S3E16.5 The Card Counter

waking up screaming, the thousand yard stare? flashbacks? one gets sympathy for these. less than you might expect but broadly you're a good victim with those. No, its the rumination that gets me. its not a headliner symptom; if you dont have PTSD you might not register the all consuming emotionally and morally conflicted hellscape that that inadequate word represents. seductive is right. When You're triggered for rumination it feels necessary. it feels like revelation and poetry. It feels meaningful, at least to me. In reality its an addiction to adrenaline. With PTSD you have it on tap. pain and fear and disgust all backed with a compulsive high. talk about crossed wires. add in sexual trauma and its a real mindfuck. it can have you drawn to trigger warnings meant to warn you. It can have you trauma dumping to podcasters when they strike a nerve. mostly it has you writing then deleting villain monologs. but this time? fuck it, this is what it can be like

i related to both abi and november’s feelings, it was reassuring to hear them spoken out loud by others

I keep needing to re-listen to November carefully explain why she's going to compare the torture portrayed in the movie to her own experience, which is a different thing. A cautious comparison between torture and not-torture, pre-emptively defended because: if the not-torture had been done by a different sort of person, that would have made it torture; and the not-torture left injuries indicative of torture. And also, the not-torture is the same act that is being portrayed as torture in the scene currently under discussion. I just listened to a family member unload decades of bottled up trauma that she's never talked about because it "wasn't that bad" and these two conversations next to each other are forcing me to have an epiphany about how deep that sentiment runs. Feeling like your experience isn't the REAL [bad thing] really is just part of what trauma does to a person, isn't it?

Well There's Your Problem: Gender

For what it's worth, "it certainly wasn't good, but it *was* unique" was a *very* understandable way of explaining it, at least for me.

I appreciated Full metal Alchemist: Brotherhood for taking (what I interpreted as) the position that it doesn't matter whether you can be redeemed or forgiven, you need to spend the rest of your life making sure no one ever does it again.

Very excited to watch Card Counter Sakura.

On the topic of "long shots that are just held" my favorite recent example was the 2020 reboot of *The Invisible Man* with Elizabeth Moss. The tension that is built with a held shot on a still room is palpable. I know horror movies aren't really done here, but still.

This movie is even further complicated by Schrader’s own ….complicated relationship with his sexuality

I won't lie, I had this pegged as "The Cooler" because I thought that was William F. Macy in the image art.

As "some viewers" I found November's commentary on the nature of obsession after assault very true to my experience.

Wow. I had to stop the episode halfway through to go watch the movie. Wow. That was a heavy one. I did enjoy the soundtrack, though that’s the kind of music I listen to anyway.

Fuck. The gray man>trans fem pipeline discussed around minute 40 is brutal to hear put into words. Drive definitely hit my pre transition brain like a bomb.

Um the Palestine action link has expired

I used to teach a religion and body course back in 2011, and taught Abu Ghraib, giving the students historical context, as well as the discussing the relationship between Abu Ghraib and pornography and lynching photographs (lots of people sent around photos of themselves posing like the soldiers). I also showed them how artists like Botero and Josh Azzarella interpreted the images. I had told them what to expect before hand, they had the choice to not come, but still some students came and then walked out, appalled that I would show “those photographs.” I thought about this class again when you were talking about the morality of making this film. I’m torn—I don’t want people turning away from what we (I’m American) did and I think art, including film, can make us look, but where does that leave the victims in real life. I don’t know.

I appreciate November’s comments about how the film could allow space for one to think and talk about one’s own trauma—esp. around feelings and desires that don’t easily align with our moral selves. I just finished a Japanese Crime novel called Out, by N. Kirino. It is permeated with violence, questions of violence as agency (esp. among women) and ends with a torture/rape scene that gets into Lacanian/Bataillian(?) annihilation of the self shit. It helped me feel through some of my own darker desires and their relationship to trauma.

i got ripped to shreds the other day for saying how beautiful i found these sorts of aspects of american scenery. although i did also bring up the movie cars (the first one) which might have undercut my point a little bit in their eyes

side note if you want a poker film that is explicitly about poker and very much by extension masculinity that is hugely popular with the poker community I can recommend Rounders (WARNING IT IS QUITE SEXIST) PS. It has Famke Jansen in it

01:05:50 While I entirely agree with November's criticism and I think its extremely succinctly put, as far as I can tell there were people convicted of participating in and aiding torture at Abu Ghraib who did actually express remorse. You could definitely argue about how genuine this was, some like Sabrina Harman seem to have basically just gone "this was bad because it hurt American imperialism and invigorated the opposition against us", others like Jeremy Sivits gave interviews expressing seemingly genuine remorse and testified against others who had engaged in torture. Obviously though this movie is a WAY more romanticised and "noble" depiction compared to any regrets anyone showed in real life. There were also so many people who got out of it scott free, or were COMPLETELY unrepentant about their crimes. Anyhow fantastic episode all of you, I was hoping you'd get around to this movie at some point after hearing November talk about it before.

Thanks for taking this movie on - as dark as it is, it's one of my favorites in terms of directing and acting. That said, I totally get Devon's point about how it shouldn't have been made.

Man, I wish Captain Tom's story had ended with him taking the money and gambling in Vegas...

I wonder if any of the hosts appreciate the irony of being called this generations Cis-kel and Ebert.

Also devon if you like shitty backwater America you should watch hell or high water which is good as fuck

This is another iteration of the light attack heavy attack thing but gamble is light attack and heavy attack is torture

Kind of stunned you got to this before First Reformed - loved this episode as someone who saw this film a while ago and saw it from a point of quite distant admiration. Made a lot of links I didn't at the time but now get in retrospect.

Fucking love how good Oscar Isaac is at playing varieties of intense/weird guys.

November horny for a man? There are truly more things between heaven and earth.....

finally talking about a paul schrader movie 🥳