Beth Harmon and the Inner World of Squares
Monday, December 14th, 2020The other day Dana and I finished watching The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s fictional saga of an orphaned girl in the 1960’s, Beth Harmon, who breaks into competitive chess and destroys one opponent after the next in her quest to become the world champion, while confronting her inner demons and addictions.
The show is every bit as astoundingly good as everyone says it is, and I might be able to articulate why. It’s because, perhaps surprisingly given the description, this is a story where chess actually matters—and indeed, the fact that chess matters so deeply to Beth and most of the other characters is central to the narrative. (As in two pivotal scenes where Beth has sex with a male player, and then either she or he goes right back to working on chess.)
I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and movies, supposedly about scientists, where the science was just an interchangeable backdrop to what the writers clearly regarded as a more important story. (As one random example, the drama NUMB3RS, supposedly about an FBI mathematician, where “math” could’ve been swapped out for “mystical crime-fighting intuition” with barely any change.)
It’s true that a fictional work about scientists shouldn’t try to be a science documentary, just like Queen’s Gambit doesn’t try to be a chess documentary. But if you’re telling a story about characters who are obsessed with topic X, then you need to make their obsession plausible, make the entire story hinge on it, and even make the audience vicariously feel the same obsession.
This is precisely what Queen’s Gambit does for chess. It’s a chess drama where the characters are constantly talking about chess, thinking about chess, and playing chess—and that actually succeeds in making that riveting. (Even if most of the audience can’t follow what’s happening on the board, it turns out that it doesn’t matter, since you can simply convey the drama through the characters’ faces and the reactions of those around them.)
Granted, a few aspects of competitive chess in the series stood out as jarringly unrealistic even to a novice like me: for example, the almost complete lack of draws. But as for the board positions—well, apparently Kasparov was a consultant, and he helped meticulously design each one to reflect the characters’ skill levels and what was happening in the plot.
While the premise sounds like a feminist wish-fulfillment fantasy—orphan girl faces hundreds of intimidating white men in the sexist 1960s, orphan girl beats them all at their own game with style and aplomb—this is not at all a MeToo story, or a story about male crudity or predation. It’s after bigger fish than that. The series, you might say, conforms to all the external requirements of modern woke ideology, yet the actual plot subverts the tenets of that ideology, or maybe just ignores them, in its pursuit of more timeless themes.
At least once Beth Harmon enters the professional chess world, the central challenges she needs to overcome are internal and mental—just like they’re supposed to be in chess. It’s not the Man or the Patriarchy or any other external power (besides, of course, skilled opponents) holding her down. Again and again, the top male players are portrayed not as sexist brutes but as gracious, deferential, and even awestruck by Beth’s genius after she’s humiliated them on the chessboard. And much of the story is about how those vanquished opponents then turn around and try to help Beth, and about how she needs to learn to accept their help in order to evolve as a player and a human being.
There’s also that, after defeating male player after male player, Beth sleeps with them, or at least wants to. I confess that, as a teenager, I would’ve found that unlikely and astonishing. I would’ve said: obviously, the only guys who’d even have a chance to prove themselves worthy of the affection of such a brilliant and unique woman would be those who could beat her at chess. Anyone else would just be dirt between her toes. In the series, though, each male player propositions Beth only after she’s soundly annihilated him. And she’s never once shown refusing.
Obviously, I’m no Beth Harmon; I’ll never be close in my field to what she is in hers. Equally obviously, I grew up in a loving family, not an orphanage. Still, I was what some people would call a “child prodigy,” what with the finishing my PhD at 22 and whatnot, so naturally that colored my reaction to the show.
There’s a pattern that goes like this: you’re obsessively interested, from your first childhood exposure, in something that most people aren’t. Once you learn what the something is, it’s evident to you that your life’s vocation couldn’t possibly be anything else, unless some external force prevents you. Alas, in order to pursue the something, you first need to get past bullies and bureaucrats, who dismiss you as a nobody, put barriers in your way, despise whatever you represent to them. After a few years, though, the bullies can no longer stop you: you’re finally among peers or superiors in your chosen field, regularly chatting with them on college campuses or at conferences in swanky hotels, and the main limiting factor is just the one between your ears.
