I played competitive chess in Middle School & High School. There would have been no shortage of men (well boys) that accepted a woman player, especially an attractive one. We had to be 97% male even at the scholastic levels and that was late 70s through mid-80s.
Now I never played closed to the level of the players portrayed. But we were at the High School Championships. Maybe a thousand players from around the nation. Even the States were many hundreds. I never saw any resentment towards the girls that did play.
Few things are perfect, and I’ll agree with 8/10. But the dialog didn’t make me wince, and the plot development didn’t make me wince, and the art direction was very good, and most of the characters were decent people, so it was better than 95% of the Netflix competition.
From a realism perspective, the very idea of the -clearly- best chess player in the world to be a beautiful American woman was massively unlikely. In the history of chess there has been only one female player ranked in the top 10 (Judit Polgar), and she did not come close to matching the Russian champ. Against Garry Kasparov she had a W-L-Draw record of 0-8-3. She did manage to win one rapid game.
The American players that arose and conquered the world were Fischer and Morphy, and both of them went crazy.
However, I had no major problem with the unlikely scenario, and enjoyed the show. (The real life story of the three Polgar sisters is unlikely enough that I’ll be slow to rule out any chess storyline.)
I’ve only seen one and a half episodes so far. One thing keeps taking me out of the story. The setting is Kentucky in the early 1960s. Would black and white children really be housed in the same facility in that place and time? When Beth went to the regular public high school, I did notice that the black children had disappeared. But what about at the orphanage? There also was a black, male staff member who, while clearly not running the place, appeared to have real responsibilities and was treated with respect by the students and white staff members.
This didn’t bother me at all. There is no reason a chess prodigy COULDN’T be a young woman, and certainly many, if not all, great chess players are masters very early on. As it happens it’s never been the case that the world’s best player was a woman, but of course it could have been.
The orphanage is a private, religious facility, so sure, why not.
The New Yorker review touches on this aspect, and regards it positively:
There has been some grumbling that Taylor-Joy’s twiggy beauty—as svelte, white, and doll-like as it is—undercuts the story “The Queen’s Gambit” tells; is it not enough for a woman to beat the boys without her having to look like a Richard Avedon editorial? But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style. Beth develops a prim, gamine flair for fashion with the same studied meticulousness that she brings to the chessboard, and in the course of the show her look evolves apace with her game. She spends her first chess winnings on a new plaid dress; she grows out her blunt baby bangs and adopts a more feminine, Rita Hayworth-esque waved bob. Her covetable wardrobe, of mod minidresses and boxy crepe blouses in creamy shades of mint green and eggshell, makes her a press darling, who gets asked about her look at chess junkets.
I’ve just started watching it so have no personal observations (very much enjoyed it so far, though), but this is the New Yorker review:
Instead of being a “quiet subversion”, I regard it as savvy marketing. The 1960s glamour look was very popular in Mad Men, and following that trend almost certainly made the show more appealing to female viewers, without alienating male viewers.
My own preference would be hippie chic, but I don’t really care. Apart from the sound track and the night in the hippie pad, there didn’t seem to be much acknowledgement of the British Invasion, the anti-Vietnam movement, or the civil rights movement. But maybe I’m forgetting scenes.
As a woman of the same era, and you being a man, I suspect you didn’t see a lot. I existed in a lot of male spaces in that era, and there was never blanket acceptance. Most men were fine with a woman around, a few weren’t, and made their disapproval known.
The other thing that bothered me was the lack of Kentucky accents from the Kentucky scenes. You don’t have a flat accent if you’ve grown up exclusively in Lexington, Kentucky.
Oh, that’s fair. Every group has assholes. But I do think chess players being largely nerds and thus outsiders were more accepting than average at least.
It was probably a bit uncomfortable for the girls anyway, 19:1 ratios had to offputting in general.
I was (hell still am) a D&D player. We were absolutely accepting of girls and if a guy gave a girl a hard time he would be the one shouted down and probably ostracized.
So one of the male dominated spaced I’ve inhabited is D&D. And in the 80s the majority of groups I tried to join were not welcoming of women. (I didn’t play chess, so maybe they are different). And women today will fill a D&D message board about how toxic the environment was in that era.
OK, my experiences were different. But considering over the years how many D&D players I’ve met were not the most pleasant people to be around, I absolutely believe you.
For chess I am a lot more sure. They were plenty of girls playing on High School teams. We took 4.5 teams to the states one year and our C-team was all girls. (their decision) and they did very well. They were anchored by two players on our B team including the 1st alternate for the A-team.
That was a fun year. We won the division that year, our B-team came in 4th in a field of 12. Then we won the states and had 2 teams place top 20 I believe.
I was also the unofficial Speed Team Champ in those States. I wish I was better at real chess but I wasn’t. At least I helped the team at 3rd board that year.
Hi Mr. Glee, I’ll trust you on that. I was actually basing that judgement on what was written in the Queen’s Gambit script. Which, if I remember, was that Morphy began believing that people were trying to steal his shoes. Prior to that I only knew that he dropped out of chess, but figured that with all the decent chess advisors they employed for the series, that they wouldn’t just make that up.
Okay, just watched this over three days. Damn good TV, but not flawless. I’d agree with RickJay’s 8/10 rating for some of the reasons several different people have brought up. It’s definitely an enjoy the journey sort of story - the ending is preordained.
But here’s the thought that struck me last night after I finished the last episode and it is almost entirely a random thought. I’m not claiming this is either text or subtext. But…despite the clear implication that the State Dept. official was at Moscow less as an escort for Harmon than hoping for a chance at a hypothetical Borgov defection…does anyone get the very slightest of suggestions that the actual defection could in the future go in the other direction?
Harmon clearly doesn’t give a shit about communism or atheism one way or the other. She is fluent in Russian. She is deeply appreciative about everything Russian (except maybe the food) and its cultural relationship with chess. The semi-celebrity status with adoring fans. Being appreciated and feted with caviar and fine rooms. Her adoration of the open air chess matches in parks (granted that could be found in NYC if she looked, certainly when I was a kid). The ready excuse offered of freeing herself from a painful and awkward past.
Probably just my over-active imagination, but I do wonder .
By the way I by no means ended the show thinking this was permanent. Maybe it is just cynical me, but she was only in her 20’s and has been shown having multiple relapses of sorts before. I think you could walk away from the show thinking everything was magically okay. But I think enough has been shown about her life to leave a sense of ambiguity. I’m not so sure that at the end the show was selling the fantasy of a Beth Harmon, now fully actualized.
Much more likely in my mind instead of finding at last lifelong fulfillment, love and happiness, she just had a great and fulfilling moment. But a moment does not a life make. Maybe she had matured enough to go on with a little more stability than before. But in the story I was watching I would suspect lots of backsliding and unstable romantic relationships going forward for the rest of her life. So perhaps happier rather than happy. Which is still a good ending, but not a storybook.
I just finished watching it. Due to some resemblances to Walter Tevis’ other novel, I was thinking of it as “The Chess Woman Who Fell to Earth.” Fortunately, it went in a different direction at the end.
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