The point she makes is more nuanced than that. And the experience of Judit Polgar, as recounted in this article that she cites, would appear to confirm she has a point. How ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Started a New Debate About Sexism in Chess Where male opponents couldn’t accept losing to a girl and refused to shake Polgar’s hand after she beat them, as I recall it, the only male opponents we see react that way to Beth are a few high school/college age guys at the very first tournament she enters. After that, all of the men she beats are entranced with her and want to sleep with her. Which gets back to the reality that the film is as much an erotic fantasy and star vehicle for Taylor-Joy as it is a movie about a chess prodigy. As with quite a few foreign/art films from the era in which The Queen’s Gambit is set - Belle de Jour springs to mind, but there are many others - the patina of middlebrow “seriousness” on display here allows viewers to rationalize the thrill of ogling the star actress in various states of undress. I’ve already touched on how ridiculous this film’s drug subplot is, but might it have been possible to dramatize Beth’s drug problem without having her dance around her house in her underwear? Again, if the prodigy and protagonist in this film was not Beth Harmon, but Harry Beltik, would this be generating anywhere near the buzz or ratings that it is? Would his substance abuse have been dramatized in the same way?
I was hooked in the first episode, which featured exactly zero shots of ATJ in her underwear. People are being inspired to take up chess, or at least learn more about it. The design and costumes are brilliant, and the cast is all very good. It's a fantasy, not a documentary, and the fact that Taylor-Joy is playing the central role is exactly the point: she's charismatic, embodies a troubled intelligence, and yes her eyes are incredibly expressive. Her star power is the magnetic center around which this show revolves. There are a lot of movies and shows that are built around star performances. This is nothing new. Also, Tevis' novel is not about a man or a nebbish Bobby Fischer. It's about an incredibly gifted young woman on a hero's journey. Gauging by the buzz on social media, a lot of young women are seeing this and feeling inspired by it. I've already acknowledged the show's flaws, and I wish those points had been better considered, but I still like the series overall. One woman writer I follow on Twitter mentioned that she was feeling anxious that there would be an inevitable attempted rape or some kind of violence against Beth and once she realized they weren't going down that road, she relaxed and could enjoy the rest of the show. I think being able to enjoy a light drama for its many good points is not a bad thing. As for trading on the "nostalgic fetishization of whiteness in decline," you can level that criticism at any period piece with white people at its center -- the entire Merchant-Ivory catalog for starters -- so that strikes me as painting with a pretty broad brush in an attempt to find something to criticize here.
A decent, partially subversive series that goes off the rails with episode six before rebounding somewhat with the final episode. One of the most transparent problems with these types of shows is writing from a 2020 or revisionist perspective. Beth Harmon is a little too reminiscent of Bobby Fischer and some of the scenes are a bit cringeworthy, such as episode one’s warped Nabokov tropes and episode six’s let’s throw away my chances of beating the greatest player in the world by going on an all night bender idiocy. The most insightful part of the series is the scene where someone alludes to the fact that athletes in America are held in higher esteem than chess grandmasters - indeed.
Er, I didn't get this at all. A couple of opponents became romantically interested, yes (one of whom is gay but conflicted). The other male opponents, after the early matches, did accept defeat gracefully, and that's as far as it went. One of her Russian opponents did not accept defeat gracefully and walked away from the board without shaking hands. In the final scene, the older Russian men are entranced because they recognize her as a great chess player, not a romantic object.
Errr... Chess boxing - Wikipedia I loved the series, hopefully they’ll resist the temptation to make a second one. Other opinions are valid.
Agreed. The final episode was virtually perfect. It was sad to watch the decline of Mrs. Maisel as the seasons dragged on.
Wife tells me that this is the only season. Thought the series was good but not Mad Men good or even the lesser Mrs Maisel good. Pacing was odd which was multiplied by the short series. It seemed like certain areas could have been expanded. Thought the NYC aspect of the last episode was a bit hokey. ( Hope that was not too much a spoiler.)
