[The problem with Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit isn’t that
Beth is too pretty. It’s how the show handles her prettiness.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT BEAUTY DEBATE, EXPLAINED  
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Constance Grady
January 7, 2021
Vox
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_ The problem with Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit isn’t that Beth
is too pretty. It’s how the show handles her prettiness. _

The Queen’s Gambit invites us to watch Beth (Anya Taylor-Joy) as
she plays chess., Phil Bray/Netflix

 

Since the limited series _The Queen’s Gambit_
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on Netflix in October, it has become one of the streaming network’s
biggest original hits. _The Queen’s Gambit_ has
dominated Nielsen’s top 10 list
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according to the NPD Group, is responsible for an 87 percent jump in
sales of chess sets over the three weeks following the show’s
premiere, along with a corresponding 603 percent jump in sales of
chess books. It is a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and a respectable
critical hit to boot.

But viewers of _The Queen’s Gambit_ have never quite managed to
agree on a central question. Everyone can see that the show is
presenting itself as good old-fashioned prestige TV — the sumptuous
production design, the lavish period detail, the heavily internalized
and literary character psychology, those are all dead giveaways.

But is _The Queen’s Gambit_ good prestige TV, like _Mad Men_? Or
is it middlebrow prestige TV, like _Downton Abbey_?

Here’s another way of asking that question. Is _The Queen’s
Gambit_ a show where all the production trappings and good acting and
showy camera tricks are telling an emotionally resonant and
thematically rich story? Or is it a show in which all of that
expensive surface-level good taste coheres into something that might
be pleasurable to watch — but is ultimately hollow, with nothing
going on below the surface?

Critics can’t seem to form a consensus. At Vulture, Jane Chu
calls _The Queen’s Gambit_ a “fake deep period piece”
[[link removed]] and
“the _Forrest Gump_ of chess,” while at the New Yorker, Rachel
Syme calls it “the most satisfying show on television.”
[[link removed]] Mike
Hale perhaps best summed up the general ambivalence on the show when
he wrote at the New York Times
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“In the end, it was an admirable package that I wanted to love more
than I did.” _The Queen’s Gambit_ seems to be — oddly, for a
miniseries that’s mainly about a girl who is good at playing chess
— critically polarizing.

To find a way into the middlebrow versus highbrow question, I’d like
to narrow our scope down for a bit. Because there’s one very
specific lens critics have been using in all these discussions of
whether or not _The Queen’s Gambit_ is actually good. And that is
what it means that Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays main character Beth
Harmon, is so darn pretty.

There’s a surprising amount at stake in that question.

Anya Taylor-Joy, her enormous eyes, and the purpose of beauty in a
period piece

[A redheaded woman (Beth) sits in front of a chess board, propping her
chin on her hands and watching her opponent.]

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth in _The Queen’s Gambit_.

 Netflix

_The_ _Queen’s Gambit_ gives you plenty of time to notice that
Taylor-Joy is pretty, because the show lives and dies by closeups of
her face. The bulk of the action comes from lonely Beth Harmon
traveling from chess tournament to chess tournament throughout the
1960s, dominating her opponents and humiliating men every time she
turns around. And the central way the show dramatizes the action of
those tournaments is by showing us Beth sitting down in front of a
chess board, locking her giant eyes on her opponent, and flicking a
piece forward.

Then she balances her chin on her hands, and the frame closes in on
her. And we are presented with a long and unbroken gaze at
Taylor-Joy’s exquisite bone structure and her enormous, staring
eyes.

Is Beth afraid? Is she contemptuous? Is she flirting? Taylor-Joy’s
face is so implacable — it’s a movie star face, a model’s face
— that in the audience, we find ourselves projecting wildly upon it.
She could be feeling anything and we would believe all of it: The only
thing that’s clear is that whatever she feels, she feels it deeply.
Otherwise why would her eyes be so huge?

Critics by and large agree that this camera trick, and its
corresponding emphasis on Taylor-Joy’s beauty, works as a way of
making chess feel exciting, intimate, and even sexy.

