In popular culture, billiards is lamentably often narrowly associated with hustling, gambling, seediness and squalor. From the earliest billiards movie, Bad Boy, to the genre’s most recent addition, Sixball, these themes run frequent and deep. Yet, the metaphoric application of billiards can be so much broader, as its imagery and language far transcend these limited tropes.
Robert R. Craven, a professor at New Hampshire College, hit on this in his 1980 essay, “Billiards, Pool, and Snooker Terms in Everyday Use.” He noted the sheer number of colloquialisms – e.g., behind the eightball; call the shots – that are used in general discourse, presumably by an audience that is far larger than the number who play pool. These phrases have become metaphorical, existing beyond the poolroom.
While exceptions to the rule, some movies have sidestepped these historic stereotypes to use billiards as an opportunity for the discussion of larger themes. Martin Lawrence’s exposition from Boomerang on how billiards represents our racist society is a classic and humorous example. “The white ball dominates everything…and the game is over when the white ball drives the black ball completely off the table…it’s the white man’s fear of the sexual potency of the black man’s balls.”
Across the annals of lesser-known billiards movies and short films, there are other exemplifications. The “Game of Pool” episode of The Twilight Zone (1961), as well as the anime short film Death Billiards (2013), both tackles issues of fate and mortality through an individual pool match. Toby Younis’ short film Pool and Life (2011) uses the game of pool as a metaphor for overcoming the obstacles that life places in front of you. Louis-Jack’s short film Petrichor (2020) masterfully leverages snooker to discuss mental health.
To this list, we can add the 2017 Armenian short film Unknown Life. A trailer of the movie is available here.
Directed by Rusanna Danielian, a prolific filmmaker who has directed 48 short movies since 2014 and has not yet even turned 40, Unknown Life focuses on Adam, who has something very strange occur on his 50th birthday. While he is waiting for his computer to reboot, his three strongest personality traits come to life and opt to decide his fate over a game of Russian billiards. Adam’s internal snooker match represents the critical decisions we make in life, in which there is mental arm-wrestling among the rationalist (who lives/works for the future), the worrier (who holds on to the past), and the dreamer (who wants to enjoy the present).
In a Facebook Messenger exchange, Ms. Danielian explained to me why she chose to use a snooker as metaphor.
In the film’s reality, it is only one man playing billiards against himself. But in the fantasy world, the game takes place between three of his dominant character traits…Depending on who has the better argument in their conversation…determines who] gets a ball in. That was the concept around the billiard game I came up with to show which one of his character traits “wins” the game in a metaphorical way and decides about his life on a psychological level.
Also my protagonist stands for a man who has reached a lot of success in his life, but isn’t feeling “happy.” So the pool table stands also for his status as it is something that normally only rich people have in their house. And the fact that he has all of that, but nobody next to him to share it all with, shows that striving for success is probably not the right goal in life.
To capture the intellectual battle among the personalities, Ms. Danielian effectively used a green screen to shoot Adam, played by Aleksandr Khachatryan, in the three different roles and then layered him on so he appears to be engaging with himself. (I believe this is a billiards movie first!)
Unknown Life was filmed in Armenian, though the private copy Ms. Danielian shared with me had English sub-titles. Unfortunately, the translation was a bit stilted, so some of the nuance of the dialogue was lost. Moreover, the actual snooker-playing was pretty terrible.
Nonetheless, Unknown Life is worth the watch for its creative filmmaking and simply for daring to think differently about the application of snooker and how the game can be used to unearth interesting psychological questions.
