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feminist-propaganda · 3 years

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Single Mothers Will Probably Cry During Every Episode Of Queen’s Gambit - Episode 1

I’ll start this long piece with a quote by Toni Morrisson. She once said : “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

After watching Queen’s Gambit yesterday I rushed to the Internet to see if someone had written all of the things I am about to write, all of the symbols I saw in the miniseries, all of the dog whistles, the references. I found articles about chess. About how the community had adopted the film, about which grandmasters the characters were based off of, about chess moves and theories, about production and the unexpected success of the series.

According to me, this is quite mediocre commentary. I eventually clicked on the New Yorker article that seemed to be a tiny bit smarter. After a couple of paragraphs I realized that the male writer was only going to rant about how the actress is “too pretty” to be Beth Harmon, and this seems to upset him. A lot.

But no one talked about Beth’s mother. Or the name of the series. Or the embroidery. The chess board. The tranquilizers. The math. The flashbacks. The exchange of queens. The sacrifice of the queen. Did no one see it? Or is it again one of those things; where the world is so obsessed with single mothers and representing them as huge, massive, quite literal train wrecks, but no one actually wants to look at them in the eye, talk to them, help them?

Let me tell you, as a single mother, this miniseries had me in tears the whole time. It’s really difficult to watch. It’s downright triggering.

Single mothers like to keep their silence. That’s because we know the world doesn’t like it when we start talking. It hurts. A lot. So instead, the world likes to make memes about how single moms are whores, how they are drunks or over worked. How they’re psychotic. How they ramble. They don’t make any sense. Bipolar. Crazy. How their children stare at the television all day, the way they microwave bad food. We laugh at them, and use them as comical relief in our ... what exactly? Cultural objects. Then we move on. We send a message to single mothers when we do this, and the message is important. You suck. Shut Up. Don’t exist. It’s your fault.

We make an entire mini series about a single mother who killed herself to save her kid, we put on the television images that hurt and harm single mothers and then the public responds with nothing. They don’t even bat an eyelash. Miss the point entirely. Great series about chess! Except it’s not about chess. Not at all. It’s about raising children alone, when the world hates you. It’s about a trailer. In the middle of nowhere. A strong willed woman who was a mathematician in the 1940s. Who taught her daughter everything she could. Realized she couldn’t do more. And made the ultimate sacrifice, the queen’s gambit. The riskiest, most reckless, bravest move of all.

So let me tell you about what it’s like to watch Queen’s Gambit when you’re a single mother. So that somewhere in the AI, it’s written. So that when our great grand children will try to understand our times, they’ll read it.

I’ll write an essay for each episode. And in each essay I will review the important lession that Alice passed on to young Beth, and how this takes her to Moscow, where she can live a much more fulfilling life than in the U.S.A.

Lesson 1 : Find A Two Dimensional Algebric Plane. Study It. Control It.

I recently learned from instagram user @itllbeokbaby and Amsterdam based artist and weaver Liza Prins that the words textile and text have the same origin as the word texture.

Text derives from the Latin textus (a tissue), which is in turn derived from texere (to weave). It belongs to a field of associated linguistic values that includes weaving, that which is woven, spinning, and that which is spun, indeed even web and webbing. Textus entered European vernaculars through Old French, where it appears as texte and where it assumes its important relation with tissu (a tissue or fabric) and tisser (to weave).

Women have been weaving, beading, sowing and stitching since the dawn of times. We also know that women used this technology not just to create clothes, tents or shoes. They used it as a container of information. As cultural DNA.

In South America, in places where writing as we know of it was never created, women would bead important tribal information into skirts. They would then use the skirts as a database of the tribe. To track births, deaths, epidemics, droughts and other important group defining events.

In modern times, women still use embroidery as a means of expression. My memories from childhood contain strong images of my aunts and grandmothers, sewing my name and date of birth onto pillow cases, bathrobes and bedcovers. They would do this by the pool, at the bottom of the ski slopes, on the beach or in the train. They would engage into conversation as they embroidered; as this activity required some concentration, but not their full attention. It was their way of being present; but also transcending into the past and projecting into the future. They sewed our lives into the cloth.

I once heard my grandmother counting the holes in the cloth she was decorating with her beautiful colours. I asked what she was doing. She said that to build the letters on the cloth, you needed to count the squares. Two to the top, four to the right, ten to the middle, etc etc. I was quite mesmerized. I was maybe eight at the time, the same age as Beth when she loses her mother. I had started learning some math in school but somehow the math in school seemed to be presented to me as the epitome of something quite different than this excruciatingly feminine passtime.

