APRIL 18, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 11

My vocabulary, the discourse of college classes, words forged out of hours of reading the classics, and planning for the English portion of the GRE, all break down when you put a Scrabble board in front of me. I am forever trapped in trying to smash random letters into words. I am pitted with my own mind, and it goes blank. I appreciate someone who has tricked his or her mind into thinking like Scrabble or the GRE. This is why I was drawn to seeing the documentary Word Wars. I assumed, like The King of Kong, that I was stepping into a well filmed quirky sub-culture, but it ended up being a movie that constantly ridicules its own subjects.

It follows the lead up to the National Championship of Scrabble in San Diego for Joe Edley, Matt Graham, “GI” Joel Sherman (so named for his intense gastrointestinal reflux syndrome) Marlon Hill. On the way we learn how to play Scrabble, why these men were drawn to the game, how they live and breathe words, and we get to see some knockdown seven-letter battles. The exposition to the main event is forced into such a simple plot line; the Nationals are a year away, there are a few tournaments leading up to them, so that we, the audience, can leisurely follow these four quirky men around and get to realize how weird competitive Scrabble players are.

The film twists perception and forces its four characters into stereotyped, convenient boxes that make for easy storytelling. The film creates a world, much like reality television, where these characters are probed and thrown on a table for us to laugh at and be entertained with. They make Joe Edley, America’s most dangerous player, into a Zen weirdo who needs his chi to compete and will lose without it. He does lose in the end. They make Matt out to be the “rocker” by showing him gambling, and exerting masculinity through cut-off shirts and his intense Scrabble play. They show GI Joel as the world’s biggest gomer, who can only play Scrabble. This is his talent, and the film makes sure you know it by the end. Every time he does anything but play Scrabble, his GI kicks in and he needs his medication, which he carries with him. The portrayal of these three characters is one-sided and does not paint the whole picture of the Scrabble world. The filmmakers seem to slap these three guys, pared with Marlin, to create an environment where dramatic tension could break out, again like reality television. It is unfair and bias that the film proves over and over that GI Joel is hopelessly clinging to Scrabble so that he can have meaning in life, just let the characters be themselves and the quirkiness will ensue. Then we get to Marlin.

Marlin is an African American male from an urban community, who plays, above all other games, Scrabble. The movie spoon feeds this to us in every scene he is in. The film blatantly says, “isn’t it weird that a black guy, without a formal education, would play Scrabble and be good at it?” At one point during a tournament, the announcer says that anyone being caught swearing excessively or acting in a threatening manner will be immediately removed. Then it cuts back to Marlin complaining about the new rule because he likes to taunt his enemies. It doesn’t show the other men’s reactions, and the film is saying, “Who cares, they are white, and white people don’t cause a commotion.” But Marlin obviously causes commotions because of his skin color and hard knocks upbringing. No one else at the competition views this. No one looks at Marlin differently. People treat him as if he were another person. The filmmakers treat him like a caricature, and we are forced to look at him this way because of it.

At another point Marlin loses and he has expected to win, and the filmmakers document Marlin drinking, smoking marijuana, and then show him going to get a prostitute. Yes, Marlin does do this and it is his nature to do so, and it is not the Scrabble documentarian’s job to destroy racial stereotypes and create barriers. The problem is that the film never stops with this relentless barrage of stereotyping Marlin by his race. It never points out what race GI Joel or Matt are. Then the film never juxtaposes Marlin’s actions to any other extreme behavior. They put it up against Matt, whose worst attribute is his gambling, and GI Joel betting a thousand dollars on a best-of series. Or, they put Marlin against Joe Edley telling us that he doesn’t know any of the words but was able to memorize them all. The film is trying to be about the dynamic nature between players and the game, but ends up just being about the extreme differences between blacks and whites. It never documents any Asians, Latinos, Europeans, or other African Americans. Marlin is the sole spokesman for his race.

Word Wars then takes its point of view and presents it in a very sloppy fashion. Between tournaments and major scenes, the movie cuts to a purple graphic screen, where jagged black lines cut through the color to create an after-school special, circa 1992. Then they slap words and more graphics on this to transition to the next sequence. In these sections, the filmmakers are showing us that they recognize that the film’s audience needs an intermission. Our attention spans are so thin that an eighty-minute movie has no chance of keeping us glued to our seats. Every chance I have to start enjoying these characters, a transition happens and I am brought back out of the movie into my reality. After this, I have a hard time focusing back in on the characters and the narrative, because by the time the film goes back into the story, I already want to watch something else. By using these cutaways, the filmmakers are acknowledging that their own movie is boring, and that the people who may watch it aren’t going to like it. Maybe the filmmakers are just cutting their losses and not throwing anymore time into a film that doesn’t even think it’s worthwhile.

The film’s next major interruption comes when Marlin has overslept and is missing the tournament in the hotel. An elderly women waits for Marlin to show up so they can begin their game. Play has begun and Marlin’s clock is ticking. Players are only allowed 25 minutes to finish their move as in competitive chess, hitting a time box to show their turn is over. When time is up those points are taken off the player’s final score. When Marlin is late, his time starts running down. The film shows this tension by cutting to him snoring, back to his empty chair, and then again to Marlin sleeping. Drama is heightened and I am ready for something to happen. Then the camera sways, and we see the cameraman’s knee, then hand, then the hand is touching Marlin, then we hear from behind the camera, “Wake-up Marlin,” then it cuts and the camera is following Marlin to the tournament. Now that I have seen him be forced up, him winning or losing doesn’t really matter. He would have lost the match if he wasn’t woken up, and that would have been more dramatic, reality television dramatic, to the aftermath. But he goes down, and wins his match, and the continuity of the movie stays intact.

The documentary’s job is to act as a representation of the culture’s life. It is supposed to then show it to us. It could be seen that the cameraman touches Marlin because they have such a strong bond that the filmmaker wants to see him succeed, hopefully like a human supporting another human. Since we already know that the film portrays Marlin as being a one-note character, we can strip away any friendship or respect that these filmmakers have for their subjects. If they were their friends then they wouldn’t have made Marlin a stereotype based on race, in this case they are showing him as lazy, which they make a point to show that the white Joe Edley is never tired or lethargic. The only reason to wake him up then is so that they could have content to document. Without this scene they don’t have an eighty-minute movie, so to keep the pacing, the word battles going, the cameraman breaks the fourth wall, disrupts the narrative, and forces a character to do something unnatural in his own pattern. We are watching the filmmaker burst the bubble of truth. I have no trust for this movie anymore. I am not going to believe anything they say now. I don’t know that this type of incident hasn’t happened already. They could have snuck GI Joel a word here or there to help him win the tournament. I will never know, thus never trust the filmmaker because he or she decided to intervene with the character’s decision.

GI Joel is crowned king of the big tournament and receives twenty-five thousand dollars. Marlin places high enough to collect eight hundred dollars, and Matt and Joe go home empty handed. It doesn’t matter who wins. The film doesn’t care, just as long as one of the four is the champion. They clearly picked out their four characters based on entertainment value and chances of winning.