Television: The Queen’s Gambit.

Netflix’s hit series The Queen’s Gambit reveals what genius is considered to be – and who is allowed to have it.

This review contains spoilers.

While I was writing this review, my laptop malfunctioned. I took it to the Apple store’s Genius Bar – staffed by (mostly male) technicians called “Geniuses” – to be repaired. When it became clear that my laptop was unfixable, a Genius jovially informed me that it was probably not working “because of its colour”.

My laptop is pink. I wish this anecdote were a fabrication, but this actually happened.

Netflix’s miniseries The Queen’s Gambit is about a fictional female chess genius. It raises questions about the nature of genius and, in particular, who gets to claim it. From

The Queen’s Gambit, we learn that a woman is a genius if she is hot and achieves international success in a field usually dominated by men. If her pursuits lie in more stereotypically feminine fields, she is merely a muse, a manic pixie dream girl, a mad wife.

The “tortured genius” narrative is hardly new ground in Western culture. The genius is almost always male. He comes in two flavours: STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – or the humanities. He is a mathematician whose brilliant brain frequently dances him close to the edge of insanity (Russell Crowe in

A Beautiful Mind, or Matt Damon in Good Will

Hunting). Or he is an artist whose creative brilliance is modulated by alcohol- or druginduced breakdowns and dramas (think

Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock, or every male rock-star biopic you’ve ever seen). The genius usually has an empathetic normie girlfriend who lives to support him, and his addiction and bad behaviour are excused by his talent (“He didn’t mean to hit you, he’s so absorbed in his work!”).

When popular culture has pushed against this representation, it has often applied these tired tropes to women. In Alex Ross Perry’s 2018 film Her Smell, for example, Elisabeth Moss plays the fictional rock star Becky Something, a drug-addicted musical “genius” who terrorises everyone around her, consistently ruining shows and breaking promises. The post-feminist message seems to be that in 2018 women can be anything men can be, including arseholes.

The Queen’s Gambit avoids this reductive trope, but it does fall into others. The series follows American chess prodigy orphan

Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) as she rises through the ranks of the competitive chess world during the early years of the Cold

War. Over seven episodes, Beth pirouettes between pill and alcohol addiction, sartorial self-actualisation and international chess mastery. She becomes an unwitting symbol of the United States’ exceptionalism as the atypicality of her gender in the chess world is championed by the government and media as a demonstration of the superiority of US democracy to the Soviet state.

In most male-tortured-genius narratives, the almost inevitable addiction is treated as symbolic as well as real. As the genius relapses again and again, drugs become a symbol of the wrong way, the bad path, the unproductive alternative. Drugs are a distraction from the real work of genius.

And it’s the drugs that make male geniuses treat others – usually the women who support them – poorly.

For Beth Harmon the delineation is not so clear cut. Beth’s drug addictions don’t make her inflict terrible harm on those closest to her. Sure, she could be kinder to the gormless Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), but apart from that Beth is generally kind to those who are kind to her, including her alcoholic adoptive mother. When she gets drunk or high, her instinct is to erase herself. Might it be that male geniuses are arseholes to the women in their lives primarily because of their masculine sense of entitlement?

Moralism aside, Beth’s reliance on drugs is not totally unproductive. She first becomes addicted to benzodiazepines as a child in an orphanage, where they are handed out like lollies. As an adult, she also becomes addicted to alcohol. Benzos transform Beth’s lonely orphanage bed into a dramatically rendered dream world, where huge chess pieces glide across the ceiling like an inverted version of the wizard’s chess challenge in Harry Potter.

Alcohol allows her, even if only temporarily, to abate the boredom of living, turning numbness into feeling.

Her other addiction, chess, opens up a world in which she is on an even playing field with her competitors. Her status as a woman or an orphan is immaterial. In chess, if you learn the rules really well you can see further into the future than your opponent: as with drinking and drug-taking, you can make choices based on your ability to access hypothetical dream worlds.

Why is Beth’s success in chess rewarded while her aptitude at drug-taking and imagining is not? Let us consider, for a moment, that chess is an invented game with no inherent benefit to society. It provides players with a demarcated arena in which to hone and perform their critical thinking.

Many other amateur activities allow critical thinking to be learnt and performed: pattern-making, sewing, knitting and baking, for example, are all mathematical or scientific pursuits. However, those who have these skills are rarely lauded as “geniuses” because these are discursively feminised realms. The theoretical relationship between knitting and coding is profound, but guess how many knitters are deemed “geniuses”? Could it be that chess has cultural prestige precisely because it has no practical domestic application, and historically has been played at the highest levels by white men who have the time to sit on chairs for hours?

By the series’ end, the prevailing critical diagnosis seems to be that Beth’s drug dependency is a useless, self-destructive