The first episode, and the entire Dickens orphanage/drug addict subplot, almost made me give up before the show did get interesting. And three cheers for that. At our family Thanksgiving last night, a chess board was brought out of mothballs for the first time in decades, because everyone has watched this show and it has sparked an interest in chess. As I said many pages ago, I agree that the set designs and costumes were top notch, and whoever was responsible for those should win awards. For sure. Yet, as quite clearly demonstrated by the drooling over her in this thread, and in the world at large, Taylor-Joy/Beth’s real superpower isn’t so much that she’s good at chess as it is that she’s super hot. It’s also a uniquely American cold war fantasy, like the Rocky movie where he defeats Ivan Drago, or the “miracle on ice” of the 1980 Olympics, that plays on the myth of the plucky American genius defeating the Soviets at their own game, while overcoming a robotic Soviet villain who is backed up by a team of cheaters.
No, she's simply very, very good at chess. I found her rather asexual, tbh. Maybe her troubled character stirred up a daddy-figure fantasy among the guys here. Again, I think you might be reading too much into it. Her opponent seemed rather avuncular to me, although we didn't learn much about him. And it's not against the rules to consult with one's colleagues, which is what Beth also did, btw.
Like Drago in the Rocky movie, Borgov is portrayed as a ruthless robot who grinds his opponents into submission.* In real life, Bobby Fischer alleged that in certain tournaments where he faced multiple Soviet opponents, the Soviets secretly agreed to draw each other to save their energy for their games against Fischer, and, without re-watching The Queen’s Gambit, I believe that it raises a similar point. I believe Beth’s State Department handler even suggests to her that, while in Russia, she not drink anything except water from her room, for fear that she might be drugged. The point is also made that Borgov has a dream team of grandmasters backing him up, while the plucky loner Beth has to go it alone, and the scene where Beth walks by the open hotel door and spies Borgov and his team analyzing the paused position further drives this point home. After this point has been made, the phone call Beth receives from her rag tag team of friends back home in NYC becomes justified, because Borgov was the first to cheat, or at least to violate the spirit of the game, which is supposed to be a head-to-head match of wits, not a contest of who has the best support team. Even though Beth does receive help from her friends, her character still taps into the same uniquely American archetype we see in Star Wars’ conflict between Rebels and Empire: like Luke Skywalker, against overwhelming odds, flying solo, Beth blows up the Death Star of Russian chess by using her intuition. In this reading, her looking up at the ceiling at the key moment in the her match against Borgov and tapping into her mystical power of seeing the pieces and intuiting the right move recalls Luke turning off his targeting computer and trusting in the Force. *Again, without rewatching the entire series, I believe there is one tiny attempt to humanize Borgov, where he confides to his wife or to a colleague that, for him, losing is not an option, because of the relentless pressure from the state or the party to triumph for communism. Back home in America, Beth gets upset when she goes to the tournament in Nowhere, USA to find that she is playing on a board with plastic pieces to near total disinterest from the rest of the country. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Borgov and other Russian grandmasters are national heroes.
Good show. Certainly not perfect, but it has compelling characters and a good story arc. I also like the songs featured in the episodes. They're well placed and seem to be very thought out in terms of their use.
They don't really make it clear enough in the movie, but it's not intuition. It's the ability to play out possible moves in advance, see your opponents counters to those moves, and play out counters to *those* moves. It's mentally grinding through permutations. You grind through these permutations until you can get your opponent into a known configuration where you can play some known attack. Chess grandmasters are basically walking encyclopedias of chess positions, with the ability to cycle through possible moves in their head until they hit one of these positions that gives you an advantage of some kind. Spoiler This is what Beth's friends were doing on the phone call. They, basically, pre-computed all of the moves that made sense, and all of the counters to those moves. When Borogov did something different, she ended up doing the same thing in her head.
