Space of Play: “The Queen’s Gambit”
When “The Queen’s Gambit” was released in October 2020, most reasonable and responsible people had endured some form of confinement for the better part of a year, abstaining from social gatherings, working from home if possible, and limiting trips to the grocery store or beyond. As I write this, the long-anticipated COVID-19 winter spike is still on the upswing, with no end in sight even if a vaccine is rolled out soon. Holiday plans are canceled, and many are hunkering down for a long, dark winter.
Netflix and other streaming services have been a welcome distraction in a year when theaters and concert venues are shuttered, sports canceled or delayed, and bars and restaurants closed or operating at severely limited capacity. Surprise-hit TV shows are one of the few media events that can still draw people together — if only virtually — in a year when many social interactions are discouraged or forbidden.
“The Queen’s Gambit” would likely be a hit in any year: inspiring underdog stories always resonate, and I can’t remember a time when the 60s retro aesthetic was out of style. The show is elevated by a great cast, sharp writing, and excellent production values all around. It’s mostly apolitical, a welcome escape from the endless election news. I believe it’s hit a nerve for all these reasons, but in my interpretation it’s found such resonance for so many people because it’s a story about escaping confinement, of a gradually-expanding world, whose contours are revealed by the protagonist as she pokes at the boundaries and questions the rules and structures that confine her. It’s a story about exerting control over space. As protagonist Beth Harmon moves up the hierarchies of the chess tournament world, she also moves out into the physical one. The show concludes with her movements unbound.
The first episode clearly establishes the show’s spatial stakes. After a brief flash-forward, we join a young Beth in the orphanage, where she is shown the basic layout of the building before being led to her bed, one of many identical beds in a grid. Her only private space is her bedside cubby, and even this is left unlocked. Her movements through the building and grounds are limited by locked doors, fences. When she discovers her future mentor, it’s in a basement room she can only access when he has unlocked it. When Beth steps outside, she and the camera can see the high school kids beyond the orphanage gates, but she can’t go to them. Beth chafes against these restrictions, and her natural willfulness leads her to test the boundaries of her constrained world. She checks locked doors, and makes excuses to visit the basement. In the epic conclusion of the first episode, she breaks into the orphanage pharmacy when her supply of opiates is curtailed. The camera generally mirrors Beth’s point of view — first glancing into or beyond the spaces she can occupy, then transgressing the boundaries.
Beth’s explorations are intercut with her training in the rules of chess. She asks her reluctant mentor the name of the game, but she observes and intuits the rules of the pieces’ movements, and then studies famous games and complex sequences and scenarios and quickly proves she has an innate skill for the game. Soon, she is learning the rules and norms beyond the board, like how to cycle through in simultaneous play when she is invited to play the local high school chess club, or how to use the clock in a timed tournament match. While Beth learns the official rules of the game, she is simultaneously learning how she is expected to behave in male-dominated spaces of play. Much of the show’s appeal lies in seeing Beth discover these social hierarchies, then find ways to surmount the barriers — mostly assumptions and microaggressions — that are placed in her way.
Over the course of the series, Beth grows from a drugged and isolated child to a professionally-confident but personally-hesitant young woman to, finally, a balanced, healthy adult, engaged in her community. Beth’s arc is reinforced by the sets, as each new stage of character growth is accompanied by a new setting. In an early orphanage scene we see a map of Kentucky on the wall; later a map of the world is seen in a Cincinnati hotel room. On arriving at her adoptive home, Beth is surprised at the size of “her” room — done up in eye-searing floral pinks — a private and secure space of her own. When Beth’s adoptive mother dies, she rebuffs her adoptive/estranged father’s attempt to retain the house; she redecorates.
Beth’s domestic spaces expand over the course of the series from unlocked cubby to bedroom to house; the spaces of competition do so as well. When Beth is invited out to the high school, she is promptly returned to the orphanage, but when she reaches a regional competition, she phones her adoptive mother in the hotel, and proceeds to party with college students. The space of play expands from the basement, to the high school classroom, to a college lecture hall, then to a series of international hotels, where chess boards are set throughout lobbies and hotel restaurants. We see Beth visit ever-more-exotic locales for these tournaments: Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Paris, and finally Moscow, where the space of play expands to encompass the city, for the amount of excitement her visit generates.
Beth’s “space of play” continuously expands in all aspects of her life: the physical spaces mirror her ever-expanding agency and her growing emotional availability. In one key scene, Beth is interviewed by Life magazine. While posing awkwardly with her trophies, she reveals this, in an unguarded moment:
It was the board I noticed first. 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.
By the conclusion of the series, Beth has moved past this naive worldview, moved literally out into the world, and allowed her friends and colleagues into her head and heart. When she ditches her government handler in the final scene, she’s demonstrating that her conception of the world now goes far beyond the board, that her moves through that world are no longer constrained, but I think the key scene comes earlier, when she gets advice from her conclave of former rivals, who’ve banded together to pool their collective talent for her advantage in the concluding match. She’s no longer confined, but more importantly, she’s no longer alone.
The show is not perfect. Secondary characters are generally one-note and poorly developed, serving only as temporary foils or advisors. Beth suffers only minor setbacks in her life or career: she only loses a handful of games; her adversaries become supportive friends all too quickly; her rock bottom is a bad hangover and dirty underwear. The biggest miss in the writing is that Beth’s addiction is treated as a choice, not a medical condition, which she overcomes too easily, without withdrawal, relapse, or consequence. The creators pass on the opportunity to explicitly connect Beth’s self-medicating tendencies to her illusions of control. She is self-aware enough to see the board as a world she can control, but she never acknowledges how her addiction feeds her narcissism and keeps her isolated. This is there as subtext, but I feel a stronger connection could have been made.
Ultimately, the show succeeds because it is a compelling character study, and because so many of the various elements of film-making have come together to reinforce the central character’s arc. In Beth Harmon, we see a woman constantly questioning the boundaries of her world, and taking action to expand it, an appealing prospect any time, but especially today, when the audience is starved for human connection and an expanded space of play.
12/7/2020
