Loneliness and Romance in The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit garnered over 62 million views in its first month.  It was the top limited series ever produced by Netflix and even made it onto Obama's "best of 2020" list.  Yet, many critics were split.  They gushed over the lusciousness of the set, the shots, and especially Anya Taylor-Joy, but they denounced the message it sent -- the celebration of Beth Harmon as feminist icon and female genius.  "Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty, and there is no story about her that can be told if she is", Sarah Miller writes in the New Yorker.  It's not just her prettiness -- but the sheer confidence that goes along with it, the feeling that Beth has already achieved everything, that makes Beth an unsympathetic character for many females.  In Torturing Geniuses, Professor Agnes Callard writes that it is ridiculous that audiences admire Beth when they wouldn't actually want to be friends with her.  She treats her male supporters as tools, runs out of the Apple Pi gathering without a goodbye, and reacts childishly upon losing.  In this way, Beth is no better than toxic male geniuses we laud.

I also disliked Beth at first.  But her loneliness hit home for me, as did her inability to trust others.  In elementary school, my parents took me to a doctor to see if I was autistic.  "She reads a lot of books", they said.  "She doesn't have any friends".  In high school, I forced myself to eat lunch at a table with other people.  I joined the cross country team.  Nothing helped.  I invited other people to hang out with me, and they did.  But they never invited me.  I watched their birthday parties on Facebook.

In The Queen's Gambit, Beth starts life abandoned by her own parents.  As other girls at the orphanage are chosen for permanent homes, Beth remains.  She enters high school without a friend.  No one understands her and she doesn't understand them.  In interviews, Anya comes back to this again and again -- "One of the things I connected to most was that Beth was so lonely".

So, Beth is rude and selfish and callous -- because she has learned to trust no one and because she believes she is fundamentally unlovable.  At least, through chess, she has some way of controlling her life.  "It's an entire world of just 64 squares.  I feel safe in it.  I can control it, I can dominate it.  And it's predictable.  So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame".  In later years, Beth creates her own loneliness.  She doesn't make friends because she doesn't try.  In my own life, I have learned I must believe people want to be friends with me to act in a way so that they do.  In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Beth believes no one but herself can truly support her and shuts out those who do.

Beth is weird.  She never really considers what people want to hear.  Her speech is a direct line to her brain, without extra words or smiles that would soften the message.  She knows what she wants, whether it be pills or a chess magazine or clothing, and she takes it.  Her chess is her obsession.  And so it is magical when another character enters her world and connects.  At the highest levels, chess is a game, but it's also a debate, a dance.   It's one plane of 64 squares and 16 pieces that connects two minds.  "There's so much energy between people, and sometimes it's romantic and sometimes it's not", Taylor-Joy explains, "and that doesn't make it any less special. It just means that it's harder to categorize."  The romance is in the dresses, the music, the expansive shots, but also on the chessboard.

In the end, Beth borrows a trick from the Soviets.  "...they play together as a team", Benny says.  "They help each other out".  There is a romance in that, too.  "We are taught to experience our traumas, like our material conditions, as a personal burden: our own responsibility. We are subjected to our lives, encouraged to learn strategies for enduring them—alone", Sam Adler-Bell writes. But it is Harry that finds Beth when she falls.  It is Jolene that picks Beth up onto her feet.  It is Benny that drills her day in and day out, while tickets pile up on his car.  It is Townes who helps her finally flush the pills.  And all of them subsume their own egos to work for Beth and cheer her on.  Adler-Bell continues, it is working as a team, "taking the risk of interdependence for the promise of self-sovereignty...that is heartbreakingly beautiful.  Romantic even".