The Card Counter, Guilt, and Brokenness
The loudly patterned carpet that spans the interior of any taupe-walled American casino is likely the most exciting part of William Tillich’s day. They’re a dime a dozen, these windowless, interchangeable, so-called dens of iniquity; any excitement attributed to casinos exists solely in the expectations of the visitor. But Bill has no expectations. He once made the mistake of allowing himself to and it didn’t end well. He once made the mistake of being open. Pliable. Eager. Creative. He doesn’t do that anymore. He now lives the sort of measured existence you can fit in a suitcase. Black jacket, white shirt, gray sweatshirt, black tie; he dresses to blend in within his red, black, and green-felted world. That is to say, Bill spends all of his time playing cards. Forty hands an hour, eight to twelve hours a day, six to seven days a week. In order to keep his daily custom running smoothly, he counts cards. Never aiming to win more than he needs and certainly never aiming to draw a crowd.
This routine offers Bill the structure he so desperately requires. It’s a code. A lifestyle. It’s as close as one can get to reconstructing prison without actually being incarcerated. Bill liked prison. He spent eight years in Leavenworth only to realize he’d never been happier. No distractions, no choices – just cards, reading and minimal thinking. Now he finds himself repelled by anything that introduces too many variants. Hotel rooms for example. Only ever one night, only ever paid in cash, only ever a two-bit motel within short driving distance from the casino. Upon entry, he unlocks a suitcase full of white sheets and then calmly, assuredly, he wraps and binds each piece of furniture. When he’s done, the room emits a ghostly glow, blending with his own prematurely graying hair and ashen pallor.
Watching The Card Counter (2021) can feel a lot like looking down from your slot machine and suddenly realizing it’s 4am. Considering the film’s title, the gambling lifestyle is largely secondary to the emphasis on its visual monotony; bet, win, lose, fold, wrap, drive, repeat. The oppressively bland sets and near-static camera movements hold us in a dreamlike daze for the majority of its run time. When the camera does move it pans in a slow wander that mirrors Bill’s unblinking sanpaku stares, the likes of which seem to render his surroundings translucent. Oscar Isaac plays his part with a warm smile and an empty core. He moves through the days as a hollow receptacle, reacting to new stimuli as it’s presented but rarely initiating, while his nights are dedicated to a self reflection that more resembles bulimic purging – retching up pieces of his life onto a page through a glass of whiskey. Blurring the lines between living and purgatory.
That’s because Bill is one of the world’s greatest villains: a government-sanctioned war criminal who served proudly in an all-volunteer army. An Abu Ghraib interrogator. The first flashback to his time in the Iraqi prison appears like a warped, yellowed nightmare – a roaring underworld that visually invokes a Francis Bacon painting as viewed through a malfunctioning VR first person shooter. Told entirely through fluid, unbroken movement, these explicit flashbacks verge on the surreal; as Bill advances forward the walls peel away from him, bending and moving as if he is not moving his own body but some unseen force is squeezing him down an endless drain. A visual parallel to the disconnect between the complicity of Bill’s actions and the emotional scars that those same actions inflicted upon him.
“The body remembers. Stores it all.” Abu Ghraib is Bill’s greatest trauma. A trauma further compounded by the fact that his punishment and public shaming stemmed not merely from his actions – morally indefensible but internally sanctioned – but from his coping mechanism. What got Bill locked up was the proof: The photos. The laughter. The creativity. Now he strips his life to the barebones minimum of functionality, brain stimulation, and movement. He no longer acknowledges the part of himself that he cannot articulate without stuttering or retching. He’s given his entire life to math, logic and guilt. He feels he does not deserve anything more than purgatorial holding patterns until it’s all over.
A feeling of brokenness extends beyond mere vocabulary choices. Depressive rumination can hijack our brains towards a near-permanent state of hyper vigilance; obsessive thoughts can tread a path so deep into our consciousness that the brain starts to default to it as an emotional short cut. We begin to notice a clear before and after in how we function. We start to rationalize. We assign blame. It’s a trap, hermetically sealing us so far within our own brains that we suffocate our sense of self. Instead of questioning the functionally of our minds, we accept this shift as a revelation of a reality we were previously blind to. Which leads us to moralize, become accustomed to accepting a daily serving of pain as silent penance. Which is where the concept of guilt comes in. A sense of justice may be innate in most, but whether or not one becomes overwhelmed by guilt is arguably a separate beast.
Paul Schrader has long been fascinated with these sort of self-inflicted wounds. He’s dedicated his career to the immortalization of broken people; those navigating life in the face of trauma, prolonged hardship, social pressures, and existential terror. These feelings of inadequacy, inflicted or imagined, typically drive his main characters to a point of no return. They rationalize their extreme choices, fold it into their sense of ego and allow it to fester in an attempt to escape confrontation or acknowledgement of how they feel within.
