Flashes of Panic

I am not a puzzle geek. I sometimes do crosswords on airplanes, or other situations where I don’t actually have a book handy, but what I get out of it is the little thrill of solving the clue, which is akin to the satisfaction of finding a neat block of code for a specific problem or function. I don’t like the idea of solving for time. And I certainly don’t have, as NYT puzzle editor Will Shortz has, a degree in “enigmatology.”

But when I couldn’t tolerate another hour staring at the Perlish guts of Movable Type this afternoon (even though Perl was my first programming language—I don’t count the Pascal I supposedly learned in Comp 11 fourteen years ago, because I didn’t remember it past that semester—it’s about fourth or fifth by now,) the idea of going out to Arlington and watching a movie about a bunch of puzzle geeks was really appealing.

“Wordplay” is a bit about Shortz, a bit about the Times crossword puzzle, and mostly about the national crossword tournament Shortz hosts every winter in Stamford, Connecticut. It introduces us to a number of contenders and past winners, not unlike the movie about the spelling bee a few years ago, and ends sweeping through the weekend-long tournament, where hundreds of crossword aficionados tear through seven puzzles, scored on time, completeness, and accuracy.

Unlike the spelling bee, though, this is a low-stress meeting of people who recognize that what they’re doing is, perhaps, a bit off-centered—and even though there are clips, throughout the movie, of celebrities (Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, the Indigo Girls, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina) talking about their love of the Times crossword, what really made the movie, for me, was the atmosphere of the tournament. It was competitive, yes, but it was also hundreds of people coming in to this otherwise-unremarkable hotel and saying, “These are my people!”

I’ll never take a crossword as seriously as any of the people in that hotel. But that’s fine; that’s not the point. I do know the feeling they’re talking about, and that’s what they wanted to show me.

Now Playing: 10 A.M. Automatic from Rubber Factory by The Black Keys

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