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Chess has generally been recognized as a male-dominated game for centuries that have left women out of the equation. However, the newly released Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit works to overturn that outdated stereotype with their powerful female protagonist Beth Harmon, played by the incredibly talented Anya Taylor-Joy. Some of us might be familiar with Anya Taylor-Joy’s other television and theatrical appearances, such as her infamous role in the 2015 horror film The Witch portraying the devilish young woman Thomasin. Taylor-Joy’s new role as Beth Harmon is quite the departure from her previous repertoire of horror films, but she easily adapts to this new role, and The Queen’s Gambit will leave you hooked.
The Inception of The Queen’s Gambit
Following the recent trend of book-to-screen adaptations, The Queen’s Gambit was originally a novel written by the late American author Walter Tevis in 1983. Sadly, Tevis was unable to experience the full extent of his novel’s success as he passed away shortly after in 1984 from an ongoing battle with lung cancer. It is also important to note that Walter Tevin was an English professor at several American universities and was a major proponent for women’s rights. Given Tevin’s progressive stance on politics, it should come as no surprise that he would make Beth Harmon such a strong female protagonist.
Interestingly enough, Netflix was not the first production company to show interest in adapting The Queen’s Gambit. Before Tevin’s death, he worked closely with a journalist from The New York Times, Jesse Kornbluth. The journalist and Tevin were attempting to adapt the novel into a screenplay. Still, this project never came to fruition as financial difficulties arose shortly after Tevin’s death (( “The Queen’s Gambit (novel).” 2020. Wikipedia.com. 2020. )). There were a couple more attempts at an adaptation in the early nineties and the early two-thousands, but the only successful adaptation has been with Netflix.
Analysis Of Beth Harmon
The underdog always impairs the audience’s heart, and Beth Harmon is the perfect example. Beth’s first sign of being the underdog occurs when she is orphaned at the age of nine. Afterward, her story continues with discovering her unmatchable chess talents and eventually ends with Beth becoming a Grandmaster. Both the novel and the Netflix series take place in the 1960s, a time when the fight for civil rights was at the forefront of America’s history. The Queen’s Gambit is a fictional story, but the series manages to capture the overall ambiance of this timeframe and accurately depicts the struggles many Americans encountered.
The Great Loss
The show highlights Beth’s formative years of life, from her birth in 1948 in rural Kentucky to her time spent at an orphanage in the late 1950s. Tragedy also seemed to follow Beth at all stages of her life. The first tragedy occurred when Beth was five years old; her father abandoned the family and left a scar on its dynamic. However, the ultimate devastation that occurred was the car accident that left Beth an orphan.
After Beth’s father abandoned the family, her mother could not mentally or emotionally recover from the incident. This incident drove her mother into madness, quite literally. In an attempt to escape the trauma, Beth’s mother took them on a drive over a bridge and intentionally drove into an oncoming vehicle. This intentional maneuver killed her mother upon impact, but Beth miraculously survived with no visible injuries. This event marked the beginning of Beth’s life as an orphan.
Beth Harmon: The Orphan
Once Beth is in the orphanage, aptly named The Methuen Home, she is faced with adversity and forced drug addiction. The 1950s and 1960s were known for their experimentation with drugs, both recreational and prescription. However, given the experimentation component, these drugs had not been studied long enough to understand the full extent of damage they could cause.
When Beth is first presented with her daily pill regimen, she is skeptical but must take them to evade any disciplinary action. Upon taking the pills, Beth becomes quite drowsy and unable to function properly, as these pills are classified as narcotic sedatives. Some of the other girls notice Beth’s adverse reaction to the pills and advise her to hide them and take them at night instead. This advice is provided by longtime Methuen House orphan Jolene, played by Moses Ingram.
After this exchange, Beth and Jolene ally and continue to look out for one another as the story progresses. Arguably, Jolene takes on an older sister’s role for Beth and provides her with much-needed advice and tender care. Without Jolene, Beth would not have been able to survive the orphanage or the woes of life.
An Unusual Alliance
Beth forges another unlikely friendship while at the Methuen Home with the orphanage’s janitor, Mr. Shaibel, played by Bill Camp. Mr. Shaibel’s character leans toward the grumpy “old” man trope, which is a bit predictable but works well in this series. She becomes bored with her day to day school activities, so Beth seeks out adventure and wanders down to the orphanage’s basement. This is where Beth has her first encounter with Mr. Shaibel and the game of chess.
Quite surprised at Beth’s arrival, Mr. Shaibel greets her in an unfriendly manner, but Beth does not give up on their friendship easily and continues visiting him daily until he offers to teach her chess. This scene proves to be a pivotal turning point of the series by allowing Beth to give her life additional meaning and take on a role that challenges gender stereotypes of the 1950s.
Beth’s Gift And Curse
Soon after Beth starts to play chess with Mr. Shaibel, he realizes that her talent is unmatched and decides to contact a colleague who is also an avid chess player. Upon meeting Mr. Shaibel’s colleague and Beth, they both seem perplexed by Beth’s talent and discover that there is something quite special about her. However, the driving force behind Beth’s talent is her use of narcotics, which the series alludes to being some type of sedative. Instead of sleeping at night, Beth takes massive doses of her sedatives and stays up to play chess matches with herself on an imaginary ceiling board.
Beth’s drug usage implications become apparent when the orphanage suddenly bans the amphetamine, and Beth begins to suffer withdrawals at the age of roughly eleven years old. Desperate to get her hands on the drug, she breaks into the pill storage room and steals hundreds of pills. While filling her pockets with pills, Beth simultaneously shoves them into her mouth, which does not end well. After the entire orphanage witnesses Beth’s stunt and overdose, there is no doubt that she is suffering from a severe drug dependency.
