Hollywood Chess

Without a doubt, the most popular part of our film, Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration, was the segment on what we called “Hollywood Chess”—a detailed illustration of how films and television so consistently get the most basic aspects of the game hopelessly wrong: from setting up the pieces incorrectly to ridiculous depictions of sudden, one-move checkmates to sententious invocations of the proficient chess player as some sort of super-genius.

Whether it’s The Shawshank Redemption or The West Wing, Independence Day or Colombo, there seems to be hardly one chess scene produced by Hollywood that doesn’t send anyone with the most basic understanding of the game into peals of laughter. And lest you think that we can simply pin all of this on those uncultured Americans, it’s worth pointing out that even The Seventh Seal, a cinematic classic that prominently featured the game in its key allegorical messaging, had the pieces set up incorrectly. 

But while it’s always fun to showcase easily-avoidable blunders by big-shot movie producers, there’s an intriguing often-overlooked question here, I think, which is very much worth considering:

Why, exactly, does Hollywood so often get the most basic aspects of the game so wrong?

Part of the answer, surely, is just basic economics. When considering which cinematic details justify spending time and money on, Hollywood executives believe that getting the occasional chess scene accurate is simply not worth worrying about—a quite reasonable conclusion to come to, given the fact that the inaccuracies are so widespread with no evident damage to anyone’s reputation.

But there’s another, much more interesting, aspect to all of this, vividly represented by Hollywood’s constant portrayal of chess as a game punctuated by sudden one-move checkmates that the hapless participants never see coming.

Despite the fact that this is a completely inappropriate representation of how the game is actually played by anyone other than a rank novice, it’s a view that most (i.e. non chess-playing) members of the public actually do subscribe to. Because they’ve unconsciously imbibed it from films and television that have continually reinforced the same false stereotype.

In other words, this is hardly a conspiracy, or even, really, a form of intellectual laziness. Those who insert a chess scene into a film or television show likely think that they’re doing things correctly, as are the actors who diligently work on generating their shocked reactions to an unexpected one-move mate. Because they’ve seen it many times before in other films and TV shows. 

Which should most definitely give us pause.  Because there’s a very strong likelihood that this sort of circular reasoning is happening much more often, and in many vastly more significant domains, than chess.  

Howard Burton, Director of Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration, and author of Chessays: Travels Through the World of Chess.