Cross words

Last night my flatmates and I watch "Wordplay," last year's film about the creators and solvers of the New York Times crossword as well as the participants in the annual crossword competition in Stamford, CT. I must admit that I have a significant soft spot for this sort of documentaries. Although I rarely find them innovative or feel an urge to revisit them, there is something comforting and entertaining about the idea of extraordinariness in mundanity that is explored by films like "Wordplay," "Word Wars" (the Scrabble film), "Spellbound" (about children at the National Spelling Bee) or "Mad Hot Ballroom" (which follows a pilot program to bring ballroom dance to NYC schools). Of course, the flip side of this coin is the criticism many have leveled at this sub-genre of documentary, that it seeks out the oddities of its subject and displays them for the mockery of the audience, taking eccentricity and transforming it into freakishness to create narrative interest. To a certain extent this criticism is true, and shows evidence of the perilous influence of reality TV: though the enthusiasm of these "characters" is fascinating, their obsessions terrify, and we must be on our guard against forgetting that they are actual people rather than fictional constructs, easily condemned.

The cast of "characters" in "Wordplay" is sufficiently sympathetic that this is less of a worry than it has been in other films. Or perhaps our sympathy comes from the fact that the crossword, as pastime and status symbol, has permeated our lives to a greater extent. We (or at least I) can understand the social capital it confers to be able to finish a New York Times crossword (especially one from late in the week) quickly and in pen, in a way that I couldn't necessarily understand spelling bees and Scrabble tournaments. And the film trots out celebrity after celebrity, from a baseball pitcher to a comedian to a former president of the United States, to prove how elite the pursuit is. In one marvelous scene, all these celebrities attempt to complete the same puzzle, and I for one heaved a huge sigh of relief when Bill Clinton quickly answered clues about missiles, for instance. There is a jarring note, however, in the continued assertion that people who do crosswords are a certain type of people, "my type of people," just as an alarm sounds when Ken Burns makes the startling assertion that he believes that the English language is the greatest force in the world today. Ah well, I will keep watching these films as long as they keep making them - warts and all, they delight me.

"Wordplay" (2006)
dir. Patrick Creadon
***1/2

Week 2, Play 2: "Topdog/Underdog" - Jan. 8-14

I must admit that this was a reread, but I will defend myself thus: the play was sadly faded in my memory, and it seemed appropriate, given Parks's current project of a year of 365 dramas, to include her work at the beginning of my challenge. I enjoyed this one so much that it might persuade me to return to more of her earlier work (even more sadly faded in my remembrance) later in the year.

"Topdog/Underdog" is about the struggle for power in a fraught binary of brotherhood: Lincoln is staying with his younger brother Booth (their father had a sense of humor) while he struggles to make a living as a Lincoln impersonator at a fairground. It is a play about identity: what does it mean to "impersonate" Lincoln if you ARE Lincoln? History lurks fatalistically at the edges of the stage - do their names link the brothers together forever in a Cain and Abel struggle? Do we all just replay the fratricidal violence of the past eternally? Does national history overlap, eventually becoming coterminous, with family memories? Is all drama a reworking of Oedipus, a familial tangle that reveals itself as a Gordian knot? (What happened to Lincoln and Booth's parents, who both disappeared suddenly, their mother explaining her departure only to Booth and their father to Lincoln - they say - and each leaving a wad of money as an "inheritance.")

Despite these grand themes, the beauty of the play is often in its details, as in Lincoln's luminous, brutal description of the people who pay money to shoot him at the fairground, inhabiting a moment of pure rebellion and violence with inevitable racial implications (not least because Lincoln, wearing whiteface, is payed less money than his white counterparts to play the former president). What motivates these pseudo-murderers, ersatz assassins?

"Winter or summer thuh gun is always cold. And when the gun touches me he can feel that Im warm and he knows Im alive. And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead. And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real. Me looking up at him upside down and him looking at me looking like Lincoln. Then he shoots.
[Rest]
I slump down and close my eyes. And he goes out thuh other way. More come in. Uh whole day full. Bunches of kids, little good for nothings, in they school uniforms. Businessmen smelling like two for one martinis. Tourists in they theme park t-shirts trying to catch it on film. Housewives with they mouths closed tight, shooting more than once."


"Topdog/Underdog"
Suzan-Lori Parks
(2001)
****

And now a tangentially related film...

.... "Bad Day at Black Rock," directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy. [Some spoilers may follow.] A man appears in a small town in the desert of the American West, looking for a Japanese-American farmer who mysteriously disappeared the day after Pearl Harbor. The town rallies round its most sinister elements, guilty and enraged.

I didn't find this to be a complex or magisterial film, but it succeeds very well within the narrow scope of its interests (interests that were, at the time, quite progressive and bold). Over the course of the film, your awareness of the isolation of Black Rock grows, the desert becomes a prison, and you begin to feel a profound and unsettling claustrophobia. I have never quite understood the cult of Spencer Tracy, finding him (at his best) a competent actor who provides an anchor for a script, a solidity that can sometimes become stolidity. He turns in another calm, impassive performance here, interesting mostly when put into dialogue with the rest of the film Western tradition. Here we have a ronin of sorts, a stranger-warrior who is dropped down in a near-ghost town rotten with corruption and guilt, and who reluctantly takes on the job of purification, of scourging. He is the pacifist-warrior who sometimes appears in weapons, reluctant to draw a gun or engage in brawls, but brave and even deadly nonetheless.

Perhaps the most interesting point the movie has to make, however, is about the insidious nature of the tradition of Western, and it is given voice by the villain of the piece, Smith. The desert provides a blank slate for the narrative ambitions of everyone, and everyone who ventures there becomes a tourist of sorts, looking to find the Old West, the Wild West, or the West were fortunes are made on gold, oil or land. Is there an essence beneath all these projections, the film asks? The villains make the mistake of thinking that there is: it is "our west," a land of isolation and homogeneity, of safety in sameness. But the film refuses any true endorsement of idealism: even after the purge, the possibilities for a bright future seem grim in a town where the train only stops once in a few years.

"Bad Day at Black Rock"
dir. John Sturges
(1955)
***1/2
[Extra points for obeying the three unities so effortlessly!]