Culture Desk
The Fatal Flaw of “The Queen’s Gambit”
By December 1, 2020
Netflix’s adaptation of “The Queen’s Gambit,” starring Anya Taylor-Joy, copies virtually everything from Walter Tevis’s novel, apart from its central tension.Photograph by Charlie Gray / Netflix
I picked up Walter Tevis’s novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” from 1983, at Skylight Books, in Los Angeles, sometime around 2002. It was a staff pick, and the blurb on the blue index card taped underneath said something like “sleeper gem by dude who wrote ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth,’ about an orphaned chess prodigy addicted to downers—read this now.” On the cover, Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said that he reread it “every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” I read it in two days, and over the years I have reread it probably a dozen times. From its first sentence (“Beth learned of her mother’s death from a woman with a clipboard”) to its last, it was my platonic ideal of a novel. I loved its respect for the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (“From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had done this”) and how this general efficiency made its richer emotional and physical details stand out, like brightly wrapped Christmas gifts set under a sparse tree. “Do I have to care about chess?” people would ask when I recommended the novel. I promised them that anyone who has ever felt lost, rejected, or underestimated while nurturing a fierce, mute hope that something residing deep within them might somehow save their life would love this book.
Following its début in October, “The Queen’s Gambit,” according to Netflix, became the streaming platform’s No. 1 show in sixty-three countries and its most-watched “limited scripted series” ever. (The show also appears to be responsible for compounding an ongoing, pandemic-induced chess boom, as measured in online chess activity as well as sales of chess sets and accessories.) I began watching the day it came out. I felt a twinge of familiarity in the austere rows of metal beds in the Methuen Home—the orphanage where Beth lives after her mother’s sudden death—and in the matchy-matchy décor at the home of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Wheatley, in suburban Lexington. But I could not summon any similar spark of recognition for Beth herself. As Beth’s chess career took off, I was interested in where it took her—drab gymnasiums, then grand Midwest hotels, then grander international hotels—but I did not care much what happened when she got there. At the same time I was being given the gift of seeing this imagined world come sumptuously to life, it was also being taken away, and the reason for the sense of loss was obvious: Anya Taylor-Joy is way too good-looking to play Beth Harmon.
2020 in Review
A complaint such as this one, about the beautiful performers who take the place of our ordinary book characters, is common, even tedious. The Web site TV Tropes has an entry devoted to Adaptational Attractiveness, wherein “someone who was originally fat, plain, or even downright ugly is played by a much more conventionally attractive actor.” (One writer has helpfully mapped adaptational attractiveness onto a spectrum known as the Fassbender Scale.) Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People” confused some fans who thought that Marianne, a bullied outcast in the book, was perhaps not most effectively played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who probably spends her free time modelling. I agreed with this criticism a hundred per cent, but I also sobbed through the whole series, every second of Marianne’s pain piercing my heart like a dagger carved from the finest ebony, polished to match the shine of Edgar-Jones’s eyes and hair. I guess I’ve had enough really hot friends to believe that their relationships are just as tragic and confusing as anyone else’s.
Actors Are Too Hot Hill is a silly place to die, yet the acclaim for “The Queen’s Gambit” series, which stars an actual former model, has stranded me there, unable to descend until I have said my piece. Allow me to shout from my lone perch at its summit that Beth Harmon is not pretty, and there is no story about her that can be told if she is.
We know that Beth is unattractive because it is written down. It is one of the first things we find out about her, right after she arrives at Methuen. “You are the ugliest white girl ever. Your nose is ugly and your face is ugly and your skin is like sandpaper. You white trash cracker bitch,” her bully and future friend Jolene declares. Beth does not respond, “knowing that it was true.” Beth spends her girlhood in this lonely place, her only happiness learning chess in the basement and, when she can’t, playing chess games in her mind. When she can’t sleep or concentrate, she lies awake, tense, her stomach contracted, tasting “vinegar in her mouth.” Her homeliness seems, for a while, like destiny: she watches pretty girls get adopted out of Methuen as she remains there to grow up. At twelve, she finally finds a home with Mrs. Wheatley, who is both an arguably bad parent and just what independent, chilly Beth needs. She takes the shame of feeling plain into her new life, however: “Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room between classes, her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose, she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth.”