You feel intense rivalries with your new colleagues, of course, you desperately want to excel them, but the fact that they’re all on the same obsessive quest as you means you can never actually hate them, as you did the bureaucrats or the bullies. There’s too much of you in your competitors, and of them in you.
As you pursue your calling, you feel yourself torn in the following way. On the one hand, you feel close to a moral obligation to humanity not to throw away whatever “gift” you were “given” (what loaded terms), to take the calling as far as it will go. On the other hand, you also want the same things other people want, like friendship, validation, and of course sex.
In such a case, two paths naturally beckon. The first is that of asceticism: making a virtue of eschewing all temporal attachments, romance or even friendship, in order to devote yourself entirely to the calling. The second is that of renouncing the calling, pretending it never existed, in order to fit in and have a normal life. Your fundamental challenge is to figure out a third path, to plug yourself into a community where the relentless pursuit of the unusual vocation and the friendship and the sex can all complement each other rather than being at odds.
It would be an understatement to say that I have some familiarity with this narrative arc.
I’m aware, of course, of the irony, that I can identify with so many contours of Beth Harmon’s journey—I, Scott Aaronson, who half the Internet denounced six years ago as a misogynist monster who denies the personhood and interiority of women. In that life-alteringly cruel slur, there was a microscopic grain of truth, and it’s this: I’m not talented at imagining myself into the situations of people different from me. It’s never been my strong suit. I might like and admire people different from me, I might sympathize with their struggles and wish them every happiness, but I still don’t know what they’re thinking until they tell me. And even then, I don’t fully understand it.
As one small but illustrative example, I have no intuitive understanding—zero—of what it’s like to be romantically attracted to men, or what any man could do or say or look like that could possibly be attractive to women. If you have such an understanding, then imagine yourself sighted and me blind. Intellectually, I might know that confidence or height or deep brown eyes or brooding artistry are supposed to be attractive in human males, but only because I’m told. As far as my intuition is concerned, pretty much all men are equally hairy, smelly, and gross, a large fraction of women are alluring and beautiful and angelic, and both of those are just objective features of reality that no one could possibly see otherwise.
Thus, whenever I read or watch fiction starring a female protagonist who dates men, it’s very easy for me to imagine that protagonist judging me, enumerating my faults, and rejecting me, and very hard for me to do what I’m supposed to do, which is to put myself into her shoes. I could watch a thousand female protagonists kiss a thousand guys onscreen, or wake up in bed next to them, and the thousandth-and-first time I’d still be equally mystified about what she saw in such a sweaty oaf and why she didn’t run from him screaming, and I’d snap out of vicariously identifying with her. (Understanding gay men of course presents similar difficulties; understanding lesbians is comparatively easy.)
It’s possible to overcome this, but it takes an extraordinary female protagonist, brought to life by an extraordinary writer. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few. There were Renee Feuer and Eva Mueller, the cerebral protagonists of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem and The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind. Maybe Ellie Arroway from Carl Sagan’s Contact. And then there’s Beth Harmon. With characters like these, I can briefly enter a space where their crushes on men seem no weirder or more inexplicable to me than my own teenage crushes … just, you know, inverted. Sex is in any case secondary to the character’s primary urge to discover timeless truths, an urge that I fully understand because I’ve shared it.
Granted, the timeless truths of chess, an arbitrary and invented game, are less profound than those of quantum gravity or the P vs. NP problem, but the psychology is much the same, and The Queen’s Gambit does a good job of showing that. To understand the characters of this series is to understand why they could be happier to lose an interesting game than to win a boring one. And I could appreciate that, even if I was by no means the strongest player at my elementary school’s chess club, and the handicap with which I can beat my 7-year-old daughter is steadily decreasing.