At one time
Chess was the reigning passion of my life, amounting almost
to an obsession. I regularly visited the chess clubs in
Old Montreal and played scrappy games with strangers on
linoleum “boards” with chintzy plastic pieces.
In time I acquired an extensive library of chess books
and fell in love with opening theory, which I studied
assiduously.
I had a chess table built for me, bought a set of lovely
hand-carved rosewood pieces, set about analyzing the games
of the masters, and played as often as I could with friends,
students and chess buffs.
Soon it seemed
I was doing little else. Montreal had become a mecca for
chess tournaments, provincial, interzonal and international,
which I devotedly attended. It was at the Tournament of
Stars, sponsored by Quebec’s major French newspaper
La Presse, that I met grandmaster Robert Hübner,
then ranked sixth in the world. We became close friends
over the years. Robert would visit me in Montreal and
twice he spent summers with my family on the Greek island
of Alonissos, where he would prepare for various international
matches. As a friendly test and on a whim, I once asked
Robert to set up the pieces as they were on the 18th move
in the 27th game of the Alekhine-Capablanca 1927 World
Championship match in Buenos Aires. It took him only a
few seconds to reproduce the formation.
By that time
chess had become the center of my life. Though I never
played in formal competitions, Robert assigned me a hypothetical
rating of 1700, which falls into the FIDE Class B category.
Eventually I came to understand chess as one of the great
metaphors for life and published a book of poems, Chess
Pieces, in which each chess piece, the various rules
and the major opening gambits, stood allegorically for
some aspect of human relationships.
Though many
years have passed, my fascination with the game has never
entirely waned. Thus, when Netflix featured the pseudo-biopic
The Queen’s Gambit, based on the Walter
Tevis novel of that title, which appears to have ignited
a chess boom across the country, I couldn’t help
binge-watching the career and exploits of chess prodigy
Beth Harmon—Tevis’ “tribute to brainy
women,” as he told The New York Times.
The series (like the book) was quite mesmerizing—a
gripping narrative of a young girl surmounting childhood
trauma to reach the pinnacle of the chess world, with
excellent production values, and snatches of games cloned
from the manuals—which many commentators have fulsomely
praised. And yet I found myself naggingly dissatisfied
with the affair. Too much detracted from the aura of authenticity
which the series aspired to.
To begin with,
although there have been (and are) amazing women chess
players, they were always few in number. This was not
because they were held back by the “Patriarchy.”
In the Soviet Union, Israel, and other nations, they were
coddled and subsidized, but never reached the status of
the very top world-class male grandmasters. The closest
any woman ever came to winning an Open World Championship
was the extraordinary Judit Polgar of Hungary, who finished
last of eight participants in the 2005 San Luis Invitational,
losing to Veselin Topalov, though she was playing White.
I have always
admired Polgar, as did Robert—but Robert never lost
to a top-seeded woman. “In the last analysis,”
he once said to me, “there is always a difference.”
“Why is that?” I asked. “Because men
are haunted,” he replied in his puckish way, “by
the betrayal in the Garden.” Perhaps more realistically,
Dinesh D’Souza refers to the Bell Curve distribution
in which men are over-represented in the standard deviation
categories. In any case, the likelihood of Beth Harmon
ever reaching the absolute summit, as in the book and
more vividly in the miniseries, is approximately zero,
but a feel-good story takes precedence over reality, especially
as it exhibits the political and cultural slant du
jour.
Secondly,
The Queen’s Gambit is predicated on the
mythological Hero Quest, in which the postulant sets out
on an adventure involving near-insurmountable hurdles,
including having to face his own inner demons. Beth Harmon’s
demons were a traumatic childhood and an addiction to
tranquilizers and alcohol, but her story does not strike
me as equivalent to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or
the saga of The Hero with a Thousand Faces or,
in the chess realm, to the inner monsters that blighted
the lives of geniuses like Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer.
Nothing is presented as her responsibility and the ravages
that should accompany her excessive drinking fail to materialize.
She remains slim, beautiful, and attractive to men and
women—the film includes the requisite lesbian scene.
She can hurt others in love relationships with an insouciant
“I do that” attitude. The Amfortas wound never
quite bleeds.