Tevis mentions Beth’s ugliness too often for readers to imagine that it is just some routine, awkward part of childhood that slips away with puberty, like a boy’s squeaky tones settling gradually into a mannish timbre, or because some nice girlfriend—she has none, after Jolene—takes her to Sephora. Instead, Beth becomes reasonably attractive by learning to play chess and then excelling at it. The first moment that Beth is able to regard her reflection without disgust comes right after she wins her third tournament game. Some forty pages later, a chess player turned journalist named Townes tells Beth, “You’ve even gotten good-looking.” Toward the end of the book, Jolene herself, seeing Beth in magazines, declares, “You’ve lost your ugly.”
I’m not gathering these pieces of evidence to suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” is a book about looks—it’s not like in “Clueless” when Alicia Silverstone yelps, “Project!” and we soon see dorky Brittany Murphy sporting a choker, hitting on guys. Here is the book’s most explicit mention of Beth’s physical confidence as an adult: “Beth was wearing a dark-green dress with white piping at the throat and sleeves. She had slept soundly the night before. She was ready for him.” Chess helps her to inhabit her body comfortably, and this allows her to play better chess. It’s the playing-better-chess part of the deal that really matters to her.
Beth’s transformation—not into a swan, exactly, but a better-looking duckling—doesn’t need to be mimicked exactly for the adaptation to work. The problem has to do with the fundamentals of storytelling, in the tradition of Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or “Save the Cat!”—the character has to want something. Book Beth’s want is as thick as the cheap wool sweaters she wears as a child while yearning for cashmere, as thick as the “cold, pale butter” she spreads on restaurant rolls and eats as an adopted teen, after a childhood of thin, institutional French dressing. Her addiction is a great, yawning want, at first for the warmth and safety that those green downers give her and, as an adult, for the freedom sobriety will give her if she can manage to ditch them. Of course, her greatest want, the one that thrums on almost every page, is to play chess—and then to be the best at chess. Early on, having been told that she is “phenomenal” at the game, she looks up the word. “The dictionary said: ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ She repeated these words silently to herself now, ‘extraordinary; outstanding; remarkable.’ They became a tune in her mind.”
When this tune starts playing in Beth’s mind, she is still at the orphanage; the tune is aspirational. Anya Taylor-Joy, however, is singing this tune from the moment we meet her—not as a secret wish that chess can save her from poverty, ugliness, and obscurity, but as a boast. Even as an orphan, in her sweet white nightgown, elbow-checking Jolene, smiling with sexy snideness, there’s no question that Netflix Beth will land on her feet. She walks into every room like she owns it. One signature move is tucking her chin into her chest, looking up at people with widened eyes—a disdainful miming of submission.
The scene in Tevis’s novel in which Beth goes to her first chess championship, having no idea how to conduct herself or what is expected of her, is re-created almost line for line in the series. “Do you have a clock?” the boy checking in players asks, and Beth says no. He asks, “What’s your rating?” and Beth replies, “I don’t have a rating.” Tevis’s book is uninflected in some ways, inviting the reader’s projections, but we have enough information to make some good guesses as to how unpretty, anxious Beth might deliver these lines. Taylor-Joy’s tone, though, is one of impatient self-regard, in this moment and most others. She doesn’t need chess to survive. She’s a confident girl who finds everyone annoying and wears great clothes and flies off to beautiful places to be weird around guys. If she didn’t play chess and weren’t such a bitch, it would be “Emily in Paris.”
The series actually begins in Paris, with Beth waking up drunk in a hotel room. If you novelized the series, rather than the other way around, it would begin something like this: “On awakening, Beth Harmon crawled out of a hundred-and-ten-gallon porcelain bathtub and, wet clothes clinging to her perfect form, slipped instantly on the Italian tile floor.” I might have kept reading, but I would have waited in vain for any indication that Beth needed someone to bear witness to her triumph. Drama happens, she wins, she loses, she takes pills, she stops taking them, she sleeps with this guy and then that one, someone dies—but there are no stakes. Watching the show, I kept thinking, This might be an interesting, dicey, and potentially moving situation for an orphaned drug addict obsessed with chess—and then Taylor-Joy would pout a little or balance her face seductively on her hands, or employ those enormous eyes as lizards employ neck frills. There’s not a single moment when I thought, Please let this work out; please let this go well; please let Beth thrive.
I don’t mean to suggest that Taylor-Joy is a bad actress. But she exudes mattering. The core of “The Queen’s Gambit”—a young woman struggling to matter at all becomes a great chess player—might be impossible for her to play. The series copies virtually everything from the book aside from its central tension. At the end, Beth sits down in a Moscow park across from an old Russian man and a chessboard. Instead of Tevis’s line, “Would you like to play chess?,” Beth issues a command: “Let’s play.” Why ask when you already know the answer?
Sarah Miller is a writer living in Northern California.
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