Fast-forward to Harmon’s early teen years, and she is now quite an accomplished chess player, but still uses the drugs to get an edge on her competitors and enhance her skills. In many underdog narratives, drug use is present and is generally followed by a swift recovery, leading the protagonist to success. This is where Beth differs from the quintessential underdog, as none of Beth’s addiction was on her own accord. The obvious parties at fault for Beth’s addiction were the state and the orphanage, as their negligence put a child directly in harm’s way.
Beth’s Second Life
After all the trauma that Beth has endured, the audience wants to see some reprieve from this vicious cycle. This reprieve comes in the form of the Wheatley’s, a seemingly normal middle-aged married couple who have no children of their own. But, as the age-old saying goes, never judge a book by its cover.
Meeting The Wheatley’s
At this point in the series, Beth has spent somewhere around five to six years in the Methuen Home and has yet to be adopted. Statistically speaking, the sad reality for children in state custody; whether it be an orphanage, foster care, or a group home, the older the children become, the less likely they are to be adopted (( “Adoption Data 2016.” 2020. U.S. Administration For Children & Families. www.acf.hhs.gov/cb. )). Beth was able to escape this statistic due to the media exposure from her chess tournaments. This exposure eventually attracted Mrs. Alma Wheatley, played by Marielle Heller, and Mr. Allston Wheatley, played by Patrick Kennedy. On the outside, the couple appeared like an ideal match for Beth; well put together and seemingly financially stable, but that was not the case.
Once Beth settled into her new home with Wheatley’s, it became clear that there was quite a bit of tension between the husband and wife. Allston Wheatley is a traveling businessman who is never home, and the wife, Alma Wheatley, is a lonely housewife with a drinking problem and a fellow narcotic abuser. Almost immediately after Beth’s arrival, Allston spends less time at home and eventually separates from Alma to live out his double-life in Denver.
The Dynamics Of Beth And Alma
After the devastating split from Allston, Alma knows that she and Beth are in dire need of cash. Out of curiosity and desperation, Alma begins entering Beth into chess tournaments in hopes that Beth will be able to procure some money for the family. Luckily for Alma, Beth shows up her competition and becomes the sole source of income, and they are able to live quite comfortably. However, given these circumstances, Beth continues to perpetuate the narrative of the underdog.
At any given point in the series, Beth has estranged relationship dynamics with women. The first relationship she has is with her Mother, which ends tragically, then her friendship with Jolene that is left at the Methuen Home. Finally, her relationship with Alma also ends in tragedy. All of these interactions with women have impermanence about them. The fragile nature of these connections never allow Beth to fully access femininity but is possibly why she can operate so well in the male-dominated realm of chess. Following the pattern of Beth’s ups and downs, her highs must always be met with a low.
During an important match in Mexico City, Alma stays in the hotel room, unable to make it out of bed, and suddenly passes away. The Mexico City coroner states that her untimely death is due to Hepatitis, which does make sense in lieu of Alma’s heavy drinking and drug use, but I’m not sure that it is the only cause. Alma’s death had an ominous air of suspicion surrounding it.
Immediately before this, her romantic Mexico fling had suddenly left her, and Alma was heartbroken by the occurrence. Before the news of Alma’s death, there was a scene where Alma was staring at herself in the mirror, noticing all of her imperfections, and this is the main reason why I suspect that Alma’s death might have been self-inflicted. But, this is all speculation as the series does not elaborate on the subject.
On Her Own Again
Being alone was something that Beth had become accustomed to. Over the course of the last few episodes of the series, we see Beth resort to some of her old ways as a means to cope with the reality of her situation. But, she does not allow this tragedy to derail her burgeoning chess career and instead uses it to her advantage to become unstoppable.
Alma’s death also works as a catalyst for Beth to discover her inner-self and process the trauma that she has experienced. It was a sobering wake-up call to shed light on the realities of long term drug use and alcohol abuse. Since the age of nine, Beth, a drug user, now realized she needed to straighten up her act and break this vicious cycle. Despite all of the sadness associated with Alma’s passing, this was the only way Beth could actualize the full extent of her greatness.
The “End Game”
Beth has many formidable opponents throughout the show, but the most feared was Vasily Borgov, the mastermind chess player from Russia played by Marcin Dorociński. The serious and downright frightening Borgov keeps Beth on her toes throughout their first match in Paris. Still, Beth is unable to stay focused due to her previous night’s activities (this is right before Beth chooses a healthier lifestyle), and they must reschedule the end game. The end game is set to take place in Russia on Borgov’s turf; by accepting this proposal, it is quite the power move on Beth’s behalf.
Continuing to solidify her position of resident chess “baddie,” Beth beats Borgov in the final match with only nineteen moves and does so without the use of pills, crowning her the new chess Grandmaster. Regardless of the chess win, this match was more significant than that. It proved to the audience that Beth was able to conquer her personal demons and find some solace in her hectic life, which allows her to occupy the space of the ultimate underdog.
What To Expect In The Queen’s Gambit’s Future
The season finale of The Queen’s Gambit leaves the audience in suspense, as it is unclear where Beth ends up after the final match. Some speculate that she may have stayed in Russia or that she ends up back home with her friends, but the one clear takeaway is that there will likely be a second season for the hit new series. So, go ahead and treat yourself to a binge-watching sesh of The Queen’s Gambit and immerse yourself in the crazy world that encompasses Beth Harmon.