“The way these matches are shot — through faces, posturing, and
lingering — feels shockingly intimate. The constant shifting from
locked gazes to averted eyes feels almost voyeuristic to intrude
upon,” writes Tracy Moore at Vanity Fair
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Moore notes that “the power of all this has everything to do with
Taylor-Joy’s self-possession, which has a deer-like speed, grace and
innocence, only led by darting shark eyes.”

Taylor-Joy’s eyes “are enormous, infinite vessels of
expression,” writes Jen Chaney at Vulture
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“They are larger than planets, larger than galaxies, so large that
she makes traditional animated Disney princesses look as if they’re
squinting.”

“When she begins a game, she rests her chin on her delicate folded
hands, like a female mantis preparing to feast,” says Rachel Syme
at the New Yorker
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“staring at her opponent with such unblinking intensity that at
least once I had to glance away from the screen.” And under the
force of that stare, chess “sheds its schlubbiness and reveals a
bewitching (and, it must be said, sometimes erotic) elegance.”

But there’s another critical take on this signature recurring
closeup. Granted that it adds an erotic charge to all those chess
games. But what does it tell us about Beth? What do we know about her
character? What do we learn about the world in which she lives? Do we
learn anything interesting about her from it, besides the fact that
she is beautiful and ruthless?

Sarah Miller argues that Taylor-Joy’s prettiness combines with
Beth’s aura of competence to create a character with no apparent
vulnerabilities. “She doesn’t need chess to survive,” Miller
writes
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the New Yorker. “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_.”

At Vulture
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Jane Hu argues that a great period piece should make the past feel
both attractive and — morally, ethically, culturally, because of
what we know now, because of what we have all lived through since that
more innocent past — utterly inaccessible. “They should not make
one feel: ‘I want to go to there,’” she writes. “Instead, the
effect is more like: ‘I can never go back there again.’”

For Hu, the palpable pleasure _The Queen’s Gambit_ takes in both
Taylor-Joy’s beauty and her lavish period surroundings blocks that
disenchantment with the past from ever truly landing. “Even
[Beth’s] frequent spirals into addiction … no longer register as
moments of concern, so much as opportunities for cinematographic play
while Taylor-Joy stumbles around in her underwear,” Hu writes.
“Everything potentially traumatizing or problematic gets actively
taken up as fodder for beauty.”

There is something about the question of Taylor-Joy’s beauty that
seems to be at the center of the question of whether or not _The
Queen’s Gambit_ is legitimately good instead of merely good-looking
and fun to watch. About the question of how attractive the show’s
trappings are, and whether anything is actually going on beneath those
trappings.

When I consider that question, I find myself less interested in the
fact of Beth’s beauty than I am in _The Queens Gambit_’s
relationship to it. It’s not “is she too pretty,” but “is her
prettiness wielded effectively?”

I don’t think it is.

There’s a difference between fantasy that subverts and fantasy that
reaffirms. I don’t think _Queen’s Gambit_ knows that.

[A thin redheaded woman smokes a cigarette, dressed in a camisole,
underwear, and cardigan.]

Beth (Anya Taylor-Joy) goes into her downward spiral.

 Phil Bray/Netflix

Let’s go back to that recurring closeup shot, the one of Beth
balancing her chin in her hands as she stares down her opponent.
It’s an exciting shot, and it’s part of what makes chess in _The
Queen’s Gambit_ feel sexy and compelling.

But it is also inviting us to gaze at Taylor-Joy, her beauty, and her
inaccessibility in an ever-so-slightly leering way.

We are watching Beth because she is enthrallingly withholding, even to
the camera, and so we want to know her better. But we are also
watching Beth because she is being presented to us as an object for us
to consume. And this consumption will be all the more satisfying
because she seems to resent us, in the same way she resents basically
everyone around her, just a bit.

