable shift away from vengeance and toward ornament that is history’s principal sequel, is the B-2’s only long-term reason for being.