When Beth Harmon first appeared on camera, we were looking at a wet body. She got up from the bathtub in a panic, then saw her hangover cheeks in the mirror. Empty wine bottles were scattered randomly on the table, and there was a vague figure on the bed. It was a really bad time, and the good-looking Harmon was dazed and flustered, obviously missing something important. Who is she, an actress, a businessman. Neither answer is right, she is a chess player who is about to play an important game. At the same time, she is also a genius, the kind of genius that is rare in the world.
Just as every great game has a crucial opening, the opening scene of Netflix's latest miniseries, "The Queen's Gambit," throws viewers into a world of genius. Then the story jumped back to the starting point. In the 1950s, Harmon was sent to an orphanage after his mother died in a car accident. There he spent his childhood and was exposed to two things that would change his life: tranquilizers and chess.
Every genius needs to find that world that is destined to belong to him, and for Harmon, it's chess. Rather than saying she found chess, it was chess that found her. Harmon learned the game from a cleaner in the orphanage's gloomy basement, then began playing against himself on the ceiling with the help of a sedative. The imaginary space becomes the tangible world, and the silent chess pieces become beating living creatures. Even if the audience has no knowledge of chess at all, they can experience the joy of pure thinking. This is the first time Harmon has recovered from the grief of losing his mother, relying on his superior talent.
From then on, "Abandoned Soldier" follows a typical growth narrative, with two clues intersecting and running side by side. One of them was Harmon's path to the top in chess. In this game, she seems to be omnipotent, just need to move her fingers gently on the board, and the opponent is quickly defeated. The camera is always quickly switching between her face and the chessboard, on one side is the tense and exciting battlefield without gunpowder, and on the other side is Harmon's always calm but somewhat contemptuous expression. The brisk ticking of the timer doesn't stop as long as the race starts. For Harmon it was a sonata of victory, for her opponent it was a death knell. Clean, neat, refreshing, never sloppy, every audience can get the same feeling from the chess game.
Compared with the smooth sailing on the road of chess, Harmon's personal growth road is much more difficult. After leaving the orphanage, he was adopted by an unhappy family. Her adoptive mother, an equally anxious woman. Two people who come out of an unhappy family develop a wonderful bond, sometimes mother and daughter, sometimes lovers, sometimes exploiting each other. For each other, each other is a panacea to get themselves out of the predicament. After each game, they chatted heart to heart on the plane, or were cautiously probing.
It's a story that's been repeated a million times on screen, and the personal life of a genius is always a mess and a terrible mess. They always have a dark side in their hearts that is always followed like a nightmare, waiting to be overcome. Harmon had a premature departure from his mother and an unhappy childhood. At the same time, she also has a certain smell of destruction on her body, drug use, smoking, irrepressible shopping desire, and the alienated relationships behind her always indifferent cheeks.
As a show with a big heroine, the 24-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy interprets the genius of Harmon with a wonderful performance. Whether it's joy or sadness, you can't see too many expressions on her face. Only occasionally, a smile or a frown appeared on the corner of her mouth, and it returned to normal in an instant. It was like taking a breath from the lonely world of genius, and then returning to the world that belonged only to her.
Harmon continued to grow as he got older. It's worth noting that "The Soldier" doesn't plunge the protagonist into a self-destructive fate like other stories of genius. After the death of her adoptive mother, she gained a sublimation and began to fight for her own house in the real world. Nothing is more indicative of female maturity than owning a house, even if it's an old and tacky perception. In any case, Harmon is fighting for what he wants in the real world, rather than simply winning the fruits of victory from the chessboard.
Also as a woman, Harmon's relationship with men is changing. At first she only regarded these people as opponents on the other side of the chessboard. When the relationship gradually deepened, they entered Harmon's life, and the intersection between them changed from a chessboard like a battlefield to a living space within reach. Especially in several intimate contacts, she went from completely passive acceptance to expressing her own voice to taking the initiative to strive for it, and each time she was more active than before. She was no longer the cowardly girl in the orphanage who could only rely on an imagined chessboard on the ceiling for comfort. That's just the world of geniuses, and geniuses can't live alone forever.
This seems to be the most subtle metaphor in the entire "Abandoned Soldier", contrasting the moves on the chessboard with the lives of the players. To a certain extent, chess is the art of exchange, which requires the constant exchange of pieces to open up the situation and gain the advantage of the scene. Wang wing, rear wing, chessboard, life, every exchange is a choice. This is strikingly similar to the trajectory of Harmon's growth. Before she can achieve the final victory, what she needs to give up is her excessive dependence on talent, her hostility to life and others, and her obsession with refusing to help. It's after letting go of all this that the deadlock really opens up, both on the board and in life.
The story has completed the most important turning point here, and the rest is a natural victory, and everything that follows is just going with the flow. Harmon comes to the Soviet Union to challenge his old enemy once again. At this moment, she has three different identities, representing women challenging the chess world that has long been dominated by men; representing the United States in confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War; representing herself challenging her past self. Symbolically, in the last chess game, Harmon chose the "rear-wing abandonment" opening and won the endgame battle, which he was not good at. It was an all-around victory, and she had the last laugh on all three levels she represented.
In the process of watching the whole "The Soldier of the Rear Wing", it is indeed full of joy. Even if you don't know any chess rules at all, you can experience that adrenaline rush. But it is undeniable that after breaking away from the thrill created by the plot, "The Rear Wing Abandoned Soldier" did not leave much. Its fairness is conservative from another perspective, and it still follows the same ideas through the ages, but we still enjoy it.
Maybe we all love stories about geniuses so much that we don't get bored even after watching them a million times on the screen. Scientists, writers, businessmen, politicians, in the imagination of the audience, these people who succeeded in the end always have extraordinary talents, and at the same time are tortured by talents, unable to lead a normal life. The audience made up a group of people who only lived on the screen, and then projected their own shadows on them, hoping that these people could achieve what they could not achieve in reality.
But is there really a group of such people? Beth Harmon is a fictional heroine, Zuckerberg is far less paranoid and arrogant than David Fincher's camera lens, and other fictional works that change from reality are ridiculously large. So much so that John Nash, the prototype of "A Beautiful Mind", bluntly said in an interview: "You only know me about that movie, and it's wrong most of the time. ." Does it matter? Of course not, viewers never want to see a completely real genius, and they don't want to think that these geniuses also cook, wash dishes and go to the toilet. They need a genius with a little bit of a mortal quality, a little confusion, and then get through it with the incomparable talent. There are no special secrets, everything is easy.
What's interesting is that at the end of "Abandoned Soldiers", Harmon seems to be a mortal again. Wearing a victor's halo on her head, she walked the streets of the Soviet Union, and then started an ordinary game with ordinary people on the street. The camera stops at the moment when she stares at the opposite side, just like when she stares at the cleaner in the orphanage when she plays chess for the first time. So now and then, there is no difference between a genius and a mortal, is there?
This article was first published on the official account of Deep Focus DeepFocus, and the text and pictures have been slightly changed.
View more about The Queen's Gambit reviews
