An Ancient Game and an Even More Decrepit Perspective

2020 was a rough year for all of us - but especially for new content releases. With the erratic stops and starts of production all over the world matched with the need for all to stay inside since March, by June, many of us had burned through all that Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime and Disney+ have to offer. When there is a new release – be it film or show – it is consumed swiftly, whether good, bad, or ugly. Most have disappointed, but we watch anyway, in horror and I personally, have stopped getting my hopes up.

It is understandable that by December, we are ready to laud anything new and with Netflix level production budget. There is also the idea that any and all content that centers women and female stories of accomplishment should automatically be up for every award show’s consideration. While it is always nice to have a brief respite from the swath of cis-straight-male-whiteness that is Hollywood, and by extension the film industry, just because it centers a woman doesn’t mean it is good. And by no means must all content that follows a woman’s journey be good – it is well known in the battle for representation onscreen that there must be enough representational content that the pressure to be the best and most representing and well told story does not lie on every episode or film produced. However, Netflix’s newest “original” – though they are rarely ever that and often content bought by Netflix – The Queen’s Gambit has received so much acclaim that it is necessary to study where and why it is so overrated.

This show has made the top shows and or best of 2020 lists of EW, The Guardian, USA Today, acclaimed film critic site Roger Ebert – even Men’s Health has accoladed it as the “best sports show ever.” It is a crowd pleaser for sure, why else would chess set sales have skyrocketed after its release? While the praise has been heaped on by mainstream media, plenty of smaller sites – and even a few TikTok videos – have examined and poked holes in the show’s claim to filmic fame.

Overall, the show is fine. It is fine and that is okay. But, by no means should it be upheld as this feminist text and it should not be labeled as the best show of the year. For starters, the show was created, written, and directed by two cis straight white men, Allan Scott and Scott Frank. Cue sad trombone sound effect. The only reason these two managed to get away with writing a character who belongs in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Hall of Fame – more than one even – is because Anya Taylor-Joy carried this show with the nuance her performance added. Nuance that, if you read the scripts of this show as book series, you would realize is not present on the page. However, there is plenty of trauma and often white men conflate the two.

Let’s start with said trauma – let’s dig in, because it is a feast to be sure. Everyone have your trauma Bingo cards ready? Okay, first off we have orphan for no reason beyond to indicate that the protagonist is “strong” and has “nothing to lose” – very Disney. Next, we have an inexplicable and vaguely “crazy mother” – more on that later. Next we have two different types of deadbeat-esque fathers: the first being Beth’s biological father who wants nothing to do with her and who we see for all of three minutes; the second being Beth’s adopted father who is such a chauvinist that he refuses to even look his daughter in the eye – again, never explained but man, did I want to punch him in the face.

Then, there’s the fact that almost every man who becomes friends with Beth – save the twins – sleeps with her or wants to sleep with her but when they see her struggling with her addiction – don’t worry, we’ll get to that – they decide she’s not worth the trouble of supporting until she is playing Borgov in the end and their chess senses get all tingly. And if being an orphan with a troubled past wasn’t enough, let’s introduce the idea that because Beth is a prodigy at 9 years old, she has never had, nor will she ever have a normal life. She is doomed to fame and infamy, to succeed and fail to the extremes, and to always be chasing the next win – when we all know, that life cannot be won.

Here’s where the addiction comes into play – anyone have Bingo yet? Or better yet, a blackout? Pun intended. Beth becomes addicted to tranquilizers in the orphanage and then begins to relapse and then overdoses, all before hitting puberty and within the pilot. It is stated by many characters that the orphanage is getting in trouble for drugging the children but seemingly nothing ever happens so it is confusing why that was ever brought up. The janitor, Mr. Shaibel, gives Beth her first sip of whiskey – because, hey, it’s the 50s!

When Beth is adopted, she realizes that her new mother is prescribed the same meds that she grew so fond of at the orphanage and Beth gets her fix that way. Beth goes on to keep using the pills – and booze and other substances – to, presumably, hallucinate and be very good at chess. However, in the finale, before her final match against Borgov, Beth flushes the pills and opts for sobriety. She completes her first and only change as a character in a matter of seconds which feels as if Allan Scott and Scott Frank both remembered that a protagonist must have an arc and change of some sort and hey, no one will notice if we shove it all in at the end. Men, am I right?

The fascination with how instability, mental illness, and addiction relates to creativity and genius has been a subject matter studied since before the first chess piece was ever moved – and for good reason, it is as heart breaking as it is fascinating and examples can be found across industries. Because this conflict is always so topical, it has been addressed and told in many a way, often with much more nuance than in The Queen’s Gambit. We watch Beth struggle with her addiction and we watch many a man – and one woman, Jolene (we’ll get to Jolene) – express concern that Beth is doomed to a fate similar to that of Icarus.

