Every year, when the darkness returns to our early evening, MovieJawn also returns to the dark for our annual celebration of Noirvember! Check out all of the previous articles here.

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Past the midpoint of Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, William Tell (Oscar Isaac), a pro gambler with a bad pseudonym and a shady past, is setting at a casino bar with his manager, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish). The pair’s relationship is more than professional. They are friends first and foremost; Tell is taking on the tournament circuit as a temporary thing. Everything for him is temporary. His relationship with La Linda is based on a series of chance encounters over years of motels and mid-level blackjack winnings. At this point, the two of them occupy the frame, decompressing as the casino floor recedes out of focus and into both our and their unconscious minds, they look like they’ve known each other forever.

La Linda asks Tell what if he has plans for the next day and he gives a capitulated look with a smirk and a cocked head. “She said to me, ‘Did you ever see a city all lit up at night?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen a whole city on fire.’ ‘Not like that,’ she said.” We have slipped into voiceover—this is the only time Tell relays dialogue second-hand, through his journal.

What happens next is a fairy tale from Tell’s pen: the camera panning across a public park with its trees covered in fairy lights, passing from one young couple to the one we know. La Linda is talking about her life, how she’s been luckier than others. Just words to fill the deep night as they walk. This park is the type of setting that makes reflecting on one’s life an idle necessity. We’re moving with Tell and La Linda from behind, walking towards an arch before swooping away. Without the ground behind them, the lights swim through the screen of their own volition. Drifting off like a sentence; Tell sitting down to write the exact conversation before realizing it wasn’t the words at all, just the fact that he was floating. Floating, an aesthetic throughline for the film which stemmed from moving on autopilot through anonymous casino floors. Cinematographer Alexander Dynan talks about how location scouting influenced his steadicam technique for Filmmaker Magazine: “Gone are the days of Reno, Hard Eight-type casinos. Now casinos are owned by large corporations, and they’ve got what they think the gaming experience should be to a T. It’s all beige walls, loud carpets, and they lead you into slots and card games,” that is, the games guaranteed to lose you the most money. As Tell relates the night, it is one of his self receding into the monotony of movement.

“Paul would comment, ‘This is the same as the previous one, the one before that, and will be the same as the next one.’” Schrader has spent much of his artistic career wrestling with his Protestant upbringing in one way or another, and there’s an air of theological predestination in the capital-focused streamlining he observes. You’re either saved or you’re not; when you make your way to either the slot machines or paradise, it isn’t of your own power.

If one chooses to live as a professional gambler, one’s vocation is to be in a constant state of tension with the hand dealt by fate. But The Card Counter is not an anxious film. Looking at the film through Tell’s eyes, bad odds are taken as a given, so no point in worrying. He lays out the facts while narrating Card Counting 101, an apocalyptic ASMR: “What separates blackjack from other games is that it’s based on dependant events, meaning past effects the probability in the future. The house has a 1.5% advantage. If a player knows the nature of the cards in the shoe, he can turn the house advantage to himself.” That 1.5% advantage describes a force that’s ever-present, a friction that, while malleable, will never wholly retreat. Knowing this to be a fact of life, Tell can move easy. It’s hard to call Oscar Isaac’s expression happy , but you can approximate happiness through an alchemy of habit and false self-assurance.

Tell spent some time in prison; we know that from start. It taught him blackjack and it taught him routine. The real rug-pull occurs a little later, when he attends a hotel law enforcement convention on a whim. Behind a podium, delivering a stilted powerpoint on “Recent Developments in Interrogation and Truthfulness”, stands retired Major John Gordo, Tell’s commanding officer at Abu Ghraib. This is also where Tell (né Tillich) meets Cirk (Tye Sheridan), college dropout son of one of his former colleagues. Cirk’s father was wrecked by his actions, using addiction as an outlet, then domestic violence, finally suicide. Cirk has crocked up a plan to torture Gordo to death, thanks to sedatives and a sandbag he’s ordered online. Tell shares neither the father nor the son’s passion, just accepts that his actions have put him in the hole.

Schrader’s most recent features—The Card Counter, followed by this year’s Master Gardener—each occupy worlds so mundane that their shared premise, “what if there was a guy had one job, then got a different job?” comes off as fantastical. One can never up and switch vocations. What if a military torturer became a pro gambler? And since that presents a fundamental impossibility, we now have to ask ourselves, how are these two secretly the same thing?

