The Game of Life

Garrett Lambur
The movie the Seventh Seal was quite an intriguing film. True, the film budget was not the largest and without the story it would have bankrupted Blockbuster in refund demands, but there was something that grabbed me about the film. Perhaps the choppy hard to follow style made me question more what took place within the film. The portrayal of death and his role within the film was striking to me. The main character is able to play chess with death in order to prolong his time on earth. Using chess as a symbol for life I thought was quite interesting, specifically having the enemy as death. It is a very different perspective on life than any other. Your life becomes embodied within a piece on the chessboard, the King. There are other pieces on the board but do you see them extensions of yourself or are they other people? If they represent people are you simply directing them as a General or do you have to manipulate them to go where you want? A perspective on life offers so many questions that seem to go on forever, one leading to the next.

But it is perspective on life that allows us to separate ourselves or group ourselves to one another. Yet it seems that this was part of what was troubling the main character through out the movie, how did he perceive life itself. This is in fact a question that I find myself facing when left alone to my own thoughts or when presented with stimulus such as this movie. Do you attack life with all you have or do you live your life and let things happen as the will? What is my style of chess play? Am I a quick moving player or a deliberate player? Reverse the example and you are presented with the question, does your style of playing chess give insight into your personal view on life? This is an interesting idea but a lacking one because not everybody plays chess and everyone is taught differently. Additionally chess is not to me a determining factor in ones development or views upon life.

Perhaps I am contemplating the idea of chess and its implications from the movie too much. That may be my issue with looking at life itself, I ask too many questions and delve into categories that need not be explored at that time. The saying curiosity killed the cat and in the Seventh Seal it almost seems as if curiosity killed the characters too. Without curiosity though how many questions would be answered or new inventions created? Thus curiosity and asking questions is not a bad thing, in fact far from it, I mean the cat had nine lives didn’t it?