(SPOILERS BELOW)
The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s biggest hit since last month’s Emily in Paris, is terribly marketed. From the outset, it seems like a biopic about a woman chess player, which, not to mark myself as anti-feminist, sounds boring. For one thing, chess is super boring, sorry to the nerds. But though The Queen’s Gambit is about chess (still boring), it’s not a biopic at all. It’s a fairy tale.
The plot is this: in the early 1960s, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy, excellent, giant eyes) loses her mom at a young age and is sent to an orphanage (FAIRY TALE ALERT) in Lexington, Kentucky. The orphanage doses kids on tranquilizers to keep them in line, which sets Beth up for a lifetime of addiction. It also seems extremely depressing, so it’s lucky for Beth that she finds a lifeline: chess, which she learns via the orphanage janitor.
Conveniently, it turns out Beth is a chess genius. Her brain works in ways others don’t. At night, she sees chess pieces move on her ceiling, which is a freaky bit of CGI animation. As a teen, she gets adopted by a nuclear postwar couple, though it turns out they’re not nuclear and the husband disappears. She continues to excel at chess, and her adoptive mother becomes her manager, traveling to chess competitions across the country and racking up the winning cash. Over the years, Beth becomes one of the best chess players in the world, but her addiction issues repeatedly threaten her success as she attempts to best her rival, Soviet grandmaster Vasily Borgov.
There are a lot of core fairy tale elements here: the bleak orphanage, the adoptive (step?) mother, the villain, the defined (anti)heroine with a set of special skills that border on magical. There’s a “prince” of sorts (Beth’s chess crush, Townes). There are her helper elves, in this case a bunch of chess-playing men who fall in love with Beth and just can’t quite match her.
It’s important to note that The Queen’s Gambit also turns the fairy tale element on its head. The “step” mother isn’t evil, but she flips the mother-daughter relationship into a partnership. The prince, it turns out, is gay. The villain isn’t a villain so much as a worthy opponent. And the magical handicap—a la Rapunzel’s tower or Sleeping Beauty’s, you know, sleeping—is Beth’s addiction to alcohol and drugs, which is a more realistic and internal crisis (and perhaps one a little too easily overcome at the end, according to critics).
Fairy tales are specifically known for having defined heroes and heroines, which is one of the reasons they’re so popular and comforting. It’s also, in my humble opinion (and this is my blog post), why The Queen’s Gambit is so fun to watch. Sure, the outfits and the period set pieces are mind-blowing, as are Anya Taylor-Joy’s aforementioned eyes. But the show is also about rooting for Good—Beth is a complicated character, but she is Different, and she has Special Powers, and those things make her someone marked to overcome. The show is cheesy in that way, but it’s also eminently watchable, especially in an IRL moment in which you’d really, really like to see good triumph.
Do note that if and when you watch this show, you may suddenly believe you know how to play chess. That is not true. Beware its power.
Catching up on the news
The big news, I’m sorry to say, is the attempted auto-coup, which appears to be ongoing in the absolute most stupid way possible. I’m 98% sure that the coup will not be successful, but that two percent uncertainty really hangs in the air. Great country.
Other news:
Here are some good blogs & features I am reading
“‘Personal Responsibility’ Won’t Save Us From a Pandemic” — Discourse Blog
“The Littlest Prince” — New Republic
“COVID Took My Grandfather. But It Wasn’t What Killed Him” — NY MAG
“John and Gisele Fetterman Are Fighting for the American Working Class” — Teen Vogue