To what extent did Bobby Fischer popularize chess in the United States, through and because of the cold war metanarrative? I ask because wow, The Queen's Gambit is such an interesting and thorough rescirpting of the entire Bobby Fischer story, like an alt universe retelling

What if a brilliant and damaged young American chess genius who takes on the Soviets in the 60s and sparks a new interest in the game... wasn't a rabid antisemitic cold warrior

What if instead of chess being a proxy battle for the entire cold war--as a crystallization of whether American individualism or communist groupthink produced True Genius--it turns out that chess people are all nice boys who accept defeat by a woman with grace and admiration

You might think that a period drama about a 17 year old girl who is chess genius in the 1960s would be focused on gender discrimination and her stubborn insistence on overcoming same. You would be wrong! This is a show about an orphan finding her clan.

At every stage you expect her to be dismissed, shut out, or to be met with sexist hostility. Over and over again, her opponents, once she has defeated them, turn into allies and friends. Even the Soviets LOVE her.

The fantasy at the heart of The Queen's Gambit just couldn't be more different than (and downright contradictory to) the kinds of stories that The Legend of The Genius Bobby Fischer teaches you to associate with chess genius. It's that self-realization brings you INTO community.

No spoilers, but if you watch the Queen's Gambit, notice how many times the tropes of the genre you're watching--abused orphan, girl-genius in period drama, struggle with addiction, etc--lead you to expect a horrible outcome that... doesn't come.

A small semi-spoiler: in the second episode, Beth is playing in her first chess tournament. She is out of her element, totally green, almost unbearably naive. She gets her first period MID-GAME. Does it derail her? No: it is completely fine. Strangers help her. And that's it.

This happens OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. The show constantly and very carefully gives us the small cinematic clues that something TERRIBLE is going to happen. And then it doesn't. https://twitter.com/0ctav1uz/status/1323278509213667330

But at a larger level, that's what the show is doing with The Myth of Bobby Fischer: The Queen's Gambit is saying "what if the Bobby Fischer character... didn't turn out that way? What if instead of being a hateful paranoid, the genius learned to trust and anticipate community?"

What if, instead of chess being popularized by Angry Young Man Fischer in the Nixon administration--weaponized by literally Henry Kissinger as an expression of USA! USA! USA!--a gentle orphan girl unites the chess world in communal fellow feeling during the LBJ administration

It's a small touch--and perhaps not a wholly accurate one--but setting the novel/miniseries a few years earlier, pre-Nixon, allows the geopolitics of global chess to be a bit less inflamed than in 68-72. The show wants to imagine this alternate scenario.

Coincidentally, we watch this show as we wait to find out whether the narcissistic and paranoid "very stable genius" will get another term in the long Nixonland presidency, and we've been trained by our experience to expect the worst. Our brains have become habitually paranoid.

Just as coincidentally, the show is set just before the ascendence of the Nixonland right, when it could still, in some fantasy scenario, just... have not. What if instead of paranoid, xenophobic hateful narcissists taking over the American psyche, they just... didn't?

This is also a fantasy, to imagine that there was a time "before" the United States became those things. But watching the show right now can't help but be compelling because it is a compelling fantasy, like going back in time to make it so [gestures at all of this] didn't happen.

If we want to be cynical about this show, it would be that it's a show about saying no to politics, about the fantasy in which you're invited to be a paranoid cold warrior for Jesus and you can just say no. Perhaps, even, you can just "be at brunch" instead of doomscrolling.

But even if there is no escape from politics--even in the good old days of LBJ--saying no to being a paranoid cold warrior for Jesus is certainly the correct choice! And there are few things more beautiful than anticipating hate a stranger and discovering a friend instead.

And I think part of why I don't want to be cynical about this show is that cynicism is, itself a defense mechanism, a shield against disappointment and betrayal. Part of what's so healing about this show is that it imagines/fantasizes a world in which we could take off our armor.