Chess players will love LEXX 4.18 (THE GAME). Only a very
few feature-length movies have been made
in which chess is the main subject. I know
of only four. Three of these have as their
central theme the idea that chess players
become obsessed with the game and go insane.
This is depressing, tiresome, and not exactly
true due to the fact that the majority of
chess players are already insane before they
take up the game.
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LEXX 4.18 (THE GAME) is an episode from a TV show, and with
the commercials removed it's only 45 minutes
long, so whether or not it qualifies as a
feature-length movie is debatable, but in
any case it stands head and shoulders above the flicks
whose directors are obsessed with proving
that chess players are obsessed. LEXX 4.18 focuses
on chess itself and succeeds in conveying
many essential truths about the game.
I'm not familiar with Canadian TV, but quickly enough I
was able to figure out that the Lexx is an
organic, vaguely crustacean and/or insectile
spaceship that resembles a wingless mutant
dragonfly from some angles and an Erector-set
phallus with a gigantic scrotum from
others. The tone of the show seems
to be a fizzy cocktail of silliness,
satire, black comedy, and intellectual wit.
The intentional over-the-top psychedelic
cheesiness of the props, costumes, dialogue,
acting, and special effects left
me feeling like someone had slipped
a hit of acid into my chamomile tea.
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In THE GAME one of the Lexx's crew members, an undead Divine
Assassin named Kai, plays a game of chess
with a villain named Prince. The stakes are
high.
If Prince wins, two of Kai's fellow crew members will forfeit
their lives – a jittery and apparently
inept worrywart named Stanley Tweedle
and someone named Xev who looks like a
voluptuous harem girl with plump bee-stung
lips. (Later I found out that Xev is
a humanoid female who's half cluster lizard
and half love slave. Hoo boy!)
If Kai wins, Prince will free Kai from the ranks of the
undead. Zombies are undead, and so are
vampires, but Kai appears to belong in
a third category. His spirit has been separated
from his body. Only if the two parts of him are
reunited will he be able to finish his life
and find rest in death.
Kai and Prince play their high-stakes game in the middle
of a bleak, lonely, windswept landscape in
the Other Zone, which is defined by Kai (rather
wittily, I think) as an "unstable partial
universe." The Other Zone landscape
(in reality an isolated location in Iceland)
consists entirely of snow and rock – a world
of white and black with virtually no other
colors, the perfect setting for a game of
chess.
The chessboard and pieces deserve a careful description.
Each of the board's sixty-four squares has
a hole in the middle and is divided into
two hinged halves that can be separated and
closed again, similar to the two planks on
a guillotine that clamp around a victim's
neck and hold his head in place so that it
will stick out through a hole and be properly
positioned under the blade. Various characters
from the LEXX show wear distinctive hats
to indicate which piece they represent (for
example, Xev is the Black queen) while standing
out of sight underneath the board with only
their heads sticking up through the holes
in the squares.
Goofy oversized keyboards protrude from two sides of the
board. When one of the players is ready to
make a move, he punches keys and turns cranks.
The necessary squares open up, an unseen
mechanism underneath the board slides the
chosen piece to its new square (all we see
is a head gliding across the surface of the
board), and then the piece is clamped in
place as the two halves of the new square
close tightly around the neck of the head.
Whenever a piece is captured, the square
is cleared by an ax or mace that swings down
and smashes the head of the captured piece
like a ripe melon, splattering the faces
of the other pieces with gorgeous gouts of
fake blood and brains.
How, you ask, could such a lurid, garish depiction possibly
reveal essential truths about chess? Let
me count the ways.
First, Kai is unnaturally logical, rational, and imperturbable.
He seems completely detached from other people.
He cannot feel emotions and makes no attempt
to feign them. He has no spirit. The look
in his eyes is cold, empty, and profoundly
inhuman. Prince, on the other hand, oozes
all of the emotions that normal people find
repulsive and loathsome. He gloats over the
board, sneering at Kai with oily arrogance,
his eyes glittering with sadistic glee. His
theatrical gestures, his haughty tone of
speech, his disdainful facial expressions,
and his endless bragging make it clear that
he considers himself superior to everyone
else in the universe. Now, I ask you, isn't
it true that these two personality types
cover about 90% of all the tournament chess
players you've ever met?
Second, the entire game is shown clearly from start
to finish. It's a Bishop's Opening melee
featuring the complicated double-edged tactics
that arise when one player castles kingside
and the other castles queenside, with a race
to see which player can checkmate the other
first. Since I'm a low Class A player myself,
I couldn't be sure, but the quality of the
play struck me as being quite high,
so I guessed that the creators of the
show were using the score of an
actual game between two strong players.
Later my guess was confirmed when Jeremy
Silman told me that the game comes from the
famous 1834 match between Labourdonnais and
MacDonnell. I may have even seen the game
before. Fifty years ago, shortly after
I discovered that I could use chess books
to learn tricky openings that would
allow me to crush my pals at Smiley Junior
High School, I became infatuated with
the swashbuckling but totally unsound MacDonnell
Double Gambit and played through most
of the games from the above-mentioned
1834 match. But I digress. The point I want
to make is that the game shown in LEXX 4.18 is
a good one, and after every move, Kai, Prince,
and the talking-head pieces discuss the purpose
of the move and debate its merits. This ongoing
analysis is fairly simple and rudimentary
but also accurate. As a result LEXX
4.18 can be used as an instructional DVD
for beginners. By emphasizing the importance
of relentless analysis, it reveals another
essential truth about chess.
Third, when the talking-head pieces are
arguing about tactics and strategy, they
also bombard each other with a non-stop barrage
of childish taunts, threats, insults, jeers,
and sarcastic remarks. Whenever they think
Kai has blundered, Prince's pieces chant, "Resign! Resign! Resign!" or "Bad
move! Bad move! Bad move!" After
a capture, one piece ecstatically exclaims, "The
violence! Oh, the violence!" Reacting
to what appears to be a blunder, another
piece snickers and asks, "What are you,
a retard?" Finally, they are reduced
to shouting "Nana nana na na!" at
each other like a roomful of sugar-crazed
seven-year-old brats. In this way THE GAME
reveals the most essential truth of all.
It shows us the heart and soul of chess.
Click to see SILMAN'S
REVIEW OF THIS LEXX EPISODE.
Lexx
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