The Queen's Gambit (dir Scott Frank 2020)

I haven't read the Walter Tevis novel on which the Scott Frank and Allan Scott Netflix miniseries, The Queen's Gambit, is based, though I'm quite tempted to. This lavishly-mounted, well-acted and decently-written seven-part drama is enjoyable and impressive, and will surely win many awards. Young Beth Harmon, an orphan being raised in a forbidding Christian orphanage (the authorities tranquillise their charges to keep them docile, sowing the seeds for adult Beth's addictions to pills and booze) is taught chess by the janitor. It turns out she has a Bobby Fischer level of natural genius although without—a canny move by the storytellers, this—any of Fischer's noisome personality traits or paranoia. Beth is perhaps a little chilly, personality-wise, but she is always likeable, humane, relatable. Or relatable except in one regard, for, played by the striking-looking Anya Taylor-Joy dressed immaculately in haute couture, Beth is beautiful beyond all normal human possibility. But this is TV, after all, not real-life.

Teenage Beth is adopted by a childless couple, a distant father who soon leaves the family home and a talented but thwarted, alcoholic, suburban mother. The series traces Beth's rise through the world of chess, from State- to US-champion until, after losing a couple of times to the stony-faced Soviet global champion Burgov, she finally conquers her personal demons and, with the help of her various friends and ex-lovers, defeats Burgov to win the world championship [update: I'm corrected on Twitter; this final match is an international tournament in the USSR, not the world championship].

Perhaps that last paragraph makes the series' denouement sound just a little, well, sappy. I wonder. Snipy of me to say so, perhaps, but there we are. To be clear: it's most certainly not a weakness of the story that it repudiates the conventions of misery-porn and concentrates instead upon a positive uplifty narrative through-line. On the contrary it is a notable strength that it stresses the way Beth's self-reliance is augmented by her friends and lovers to enable her to prevail in the end. That's excellent, and the more so because it's relatively rare in TV drama. No: the problem, I think, is that the obstacles the drama throws in the way of Beth's rise—obstacles needful in a narrative sense, since without such friction we have no drama—get resolved in too facile a manner. Beth's alcoholism and drug-addiction are vividly portrayed, although the show's more fundamental love of the scrupulous, gorgeous recreation of 1960s interiors in all their quiddity and glossy glory rather softpedals the skeeziness of her situation. But it is, I think, a problem that Beth's addictions are, by the end of the drama, simply waved away, with a little help from her friends, and via her final big victory. That doesn't ring true.

As for the chess, the show mostly manages to tread its delicate line, keeping things just actual-chessy enough not to irk real chessheads, whilst not getting bogged down in chessular specifics to the point of alienating audience members who don't know their Nimzo-Indian from a hole in a ground. It's a little over-simplified of course: actual moves are vagued at and the tournament-play seems to consist entirely of one-off matches between great players, almost never drawn. We can chalk that up to dramatic license. Still, without specific content to the games the show has instead to peg Beth's victories or defeats to exteriorities. So, the first time she loses to Burgov is connected, dramatically, to the death of her mother (she dies of hepatitis in their shared hotel room as Beth is playing downstairs) and the second time to Beth being titanically hung-over after a night of boozy Parisian indulgence, painting the town rouge with a French friend. Which means that the third and final time she defeats Burgov, at end of the show's narrative-arc rainbow, becomes less about her gameplay and more about the support of all the characters she had met and befriended along the way.

Still, what occurred to me, having watched the finale, is that this isn't really a show about chess. Or to put it more precisely, it's a show that uses chess, and the visual codes of mimetic historical realism, to tell a superhero origin story. Beth is not a crime fighter, but then again all these superheroic crime fighters, from Superman to Batman, from X-Men to the Avengers, are actually about re-establishing order from chaos, and that is entirely Beth's gift, and the show's throughline story. Chess is Beth's superpower in the sense that her skill goes beyond Batman-style super-preparation and armature of materiel (in Bruce Wayne's case, combat-training, long hours in the gym and lots of high-tech; in Beth's case training-games with other chess masters and long hours reading chess manuals)—that her skill goes beyond this into Superman, Dr Manhattan or Wonder Woman type innateness. She plays key moves intuitively, even her international chess master friends don't understand her total grasp of position and ability to find the right move, and so on.

So far as that is concerned, it's the origin part of the superhero story that The Queen's Gambit gives us. Three of the ‘Origin archetypes’ listed at TV Tropes are especially relevant, I think: the ‘Lucky Accident’ (the ‘Freak Lab Accident, one-in-a-million malfunction, or what have you; e.g., Spider-Man, The Flash, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil or The Fantastic Four’); a combination of the ‘My Own Creation’ mythos and the origin-story rooted in ‘Augmentation’ (for instance ‘participating in an experiment taking a Super Serum to become a Super Soldier like Captain America’, with the augmentation, here, being the chess-board); and ‘Pure Will’. The ‘Lucky Accident’ narrative takes us back to the reason Beth is an orphan, shown repeatedly in flashback. Her mentally unstable mother deliberately crashes their car into an oncoming truck (‘close your eyes’ she tells young Beth, on the back seat, just before the collision), but Beth is miraculously thrown clear of the resulting pile-up and is discovered standing, unscratched, in the middle of the road. The other two story archetypes are obvious enough.

The point is that superheroes are often orphans, like Batman or Superman; that they are often otherwise unconsidered ‘ordinary’ people, or have unconsidered ‘ordinary’ alter-egos, whilst at the same time being at the centre of global geopolitical crises and crunch-points (Beth beating the Soviets at the height of the Cold War); that they in some sense fight chaos ‘for all of us’ (eager crowds gathering inside and outside the venues at which Beth plays, watching her every move). The point is that there is something miraculous, something touched by wonder, about Beth's chess abilities.

The question as to why ‘we’ are so obsessed with super-heroes at the moment is one future cultural-historians of the first decades of the 21st-century will chew over. I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, actually, although it seems to me a profound one, and it doesn't seem to me surprising that, after the super-saturation of DC and (especially) MCU science-fictional superheroes over the last ten years the trope is migrating to other modes of representation, as here. We may have had enough spandex, without, perhaps, satisfying our appetite for superheroes as such. A few years back I wrote a History of Science Fiction that located the origins of SF not in Hugo Gernsback, not in Wells, Verne or Poe, not even in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but much earlier: in the Protestant Reformation, during which time, from the early 1600s onwards, a new ‘materialist’ form of the fantastic budded off from that aboriginal storytelling human mode. One consequence of this origin story, I suggested, was that certain elements from the cauldron of the Reformation are still in the, as it were, DNA of science fiction. A key one of these was the debate over the nature and powers of the divine intercessor, the messiah. It certainly seems to me inarguable that SF is fascinated by messiah figures, and we can if we like refer to all such figures, from Paul Atreides to Luke Skywalker, from Doctor Who to Neo, superheroes. It has something to do, and manifestly connects with a great many people on the level of, a mixture of desire for a saviour and anxiety about the saviour's nature and capabilities.