_The Queen’s Gambit_ consistently seems to take this sort of
proprietary pride in Beth’s beauty: See, here is this gorgeous
creature we have built and are serving up, just for you. Look at her
win these chess games with her glossy coiffed hair. Look at her spiral
downwards in her gamine underwear and her perfect smokey eye makeup
while the camera lingers on her long, bare legs. Don’t you want to
just eat her up?

For this show, the fact that Beth is both smart and a babe is a source
of continual astonishment, as though it somehow missed the entirety of
’90s pop feminism devoted to proving that it’s okay for women to
be both hot and smart. Chess reporters gawk at her sleek good looks
and assume she must be a bad player because she is so beautiful; mean
girls at her high school gawk at her chess magazines and assume she
must not care about how she looks because she is so smart.

So beautiful and so smart is Beth that _The Queen’s Gambit_ treats
her as a mythical creature of sorts: the rare woman who is Both.
“You could never be a model,” one character tells Beth. “You are
pretty enough, but you are much too smart. Models are empty creatures.
The camera lens fills them with color and texture, and, once in a
while, even mystery. But just like there is no mystery to a vacant
lot, it is just there until you put something interesting on top of
it. Models are the same. They are just what you put on them.”

Moreover, all of the men of _The Queen’s Gambit_ are similarly
astonished: as awed by Beth’s simultaneous beauty and brilliance as
we in the audience are asked to be. If at first they are threatened by
her inarguable superiority, they rapidly capitulate before her, all
the while overwhelmed by her prettiness. She’s so hot and so good at
chess she practically turns a gay man after she humiliates his rook.
“You really are something,” he tells her, looking her up and down.

Nor do the men of _The Queen’s Gambit_ ever resent Beth for her
icy and withholding beauty, her alien smarts. Instead, they respect
her. The first two men ever to underestimate her at her first
tournament become her groupies, and the first local chess champion she
ever defeats languishes in unrequited love for her. When she travels
to Moscow to play against the Soviet chess players — the best in the
world, we’re told — her posse of American boy toys stay up all
night plotting winning strategies for her to use. One of her
humiliated Russian opponents resigns by kissing her hand.

This happy state of affairs is, it should go without saying, not quite
an accurate depiction of the state of gender politics of actual chess.
“They were too nice to her,” female chess champion Judit Polgar
told the New York Times
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the way fictional men treat fictional Beth. In real life, Polgar
recalled the men who “refused to shake hands” after she beat them,
the one “who hit his head on the board after he lost.”

_The_ _Queen’s Gambit_ is not supposed to be a documentary, and
there is nothing wrong with indulging in the fantasy of a world in
which men respect women enough to be supportive and complimentary
after women show more skill and talent than them, even if that’s not
the world in which we actually live. But I don’t think that fantasy
is quite what _Queen’s Gambit_ is giving us.

Because the show’s insistence on Beth’s beauty, and specifically
on Beth’s beauty as something that makes her matching intelligence
even more remarkable, creates the idea that what is valuable about
Beth is not _just_ her brilliance. The fact that she is both
brilliant and beautiful is where her value lies. The former without
the latter would be sad and empty. But together they make her
something.

There is a potent fantasy embedded within this story. But it is an
empty fantasy that reifies preexisting power structures rather than
critiquing them. The story it tells is not “this woman is so
brilliant that she is able to smash through the barriers of engrained
structural misogyny,” but, “this woman is so beautiful that the
barriers of engrained structural misogyny simply topple before her.”
Beth becomes the exception that allows the patriarchy to continue
functioning, rather than the rule-breaker that shows us why the
patriarchy should crumble.

This conservatism, this failure of imagination, persists all the way
through _The_ _Queen’s Gambit_. It is the fault line running
through the show’s exquisite surface-level imagery. It is the rotten
hollow at the heart of the show. It’s why, in the end, _The
Queen’s Gambit_ fails to ever quite become great.

_The Queen’s Gambit_ is beautiful to look at. But it does nothing
with its beauty except ask us, again and again, to eat it all up.

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