In the magical year of 2020, the timely appearance of “Rear Wing Deserters” not only soothes the heart with its cool drama, but also carries a sense of optimism and hope.
According to the fashionable words, “Rear Wing Abandonment” is a big female drama. As the absolute protagonist, the woman is the one who has to overcome all the thorns, kill all the people and finally grow up. In the poster, the heroine’s sharp, cold gaze is directed at her opponent and the audience over the wine and medicine bottles on the chessboard, with the title implying “Queen”. The audience will be delighted to follow the heroine’s heroic life and take a breather in the magical year of 2020 with this drama.
However, it cannot be denied that NETFLIX’s drama has a completely different pace and mood from many of the main dramas. It’s light, and in the play, the heroine seems to have shades of the angel Emily, who has pain, but more than that, she is openly devoted. She experiences a lot of misfortune in the world, but misfortune to her, sometimes seems like a breeze. She is strong enough, not because she suppresses herself, but because she has a more calm and clear judgment of life itself.
In terms of plot, the play straddles every cliche. No horrific sexual assault, no hysterical romance, no sisterly rebellion, even drug addiction is just a pale backdrop to the heroine’s completion of herself. Miraculously, it’s done so beautifully that the life she has mastered in the world of chess is exciting enough without any clichéd plot devices.
Chess is Life
Based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, this drama tells the story of a talented young girl against the backdrop of the Cold War, her transformation from the basement of an orphanage to the world’s top chess player, and her struggle to break the female professional ceiling in the male-dominated world of chess.
The real social atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s is restored, and the fluency of the narrative and the subtle coordination of the audio-visual language make even the boring and professional table games seem exciting and sexy.
The “abandoned pawn on the rear wing” is a chess opening method, similar to the Chinese chess game of The “lost pawn”, by giving up the Queen’s flank of soldiers in exchange for the advantage of the situation. In contrast, the female lead, Beth Harmon, lost her mother at a young age and became a drug addict in an orphanage at a very young age, which is also a kind of tragic start in her life, but her high talent and focus on studying the chess game on the ceiling in the midst of drug hallucinations became the advantage of Beth’s rapid growth. In the first half of the series, Beth’s attack on life is as savage and fierce as her chess style.
At this point in her life, Beth has all the problems common to all geniuses: pride, eccentricity, social barriers, and disregard for the rules, so much so that the reporter who comes to interview her exclaims that there is only a thin line between genius and madness. The combination of the 64 squares of the chessboard, which she was able to master and control, and the drugs and alcohol she was using to fight off the nightmarish recurrence of her childhood: the fear of losing her mother and her subconscious tendency to self-destruct. While the media was always making fun of Beth’s womanhood, praising her for breaking the male dominated world, she felt disdain: “The stories were always about me being a girl, it wasn’t that important! “The important thing is that playing chess can be beautiful.
Life is not a game of chess, after all. Of course, everyone who plays chess wants to win, and all the planning and operations are aimed at reaching the ultimate victory. But the end of life is determined from the beginning, and the only thing that can be mastered is the process in between. A fleeting first love and a crushing defeat in her first open tournament began an awakening in Beth’s life. At the Mexican championships after high school, her adoptive mother showed Beth another possibility in life.
This story line of her adoptive mother is different from Beth’s big heroine’s. If Beth’s journey is a kind of utopian upgrade, her situation is very realistic and “low to the ground”. This is a portrait of a tragic woman. Soon after Beth’s adoption, her adoptive father completely abandoned his marriage and his wife, and the adoptive mother’s explanation implies that adopting Beth was one of the adoptive father’s premeditated strategies to get out of the marriage. The adoptive mother, who spent her time with television, alcohol, and the piano, was slowly rejuvenated by accompanying Beth on her tournament schedule, and truly developed a unique mother-daughter relationship with her.
Before the championships in Mexico, the adoptive mother has a conversation with Beth that is a rare moment of bonding between mother and daughter.
Foster Mom: Chess is not everything to you.
Beth: It’s what I’m good at.
Foster Mom: What you’re good at isn’t necessarily what’s important.
Beth: Then what is important?
Foster moms: live and grow, enjoy life, be kind to yourself, take risks.
For the rest of the tournament, while Beth is working hard to advance, her adoptive mother is physically trying to have daily fun with her boyfriend, spending the afternoon taking bubble baths and indulging in piano playing in the hotel lobby. After her boyfriend leaves, her adoptive mother quickly falls ill, as if the time she spent with him had finally given her the joy and meaning of living, but the rare and fleeting moments in her life make her suddenly fall from the clouds and become a potential problem for her to pass away.
On the other hand, Beth asked the young and energetic player what he wanted to do after winning the world championship, which was a rare occurrence. In the elevator, the Soviet players were secretly talking about Beth: “Losing is not an option for her, otherwise what is left in her life”, but what about winning? What are the options with so much life left?