You don’t have to explain to me how high level chess works, or that grandmasters memorize opening lines and defenses. However, real life grandmaster Magnus Carlsen famously relies on intution, as he explains here: “Most of the time, I know what to do. I don’t have to figure it out. I don’t have to sit there and calculate for 45 minutes, an hour, to know what the right move is. Usually, I can just feel it immediately.” The documentary film about Carlsen goes into some detail about how Vishy Anand, whom Carlsen beat to become world champion, relies on the Borgov approach of attempting to memorize every possible opening line and position. Carlsen defeated Anand, not by forcing him into positions Carlsen had memorized better than Anand, but by forcing Anand into unusual and unknown positions, where Carlsen could use his superior intuition. Forced to think on his feet and not rely on his memorized lines, Anand was not as good at intuiting the right moves as Carlsen. And the repeated motif in the Queen’s Gambit of Beth staring up at the ceiling and “seeing” the right moves is 100% clearly designed to paint her as an intuitive genius like Carlsen, not a robotic grind-it-out memorizer like Borgov or Anand.
I saw that as her grinding out potential moves. I looks almost exactly like a computer chess program calculating potential moves if you turn the visualizer on. If it was intuition, you would just see the correct move instantly. Also, there are clear parallels between Harmon and Fischer, reinforced by the fact the chess consultant was Kasparov, who was influenced by Fischer. Fischer wasn't an intuitive player. He played crazy variations on existing moves, but he wasn't winging it.
This article argues otherwise on Fischer: Intuition in Chess And pretty clearly, Fischer’s most famous Queen sacrifice was thought of at the board, not during pre-game planning: The Game of the Century (chess) - Wikipedia I guess we’re getting into semantics here, but I would argue that what savants in chess and other fields describe as “intution” is simply their unconscious mind grinding through all of the possible moves, just like a computer, or a grind-it-out player like Borgov or Anand, with the key difference that they are able to do this instantly, and/or subconsciously, without, as Carlsen puts it, consciously spending 45 minutes grinding out the moves and counter-moves in their mind like a Borgov or Anand would have to do. In that video I linked to above, Carlsen adds that, after he intuits the right move, he often spends 20 or 30 minutes consciously running through the moves to verify that his intuition was correct. That doesn’t change the fact that his original flash of intuition somehow arrived at the right answer without him having to consciously run through the moves. I enjoy crossword puzzles. Sometimes I get stuck on a puzzle and can’t make any progress at all. If I put the puzzle down and do something else for an hour, or sleep overnight, I almost always find that I can immediately break the logjam and solve two or three clues right away upon taking the puzzle back up. Pretty clearly, my unconscious mind was thinking about the problem while I was occupied with something else or was asleep. On a far, far higher level, this is what chess players like Carlsen and the fictional Beth Harmon are able to do. When Beth looks up at the ceiling during her final match with Borgov, she doesn’t have to concentrate for 45 minutes to see all of the possible lines. Her visualizations of the pieces move at lightning speed, and the problem solves itself nearly instantly. Non-intuitive players and thinkers can’t do that.
Good article about the set design in this show, which is amazing. Nearly all of the scenes in “Kentucky” and “America” were in fact filmed in Europe. Inspecting 11 Rooms From The Queen’s Gambit
Fascinating! I love how little details reflect the character's situations and personalities. The wallpaper in the trailer for instance reflecting the "cage" they live in, and the shape of Mrs. Deardorf's desk lamp reflecting her shape and personality. I wish they talked more about the sets in Mexico City. dan c
Man, I'm glad I didn't get into dissecting the piss out of this show. I simply watched it and liked it.
It sounds like I'll have to be putting this one on my Mrs. and I watch list soon. We're so behind the curve on Netflix series.
I think your points are largely on the money. However, I think a lot of the praise for the series is that it's a great entertainment, and not necessarily a great piece of art. (Well, that's how I look at it.) And ATJ's looks are a big component of that entertainment.