Generally
speaking, the Quest hero struggles with his fears, weaknesses,
and inadequacies, which he must labor to overcome, not
always with success; the heroine merely has to vanquish
what the world has done to her in order to become what
she is, what she always was. What we are observing is
not so much a transformation as a recovery—by no
means the same thing. The fact is that people suffer all
manner of turmoil and psychic havoc without considering
they have conquered monsters. Suffering in itself is not
a prerequisite for spiritual achievement if the cosmic
perspective is lacking.
Thirdly, chess
masters, as I can attest from experience, are rarely as
charming, complaisant, and gentlemanly as the characters
in Gambit. More often, they are churlish, vindictive,
and ruthlessly aggressive. I have seen them stalk away
from the table after a loss in a sullen or tempestuous
frame of mind. I have seen them try to disorient their
opponents by intense staring, unnecessary fidgeting, loud
coughing, disruptive pacing, and frequent breaks at critical
junctures. I once saw a grandmaster suddenly light up
a cigar and blow smoke in his opponent’s face. Robert
told me the story of one grandmaster who used a small,
winch-like pincer to remove the captured pieces from the
board, rolling the device through the open spaces to seize
its prey. The effect on the other side of the table was
profound. Bobby Fischer allegedly said, “I love
the moment when I break a man’s ego.” Alekhine
and Capablanca grew to hate one another, famously refusing
to be in the same room together, decorum be hanged. The
standard handshake, not always cordial but often perfunctory
and sometimes menacing, occasionally reminded me of the
scene in Rocky IV in which the Russian champion
Ivan Drago, instead of touching gloves before the fight
as is customary, slammed Apollo Creed’s extended
hands and said: “You will lose.” Then he killed
him.
A fourth problem
is the complete absence of narrative tension. It’s
a feminist project, after all, and the viewer knows from
the start that Beth is going to win the championship.
There is no chance that she will lose to a superior (male)
opponent, and possibly grow as a character in humility
and fortitude. The sequel is as predictable as a fairy
tale—which is what The Queen’s Gambit
basically is.
Ultimately,
as noted, the major problem with The Queen’s
Gambit is that it is a staple leftist/feminist narrative.
Christianity is mocked as a righteous platitude in the
form of two feeble-minded elderly biddies who attempt
to bribe our heroine into anti-Communist statements. Beth’s
black friend is not a raging BLM activist or intersectional
zealot but a successful paralegal, budding Civil Rights
lawyer, and sister-goddess who bankrolls Beth’s
trip to Moscow. The Soviet Union is a chess paradise filled
with kindly and agreeable people, multitudes seeking Beth’s
autograph, and elderly men happily playing chess in the
streets. Beth is lionized wherever she goes. And, of course,
in losing to his female opponent, the Soviet world champion
Vasily Borgov, already handicapped in playing Black, bestows
a tender hug and applauds her victory—as implausible
a scenario on both counts as one could imagine. The feminist
theme is metaphorically foregrounded as Borgov breaks
protocol, not by toppling his king as is customary but
handing it to Beth, the Queen, whose gambit has succeeded.
Message: the Queen is King.
The female
is unstoppable. As Tevis writes describing the end game,
“She moved the pieces with deliberate speed, punching
the clock firmly after each, and gradually Bergov’s
responses began to slow.” As we’ve seen, the
series plays all the moves and advances all the pieces
of the current cultural game: racial gratitude, female
superiority, rejection of Christianity, capitalist greed
(Beth’s adoptive father going back on his word to
deed her his house, which he then sells to her for a profit),
socialist intelligence, and the Russian accommodating
spirit.
The Queen’s
Gambit is not so much a multi-segment movie as a
kind of documentary propaganda for the leftist/feminist
world view masking as a true-to-life story, but one that
could never happen. As D’Souza says, it is an enjoyable
fictional portrait that “appeals to fantasy.”
Beth Harmon is, so to speak, now in harmony with her real
self, having found peace without sacrificing an iota of
her talent. The best parts of the series, however, are
some of the chess sequences, modeled on the games of other
chess maestros, for example, Vassily Ivanchuk and Patrick
Wolff at the 1993 Biel Interzonal and possibly the historic
1972 battle between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in
Reykjavik, so far as I can detect the moves in the speed
cuts and camera angles—though I can’t be sure
about this. In any event, these moments are the nearest
the story ever comes to the truth.
