Recently, inspired both by reading Jack Graham and Elizabeth Sandifer's excellent essays on the Star Wars movies, and the fact my Disney+ subscription is coming to an end, I decided to embark on a project of watching those movies in what some fans call the Machete Order (or rather a variant thereof which I devised in order to include the Andor TV show and Rogue One). Between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, however, I found myself somewhat sick of the series' cookie-cutter morality and needing an injection of cynicism. I got that cynicism in spades when a family movie night saw me having to bear witness to the fourth iteration of the Expendables franchise, a film which pussies out of its one interesting idea in its final moments and doesn't even have the decency to give us the Iko Uwais/Tony Jaa duel I assumed would be its only highlight. What I realised, I needed, wasn't the cynicism of roided-up Hollywood pensioners, but the cynicism which comes from ideals disappointed, with having to live with and in a world which you know to be fallen, where the possibility of redemption isn't offered hope, but sharpened torture.
You can always depend on Paul Schrader for that sort of thing.
The Card Counter is a 2021 film written and directed by Schrader in the aftermath of the more successful and comparatively bigger budget First Reformed, and, like that film it follows another of Schrader's favourite type of protagonist, 'God's lonely man', a reclusive and walled-off individual who spends his days passing time in a fallen world and his nights furiously journalling in an effort at making sense of it all. Where First Reformed's Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a faithless saint contemplating the commission of an act of eco-terrorism, however, The Card Counter's William Tillich, played by Oscar Isaac, is very much a sinner. An Iraq War veteran imprisoned for a decade for acts of torture committed in Abu Ghraib, when we first encounter Tillich he is eking out a living as a low-rent gambler, practising the trade he taught himself in prison at the blackjack tables and always peacing out just before the pit bosses make him. Eschewing the casino hotels - and the surveillance that comes with them - he prefers to sleep, sometimes fully clothed, in anonymous motel rooms he methodically strips of what little identity they still possess, pulling pictures off the walls and wrapping all the furniture in grey sheets he carries with him. Tillich begins the film by telling us he would not have considered himself 'suited to a life of incarceration', but it's clear that he is recreating the conditions of his prison cell in the 'free' world he's been released to, confining himself to quarters and wrestling with his guilt and his God in the pages of a notebook.
It isn't a happy life, but it's one he's in control of, until a chance encounter at a security convention, and the ministrations of a poker stable boss, appear to give him the shot at redemption he's given up on. When the son of one of his former army buddies tries to inveigle Tillich into a scheme for revenge against his former commanding officer, whose status as an 'independent contractor' allowed him to get off scot-free while Tillich languished in Leavenworth, he makes a counter-offer: asking the boy, Cirk, to accompany him as he makes the rounds of the celebrity poker circuit, a Faustian endeavour Tillich barters himself into in the hope that he can wipe out Cirk's debts, see him reconciled with his estranged mother, and put him on a path to something other than revenge.
Of course it all goes wrong, but that's not what I'm interested in here. What has preyed on my mind about the movie since watching it is something the film never draws much attention to, but which is obvious if you remember the events it's based on, which is that Tillich is, essentially, a genderbent Lynndie England.
You could argue otherwise, of course. While England is the name and the face most people remember from the Abu Ghraib torture photos, she didn't serve a decade in jail for what she did - neither did the only member of her happy band of sadists who was sentenced to ten years, Charles Graner, come to that. And she wasn't even the only woman in those photos, smiling at the camera and giving a thumbs-up while pointing at naked and humiliated Iraqi men: Sabrina Harman was another, and although she claimed, in a letter to her wife, that she wanted the crimes documented as a warning, both her mouth and eyes are smiling in the photos; and so was Graner's eventual wife Megan Ambuhl, though she seems to have been smart enough to keep her face out of the pictures. But England is the headline name, the one that sprang most readily to the minds of the people I asked in my admittedly unscientific survey of Facebook and Bluesky associates when I asked if they remembered anyone involved.
Interestingly, Tillich's CO, Major John Gordo, played by Willem Dafoe, is also a gender-swap: the officer in charge of all detention facilities in Iraq was Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was demoted to Colonel as her punishment for overseeing these enormities. Like many of those involved, Karpinski has sought to minimise her own role in events and shift blame onto others, and she isn't entirely wrong - as the torture memos told us, the buck stopped with Rumsfeld, if not Bush, and one of those men died comfortably in bed while the other is being rehabilitated in the media as a sort of qlipothic Jimmy Carter who paints charmingly naive portraits.
This game of passing the buck is, of course, one of the key things which indicates that for all the grittiness of his character, Tillich is a fantasy on Schrader's part: none of the people involved in the torture carried out at Abu Ghraib has wholeheartedly embraced their guilt, and certainly not to the extent that Tillich does. But Schrader's transformation of Tillich into his preferred gender of protagonist gives him an easy out in another way, too
You see, one of the things I remember with shame about the revelation of those photos is that there were some women - and it goes without saying that these women were white and cisgender, though I've met enough racist white trans women in my time to know some of them probably thought this too - who got a thrill from those pictures. Who saw them as revenge on Evil Misogynist Muslims like the Taliban, who had forced women into burqas and much, much worse in Afghanistan. That this position was politically incoherent as regards the secular Ba'athist state of Iraq ought to go without saying, but white fantasies of racialised revenge have never really cared for nice distinctions.
And it's that element Schrader loses the opportunity to address by turning England into one of his trademark Lonely Men. For one thing, a female card counter would have to spend a lot more time dealing with men in casinos hitting on her. It's not that Tillich's world of casinos is entirely homosocial: the stable boss La Linda, played by Tiffany Hadish, is the person with the most power that we see in that world, though even she is just a middle(wo)man for her own financial backers. But, even though it's clear from the beginning that La Linda's interest in Tillich is more than just monetary, it would have a very different dynamic if the genders were flipped. But what interests me much more is how the meet-cute between a female Cirk and Tillich would go.
Because Islamophobia and transphobia tend to be comorbid ideologies. The loudest voices fantasising about violent revenge on us trannies are the same voices which exult in philosemitic abandon at every Israeli atrocity (hi Julie! *waves*). And I can't help but wonder about the story you could tell if a female version of Schrader's imagined protagonist found herself sat next to one of those women in a hotel conference auditorium and got to talking. That would be a very different story - one in which the temptation proferred to the hero is not redemption but reintegration, acceptance into a twisted social fold made all the more tempting by its acceptance in the so-called 'mainstream' media. A female William Tillich would be even more marketable than her male equivalent - women in professional gambling acquire a glamour simply by virtue of their comparative rarity, and in a world where transphobes have seriously attempted to rehabilitate bigot and serial paedophile-befriender Mary Whitehouse, is it really far-fetched to imagine them doing the same for a war criminal? Especially in times as mask-off as our own with regard to which war crimes count...
I don't fault Schrader for not wanting to tell that story: it's pretty clear from his filmography that he's just not really into girls. But I can't help but wonder about the story that could have been told.
Who knows? Maybe one day I'll write it. If this fallen world gives me the time.
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