Her first defeat against a Soviet chess player in Paris completely broke Beth’s heart. The shadows of her childhood, the confusion in her life, the alcohol and the drugs, all of which haunted her, were the painful mental experience she had to go through before she could beat the big boss. With the support and help of her childhood friends, Beth gradually gave up alcohol and drugs, and finally defeated the Soviet master as the inevitable result of her defeat. At this moment, Beth finally begins to enjoy the process of playing chess, the process of life, winning and losing are no longer important.
Behind the Drama
Although Beth loses her mother at a young age and has a bad temperament, she receives help from many people throughout her development as a genius, including her roommate Jolene, who is like a sister to her in the orphanage, and her mentor Xue Bo, who is kind and quiet. After becoming famous, Beth goes to the drugstore where she used to steal chess magazines as a child, and the gray-haired owner teases her, “No more stealing this time? It is implied that behind Beth’s success there are countless little people who are tolerant and supportive.
Many netizens hold a grudge against Beth for not returning the ten yuan application fee she borrowed from Mr. Xue Bo for her first contest, but that is how the brain of a genius is highly focused and attentive to details. When Eileen Chang was in college, she wrote her first Chinese essay for an essay contest in West Wind magazine, but because of the 500-word limit, the final collection of her essays was titled Dreams of Genius, but it was not well received, and the number of words in the first-place essay was several times more than the number of words in the first-place essay. According to scholars, the word limit for the essay was 5,000 words, not 500, and the most brilliant geniuses often make a mess of the smallest details.
But the subtext of the play is, of course, that it is difficult to realize in reality, so we have to watch the play to have fun. In fact, the heroine’s character is based on the talented American chess player, Bobby G., who broke the “chess hegemony” of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Fisher, by inserting the life of a male chess player into the woman’s body, is itself an indication of the weak basis of the drama’s reality. Even today, in the 21st century, it is not easy for women to break the professional ceiling, let alone more than half a century ago.
In the 1960s, when Beth was growing up, most women in the United States, even if well-educated, stayed home to raise children and run the household. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystery, American feminist theorist Friedan declared that husbands and children were not the whole world to women, and that women should be independent individuals who had the right to choose their own way of life, which was shocking at the time. After all, she herself was fired from her newspaper for taking maternity leave and was forced to return to her family, which led her to campaign for equal pay for equal work, increased employment opportunities for women, maternity leave, and abortion for women. The American drama “Mad Men” vividly shows that in the 1960s, the American workplace was exclusively a man’s world, and working women had to deal with not only sexism and sexual harassment, but usually at the cost of giving up their marriages and happiness in order to advance from entry-level positions such as secretaries and operators. In The Marvelous Mrs. Mercer, Mickey also struggles to break into the male-dominated talk show industry.
Rather than the traditional Hollywood hero narrative of switching genders to get a female audience, the series shows in suggestive detail how the same path to success can be taken by a woman. During the Mexican tournament, Beth overheard a Soviet player commenting on her in an elevator: “I hear she’s an alcoholic, and her moves are almost entirely offensive, so she can’t always be on the defensive. She gets angry when she makes a mistake and can be very dangerous”. “Replace all of them with “he” to describe a man who has achieved success in various fields, and it may be appropriate, but when it comes to describing a woman, it’s not the same thing. When a woman does not do what any man would do, she has to add the phrase “just like all women,” implying that in a patriarchal society women would be punished for simply doing what all men would do. Despicable and offensive.
Beth’s relationships with several of her chess player ex-boyfriends are also quite evocative. It’s certainly one of the coolest things about a woman who is struggling to make her way and receives a lot of help from her wonderful ex-boyfriends. But it’s important to note that if a man is helped on his way to success by a woman, it’s often with admiration and admiration, logistical help that he’s willing to hide behind a tall figure, but Beth’s ex-boyfriends have all become her underdogs and come to her uninvited, condescending rescue and declare. “You need my help.” There may be some admiration and affirmation in that help, but in the end it all translates into the following words. When possession or control in the name of “love” was not possible, these ex-boyfriends all left, leaving Beth alone.
In Beth’s darkest hour, it was the companionship and encouragement of her best friend, Jolene, who did not say, “You need my help. “You need me, and I need you, and as long as we have each other we are not orphans,” is a relationship that is truly equal and therefore can last. This sisterhood allowed Beth to truly make peace with the world.
In the final game of the century, the ex-boyfriends once again descend from the heavens to give Beth collective advice, and in the end, the Soviet chess king goes off the rails and does not make the moves that the ex-boyfriends expected, giving Beth the chance to prove herself and finish the job, truly living up to the words that her mother told Beth in her childhood: “A man will find a man. Screwing you and trying to discipline you doesn’t mean he’s smarter than you, most of them aren’t. But it makes them feel great. But it makes them feel great, they show how to do things, just let them brag, and then you do what you feel, only a strong woman can be independent. ”
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