To begin with, the subject of veteran rehabilition’s impossibility isn’t foreign to the Paul Schrader oeuvre. The 70’s critic’s turn to screenwriting included three veteran stories within three years: The Yakuza, Taxi Driver, and Rolling Thunder. Taxi Driver, while being “about” war in the least explicit sense, has come to be seen as a post-Vietnam film, using Travis Bickle as the ball of contradictions the war would come to represent. Veterans would return home to protest what they had done on the government’s behalf, even if by the 80’s, “the Vietnam syndrome” would come to mean military failure and a thankless civilian population. Travis Bickle is a vigilante with a broken moral compass and an alienated worker with no political awareness; if he shows “soldier” and “cab driver” to be the same vocation, it’s by way of their shared fundamental aimlessness. So America would continue to be waging war abroad when Schrader came full circle 35 years later. “You get a job, you become the job,” as fellow cabbie “Wizard” (Peter Boyle) tells Travis.

Gambling and military torture both imply clear goals. You make money, you extract information. Certain methods and rationales are required to make these goals feel realizable. You craft a narrative. In case there are no results, the narrative itself will suffice.

The “Vietnam Syndrome” wasn’t a unique phenomenon—“post-war disillusionment” has been a long-standing object of discourse. The second world war has been remembered as the last war that the US fought with a clear and just purpose, but such summary fails to capture the spectre of readjustment. There was ballyhoo from the pulpit to the printing press, all to do with what one pastor would call “the veteran type of mind” Suddenly, with victory at hand, the very qualities of grit and camaraderie that made American heroes made them suspect, potential revolutionaries. In Film Noir: A Critical Introduction, Ian Brookes outlines how pervasive the concern was, to the point of becoming formulaic: among medical practitioners, “‘veteran’ meant ‘the veteran problem’ and that ‘readjustment,’ as defined by social scientists themselves, constituted the social mechanism necessary to solve it.” And while the GI Bill was veterans organizations were established, and readjustment faded before the red scare, the cinema would make sure the file stayed open. Icons of the screen like Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place would return from the war as violent men, thieves, murderers, and traitors. Most of the time, the war existed in allusion, as with Taxi Driver. Then there are the more explicit “veteran stories”, which created a “filmic” framework for PTSD decades before it became an established psychiatric category. It’s impossible to separate “flashbacks” from ideas of “non-linear storytelling”.

In The Clay Pigeon, Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) wakes up in a veteran’s hospital after spending time as a POW in Japan. The entire staff loathes him, but he doesn’t know why (a blind veteran walks into his room and feels up his face, just to know what a dirty traitor looks like. The sadistic side of noir doesn’t get funnier than this). Supposedly, he informed on his best friend, greeted with a summary execution for stealing food. Jim doesn’t remember. Sometimes he’s plagued with headaches, sometimes with visions of a particularly ruthless guard, whip raised in caricature/close-up.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that Jim manages to clear his name. Alan Ladd doesn’t kill his wife after returning from overseas in The Blue Dahlia; John Hodiak didn’t commit murder/larceny before waking up in an Okinawa field hospital in Somewhere in the Night. We get to see the true culprit face justice; guilt, and presumably the suffering caused by war, is shouldered, because in these films, crimes are committed on an individual basis. In classic noir fashion, these are Gordian knots of shocks and dead ends. But what if crime was norm? What if war and crime were inseparable? What if America used the fantasy of individual incrimination to let the actual decision makers get off the hook for Abu Ghraib?

The thing is, The Card Counter doesn’t exactly counter this notion of individual responsibility. It is, in fact, unshoulderable. Tell goes through the motions as a self-flagellation, even a reenactment of his own crimes: When we are greeted with flashbacks, they aren’t disembodied close-ups, but wall-peeling tours through Abu Ghraib, whose use of a VR headset mirrors the use of steadicam within the present-day casinos. And while Tell will reach a violent catharsis by killing Gordo in “the world series of torture” (seriously), the film isn’t proposing a way out of atonement.

What there is, is an inescapable beauty in life. This is what Tell is resisting when he creates a predictable life for himself. I’m reminded of how Norman M Klein comments in A History of Forgetting on how noir directors “talk about L.A. like a bus driver giving a guided tour through a parking lot.” The scene I describe at the top, walking through the light display, is exactly that—Schrader gets his Pickpocket-style lightning-bolt ending in as well, but here the experience of joy is like trying to boil a frog. You don’t recognize your own happiness until it’s already happened—until the inevitable has happened.