Math was presented to me as masculine, out of reach to us girls. And now I was disovering that these women in my family were geometry experts, fluent in linear algebra, and that at a higher level, they were database account managers.

In the first episode of the miniseries, in the first couple of minutes; we discover two Beths. The first Beth is in Paris, the beautiful, the chic; the glamourous Paris. Paris will always be the undisputed capital of Fashion.

Paris is the undisputed capital of fashion not because it is the home of polluting massive textile industries like the ones in Pakistan or Zara’s empire in Spain. Paris is the capital of fashion because it is the capital of Haute Couture. And Haute Couture is custom made, sowed by hand, piece by piece, bead by bead, sequin per sequin. It is delicate. It is slow. It is sacred. It is what my aunt’s did.

It is the opposite of industrial, the opposite of a sewing machine, the opposite of an engine. The opposite of yield failures, punching in and punching out. It is lace. Delicate, personal, eternal.

The second Beth we see is the eight year old Beth, that has just lost her mother. She stands on a bridge. Two cars have crashed into one another. And she stares on at the police officers. One says “Not a scratch on her. It’s a miracle”. The other says “I doubt she’ll see it like that”.

My theory is that the miniseries explain how Beth eventually begins to “see it like that”.

The first time we see 8 year old Beth she is wearing a dress, with her name embroidered on it. It reads Beth, in pink. Feminine. Purple flowers surround it. The embroidery is delicate. It’s on her heart.

We follow eight year old Beth as she gets sent to an orphanage. In the first couple of scenes at the orphanage, we think, for a minute, that maybe Beth will be okay here. The head mistress smiles, has nice hair. Shows her around. Yes, the bed is by the lavatory, but at least she has a bed, a roof over her head.

We only start despising this new mother figure when she takes Beth to choose new clothes. Beth takes off her dress, and stares at her name, written on the front. The headmistress selects a white shirt and grey dress for Beth. She hands to her these new items, symbol of her new life, of her integration within the orphanage and later mainstream society. The headmistress then grabs the dress with the name embroidered and looks at it with disgust. Then, she says “I think we’ll burn this one” and disapears.

Beth then understands that she is no longer allowed to love her mother. That to fit in this school, this orphanage, to survive, she must let go of the embroidery and all of the things she associates with her mother. Her mother, in the words of the teacher was a “victim” of “a carefree life”. A free spirited whore, a lesbian, a witch. There’s a lot of words we liek to use to describe women who don’t conform. And Beth’s mother, as we learn, never conformed.

At night, Beth sees her mother’s eyes, she hears the last words her mother uttered before dying in the car crash. “Close your eyes”. She said it with tears in her eyes and an air of great determination. She knew what she was doing, which is something Beth doesn’t want to tell anyone. Not even her new friend Jolene. Beth’s secret is her mother wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t crazy at all.

Then, Beth discovers the board. One day, she gets sent to the basement and sees the janitor playing chess. Later in the miniseries, Beth tells the journalist from Life it was the board that attracted her. Not the pieces.

As the first episode unfolds, Beth learns that the squares have names. She learns the names. And at night when she looks up at the ceiling she sees the board. She visualizes the pieces moving on the 64 squares. She moves them in her mind and imagines all of the alternatives. What the board would look like if she moved this piece to that square. What would her opponent do then?

To the journalist of the Life magazine, Beth says that the Chess board was a universe of 64 squares, and that she could control this space. All she had to do was study it.

The board is much like the cloth that Beth’s mother Alice would sew information onto when she was a young child. You count the squares and move your material through it. As you go, you make shapes, patterns, motifs. Beth looks up at the ceiling at night and the first night, without the tranquilizers, she sees her mother say “Close your eyes” which is too painful or such a young child. A young child doesn’t understand yet why a mother would say “Close your eyes” and then crash on purpose into a truck. A young child doesn’t know about the world yet.

Alice aknowledged that she was about to do something extremely risky, that the outcome was uncertain. Alice told Beth that she was going to purposely provoke the car crash.

But when Beth takes the tranquilizers at night, and now that she knows about chess, she can transfer her love for her mother into her growing obsession with Chess. She looks up at the ceiling and instead of seeing Alice’s last thoughts, she sees the Chess board. Which is the small piece of universe that Alice controlled, when she was alive. The cloth that she sewed her daughter’s name on: “So that you’ll always remember who you are”.

#feminism #single mom #the queen's gambit

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