However, these men seem to have no interest in supporting Beth as she struggles with her disease, let alone offering to help her get the help she needs. But they are ready and waiting to use her as a muse, a teacher, and for her celebrity. If the men in Beth’s life had given her even half the help they provide her with in her final match with Borgov to seek sobriety, the show might have been a few episodes shorter. I wouldn’t have complained, that’s for sure – if I never have to watch a chess montage again, it will be too soon.

Finally, Beth never gets much from these men that she can use. She is already more brilliant and a better player than they are – these men know that. So instead, they choose to use her for what she’s worth to them – the glamour, the sex, a mental punching bag to belittle or infantilize – and she gets little to nothing in return. What’s more, when Taylor-Joy first steps in as Beth, the character is 15 and then doesn’t age in ten years sans a few wig upgrades and makeup fads. Yet the men who she knew when she was 15 are elated when she becomes old enough to fuck, to see she’s “all grown up” because all she can offer is her sexuality. They want to take what they can and let her spiral dangerously without much aid – it’s a miracle she makes it to her match with Borgov. In fact, that miracle is named Jolene – The Queen’s Gambit’s own magical negro.

Credit must be given where it is due, Moses Ingram’s portrayal of Jolene brings range, heart, and once again, heaps of nuance to a character trope as old as white cinema. The magical negro is more of a plot device than a fully fleshed out character, often a Black woman who is used by the white protagonist to develop into his/her own full potential. We first meet Jolene in the orphanage, her character introduction is faceless – plenty to unpack there – as she screams profanities offscreen. This is another controlling image in use: the angry Black woman – even though Jolene is still not an adult yet, but adultifying Black girls is another one of Hollywood’s favorite pastimes.

After that introduction, Jolene befriends a friendless Beth and even saves Beth pills when the orphanage stops giving them out and Jolene sees that Beth is experiencing withdrawal. Jolene is always there for Beth and then Beth is adopted and we don’t see Jolene again until Beth is at her rock bottom, with no one to help her. Jolene magically appears at Beth’s doorstep to pick her up and get her back in chess playing shape. But now, Jolene is presented with yet another controlling image – and one her character even self identifies with: the “clean Black woman.” Jolene describes this ideal Black woman as one who is smart, polite, and classy – these traits align with the traits of the “mammy” used oft throughout Hollywood.

The “new and improved” Jolene takes Beth to the funeral of Beth’s beloved Mr. Shaibel, offering emotional closure there, before playing a game of racketball together and offering Beth the money she needs to fly to the tournament in Russia.

In a lazy attempt to sweep the magical negro-ness of Jolene’s character under the rug, Allan Scott and Scott Frank have Beth call Jolene her “guardian angel” to which Jolene objects. But then, Jolene contradicts this objection by saying that she lived her whole life thinking about Beth when it is clear Beth did not do the same. The cherry on top is that a line of Jolene’s dialogue is literally: “One time, I was all you had and for a time you was all I had.” An interesting grammatical choice given that this is the same character who at 15 or so said the phrase “You’re experiencing withdrawal symptoms” and is both a grown woman and a lawyer.

Even more interesting is that while Beth is born and raised in Kentucky, she doesn’t have an accent but Jolene and Mr. Fergusson – the only other Black character in the entire pasty show – both drawl more than any of the other supposed Kentuckians on the show. Which brings us to poor Mr. Fergusson (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who says little and recites useless Bible verses without any character development that is generously allotted to the other employees of the orphanage. It is as if Allan Scott and Scott Frank were trying to meet some sort of Netflix diversity quota by having an integrated orphanage and two Black characters with speaking roles who appear in approximately 3.5 episodes. A chessboard has more diversity and accurate world representation than this show.

Speaking of inconsistencies – and no, I won’t even address the poor lighting, pacing, and coloring that left the show blanched in some spots and migraine-inducingly orange and blue in others – let’s talk about Beth’s mother. Beth’s mother is bad because she kills herself and tries to kill her daughter. Beth’s mother is crazy because she cries a lot, is obsessive and suicidal, and...well I don’t know, she just looks crazy right in that Hollywood iconographic “crazy” way?

No diagnosis or explanation are ever given, even though the flashback in the car with Beth’s mother is a reoccurring motif on the show – but from that flashback, we can definitely ascertain that Beth’s mother was bad and crazy because all crazy people are bad. I assume by this point, Allan Scott and Scott Frank were so exhausted from assigning Beth all of the trauma and making sure Jolene could resolve it all, that they forgot to add dimension to yet another female character. But that’s okay, it’s not like people are going to conflate this show as a feminist film text or anything...

In the hellscape that was 2020, The Queen’s Gambit is a fitting final release: an overhyped, mildly toxic, and sloppy product of cis straight white men who were definitely paid and praised way too much to make it. I am happy for chess lovers to have a Netflix show that they love and even happier for there to be a female protagonist in such a show. However, this show is not great, it is not even good. It is shallow, full of contradictions and tropes, and just poorly written. If you like watching four uncompelling and hardly differing chess montages per dragging hour long episodes in bad color corrected hard light as the female characters hold less dimension than the pieces of chess that appear on the ceiling, go for it.