Rarer is a Schrader screenplay where the lead actually succeeds in finding some balance between their trauma and the world. In The Card Counter, the schism between processing trauma and self-forgiveness comes to a head. To Bill, this living prison he has set up for himself is akin to a religion, a universal solution to establishing control over what cannot be controlled. But salvation cannot be achieved without confession, without true consciousness – simply having suffered great punishment is not enough. While his world may be perfectly engineered, it’s built on shaky ground, and Bill hasn’t accounted for two major outliers: other people and himself.
When Cirk first approaches, brandishing the naive promise of revenge, he hooks Bill with a feeling he had long since repressed. An sympathetic inclination he believed he had since mastered. Conquered. Buried. Cirk’s father was an interrogator in Abu Ghraib, but he never learned to harness his guilt like Bill; he did his time in prison, drank himself to a stupor, beat his wife and son, and then shot himself in the head for good measure. Now Cirk approaches Bill with the offer of two things: the home of Major John Gordo, an architect of terror never held to any standard, and the dream of retribution. Bill dismisses revenge as a fools errand, but seems otherwise captivated by Cirk’s naive ability to still dream. It seduces him, this unspoken possibility of acceptance. Gratitude. Purpose. Cirk awakens in Bill a desire to transmute his pain into self salvation – what he believes would be something positive for not only for himself and Cirk, but the world at large. One less monster born, a collective soul healed.
La Linda offers a different sort of temptation, an antidote to self-hatred and relentless loneliness. A reward for a job well done. But only if he can get the job done first. Bill never would have considered her warmth, her romantic interests, if not for his perceived mentorship of Cirk. He keeps her in a holding pattern, lets her fill in all of the blanks where she wants to see them. One of the few break in the visual monotony film happens when La Linda invites Bill to a night stroll through a rainbow-lit garden. Shown chiefly through soaring overhead drone shots, to Bill it’s the only glimpse of sky he’s noticed in years. A moment of weakness, a further expansion of his once rigid structure. A romantic gesture that rings as sincere as these LED lights look natural.
But you can’t force others down your path of your enlightenment. If he’s honest, it was never truly about the others to begin with. Bill floats blindly through the world as if a series of circumstances is merely happening to him, as if he’s an impartial observer merely playing each hand as it’s been dealt. He strategizes, plans, organizes, and yet never stops to ask who he’s doing it all for. If a man who does not know himself is even qualified to teach others.
Bill overplays his hand. He tilts, as they say in poker.
In his quest to save Cirk from the doomed path of hyper aggression, he instead becomes its role model. Frustrated by Cirk’s refusal to abandon his plans of retribution, Bill invites him to his hotel room. There, in a scene lit like a chiaroscuro nightmare, he pries apart his deepest wounds and forces Cirk to stick his finger inside. Placing a sheet-wrapped lamp on the floor below them, along with his heavy bag of tools, Bill turns on a steady drip of rage – taunting Cirk, pushing him, antagonizing him. A demon summoned from the depths of his past, one that’s been buried in a shallow grave. His actions are completely at odds with the rather generous offer of tens of thousands of dollars Bill’s trying to bestow. It’s a sublime mix of the future he sees for his disciple and his completely miswired sense of human empathy laid bare. He’s lost sight of just how inhospitable the boundaries of his life are to the living. He’s lost sight of what a good deed is meant to be. It’s hard to be selfless when you’ve never had a sense of self.
It’s in this moment that Cirk sees him, truly sees him for the first time. He bares witness to this raw, unchecked anger, the power of this authoritarian fist. He is awed. Then he is energized.
Bill realizes his mistake far too late, so desperate to speed up his own penitence through forced-fed displacement. He sleeps with La Linda, so desperate to believe her trust in him is deserved. But Cirk’s dead, shot before he could even stick the dart in Gordo’s neck. Now Bill is truly left with nothing but direct failure due to his actions, his miscalculations. With no illusions or juggernauts to hide behind this time, Bill is forced to finally face himself – to face the void he’s hitherto never dared to approach. Forced to test the strength of his own internal balance, to see if he even has a moral code.
So oppressed under the weight of his own conscious and the crushing fist of public opinion, the lines between William Tellich’s actions and his mind have blurred. Whether this was a problem he had before or after Abu Ghraib is uncertain. Bill no longer knows what he wants or who he is. He can trust his life to providence and his soul to grace, as his tattoo states, but if he can’t handle being alone with himself then he has no ground to stand on. He kills John Gordo not because he wants to, but because he must. It becomes the only way to sure up the foundation of his now crumbling world. A righteous fist of judgment to avenge a boy who thought righteousness actually existed. A restoration of order. Of balance. An act of love, his first true step towards healing.
Bill sits in the dark, in a sheet-wrapped armchair. He waits. This might not have been where he wanted to find himself, but he is sure this is the logical conclusion. As Major Gordo enters his home, he finds the lights are not working. A voice calls to him from the dark – calm, composed, almost bored. Gordo catches a reflection of moonlight from Bill’s gun.
“Come sit down, John. Don’t be stupid.”
PFC William Tillich becomes William Tell, folk hero of yore.
