I finally watched last year’s Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit last night, after it’d been sitting on my Netflix pile for a month or so. It’s a nice little film about champion Scrabble players, not unlike 2002’s Spellbound. (You can watch clips here.) Aside from the crappy soundtrack (I’m sorry, but it is crappy), it’s full of delightful anecdotes and anagrams, and more than a handful of things that make you go hmmm….For starters, it presents a kind of desperate look at the life of the four men they follow to the championships: these guys have no “real life” outside of Scrabble and admit to it; their obsession is truly, truly an obsession.
So it’s actually kind of sad to watch at times, as the geeky guys pore over lists of words and talk about how broke they are because the only thing they ever do is play Scrabble, which, btw, is not a very lucrative sport. There is entertainment, though. For one, the characters on the Washington Square Park circuit are colorful and seem to be a little more attached to the world than do the champion tournament players, offering a different perspective on the game.
For another, Marlon Hill, one of the featured players in the documentary, says some hilarious shit. Now I know it’s cliche to think that the one black guy in the movie is just soooo funny, but he also says some interesting things about language that made me think of every sociolinguistics class I’ve taken: that a language has the characteristics of the people who speak it, for instance. Or my favorite:
English is a fucked up language; too many words have multiple meanings, y’know…Motherfucker’n go crazy dealin’ with this shit.
Speaking of profanity, did you know that jew as a verb used to be in the Scrabble dictionary but was taken out due to controversy? Due to this and other arguable obscenities, now there’s a regular Scrabble player’s dictionary, as well as a “family” version.
Another disturbance was to learn that some people (ok, Joe Edley, a former champ) actually study word lists while driving to and from work. Did you hear that? He studies. Word lists. While driving. This has got to be more distracting than cell phone use.
Finally, we come to the part that struck me most from the very beginning: there are virtually no women in this documentary. The characters we follow are four men, and most of the other players interviewed or shown are likewise male. There are a couple of champion players interviewed, and what do they get to talk about it? The lack of women at Scrabble champion tournaments. In fact, according to them, there have never been more than SIX women in the top 50 players at the national tournament. SIX out of FIFTY! I feel like this ratio is totally absurd, and I want an explanation. The women in the film say that women simply aren’t as obsessive as men about things they like to do; moreoever, women have obligations in life that keep them from dedicating themselves to something like Scrabble. I don’t know - what do y’all think? Are there other reasons there might be so few women in this game at the top levels? (It can’t be biological, right? It doesn’t seem that the skills involved in Scrabble are ones to be sex-differentiated.)