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Attack of the spelling bees
America has fallen for a documentary about spelling. Shawn Levy explains why
Friday October 3, 2003
The Guardian
My people, the Americans, we bee. From the mountains to the prairies, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the deserts that divide us from Mexico to the frozen lakes we share with Canada, our land hums with the sound of our bee-ing.
If you're puzzled by this, it is probably because you don't, as a people, bee. I thus refer you to the fourth definition of "bee" in the Oxford English Dictionary: "in allusion to the social character of the insect... a meeting of neighbours to unite their labours for the benefit of one of their number... usually preceded by a word defining the purpose of the meeting, as apple-bee, husking-bee, quilting-bee, raising-bee... hence, with extended sense, a gathering or meeting for some object." Bees traditionally involve folk crafts and chores and are thus more than merely social. As can be inferred by the Latin root, bene, a bee involves quilting, threshing, canning, spinning, logging or barn-raising for the common good. There is a moral dimension to bee-ing, a grand utility at work, the building blocks of the Golden Rule.
But there are other sorts of bees, insidious bees, excruciating bees, bees that devour the souls of those who take part in them - competitive bees. As anyone who sees Spellbound, the charming documentary by Jeffrey Blitz, can attest, there is perhaps nothing quite so harrowing in American life as our National Spelling Bee (unless, of course, it's our National Geography Bee, but I wander).
Each year, American cable TV viewers are privy to one of the most bizarre spectacles in the land. Scores of schoolchildren under the age of 16 gather in Washington DC, under the auspices of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, to face one another in a brutal one-false-step-and-you're-out derby of spelling. These prodigious youngsters have demonstrated their lexicographic prowess by vanquishing all comers in their local schools, cities, counties and states and now stand on the precipice of the grand prize - a college scholarship of more than $10,000.
At the big event, in the glaring lights of ESPN cameras, the contestants take turns stepping up to a microphone and listening as a stentorian voice assigns them a word to spell - complete with definition and, if they ask for it, language of origin and derivation. Without benefit of pencil or paper, they take a stab, and if they're right they survive for another round. Eventually, just two competitors stand against each other until one is able to spell some arcane word that the other cannot.
How arcane? The last five final-round winners were logorrhoea, démarche, succedaneum, prospicience and pococurante. Dunce - and crappy speller - that I am, only one of these (the first, for obvious reasons) declares its meaning to me. The others are, to my mind, a Dali-esque nightmare of double letters, i's-before-e's, foreign roots and the like. (To my shame and horror, and although these words are as alien to me as Aramaic, my spell-check just now balked at only one of them.)
Jeffrey Blitz happened to tune into the broadcast some half-dozen years ago and was enthralled by what he saw. Here in one ready-made package was all the drama a film-maker could ask for: children from all far-flung corners of the land, of all backgrounds and temperaments and dispositions, engaged in an objective competition that spoke to the secret fears we all harbour that we are morons unable to do something that is, to these savants, literally child's play.
The following year he tuned in again, this time with an eye toward identifying competitors who would still, due to their ages, have at least one more year of competition ahead of them. He contacted the families of several of these children and was allowed permission to follow the progress of eight of them from their local bees through to the big one. The choices are inspired and inspiring: among them a Mexican-American girl from rural Texas whose immigrant father can't speak English; a spunky African-American girl from a single-parent home in Washington DC; a nebbishy Jewish boy from a New Jersey suburb; a well-to-do Asian boy from San Diego whose father hires tutors to instruct his son in a variety of languages and pays a temple back home in India to say prayers on the day of the big bee; a taciturn midwest farm boy; a well adjusted New England girl whose sister has also been a top speller, and so on.
Right there, in this cunning casting process, Blitz reveals the singular charm of the National Spelling Bee. An old cliché of US democracy, sadly quashed by the ugly realpolitik of the 2000 election, holds that anyone born in America has a chance to be president. That's obviously a joke, but it remains true that any child, from any origin, armed with a dictionary and the will to memorise it, can rise to the top of the spelling pyramid. (That the current occupant of the White House couldn't make it out of a third-grade bee is, of course, a delicious corollary.) If Blitz never makes this point explicitly, it's patent in the rainbow coalition of faces that make up the film.
Likewise, he gets at another essential aspect of the American temperament in his depiction of the slavish preparation for the hellish pressure of the big bee itself. The human thirst for competition takes many quixotic forms - baccarat, sumo, the caber toss, quoits. But it's hard to believe that any of these provokes devotion more obsessive in its practitioners than spelling. Several of these children seem as dehumanised by the process of study as any teen tennis or figure-skating star ever was by dreams of Olympic gold - and, in some cases, as cruelly browbeaten into agony by a parent. Others seem to possess extraordinary abilities to memorise words as a fringe benefit - if that's what you would call it - of deep neuroses that will obviously hobble them to some degree for the rest of their lives. For the handful who seem able to take the experience in stride, we can, on the other hand, imagine the happiest of fates - even the presidency, should intellectual competence ever be deemed a prerequisite for the job.
As for what the devil the National Spelling Bee is doing on a cable sports network, Blitz has devised two ingenious montages that capture the heat, heartbreak and exultation of the event and stand as the twin highlights of the film. In one heart-rending sequence, one young competitor after another collapses into anguish as his or her effort to reproduce some bizarre permutation of letters fails; in the other, the ringing of the merry little hotel front desk bell that signals a successfully spelled word is greeted by the competitors with exultation, grins, sighs of blissful relief. It's a human spectacle of the sort that feature films can almost never deliver and documentaries have increasingly become our best chance to experience.
By the way, I've been talking about the spelling bee as a purely American phenomenon, but the fact is that it was the ancient Greeks who conceived the notion of word-based sporting competition when they included poetry in the original Olympic games. A damn fine idea it was, and one that ought to be revived. I can just see it now: Athens, 2004, the gold medal round. Andrew Motion against US poet laureate Louise Gluck - best three metaphors out of five. And, yes, spelling will count.
· Spellbound is released on October 10. Shawn Levy is film critic of the Oregonian and author of Rat Pack Confidential
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