“Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief in a purpose. But, in this way, all that will ever be obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known - this is the certainty necessary to play well.” - Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy
If there is truth to the maxim “[e]conomy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself”,1 then the identification of the trait demands a qualitative specificity to the administration of time, its movement as the becoming of a sociality’s being. The card counter is one that masters a practice peculiar to a certain flow of stolen time, time always between being taken and taken back from a non-originary but presupposed taking. The unifying mediator between the prison and the casino is that they operate as different registers of time stolen. Only from this recognition do we begin to understand redemption in this time as a deepening of the debt. This economy of stolen time moves in perpetuum mobile through the animatronic arms of the croupier, an eye which becomes an extension of the surveillance of property at the hint of the count in a conscious player, and the marks that move in and out of the game. Other people’s money, other people’s time, other people’s lives. The Aurelian stoic in William’s poker face conceals to his surroundings the character in study as our connection to a world-history of stolen time as life denied and taken. It is his steady contemplation in quantity, of odds and the internal confessional that every meeting with the upcard allows, that the return of this history shatters.
A room remains a space where the individual may make itself. William’s contemplative solitude is always precipitated by a ritual covering, the austerity of a suitcase of thin ropes which bind blank white sheets over the furniture of motels where he stays in between casinos. It is an evasion of the science of the body that the security system registers amongst its clientele, but an evasion that persists through the void blankness of William’s willful denial of sensuous life. Glasses of whisky mark the time of a journal we see the contents of but once, a practice of memory which recalls a past that cannot be forgiven, one of which he has assumed the nomadic stasis of the modest card counter, an ascetic penance. The calculation of an infinite variety of odds within determinate constraints of the deck make every hand of blackjack a bead on a rosary. Monuments to the excessive spiriting away of wealth and the deepening of a debt-encumbered society are his home, among similar though less stoic denizens. We come to know this unidirectionality as a continuation, a repetition and return for William of prison, time is merely passed and life cannot cross over into living.
The economy of time that marks the debt of incarceration and the administered speculation of the croupier automaton is undergirded by a surplus of violence and torture meted out under the cover of war. William stands in for the true story of the soldiers convicted of charges following the revelation of torture at Abu Ghraib. No superiors faced incarceration, accountability was administered at the level of the image. This marks the stolen life behind the economy of time that is whiled away in the casino. An open shot of the poker tournament’s room and a slow panorama of its diverse residents portrays a society where everyone has a seat at the table, turned inward, deceptions traded to each other in bets of a hidden content, the reveal of which making for a petty amusement of idle backers and lone thrill junkies, other such ascetic tradesmen. History remains an absent cause, the indigenous names of casinos existing in and outside of time bear a mark, William’s own crimes against his species a concealed connection. His debt in prison constitutes a payment to the effect of a besmirched military discipline, a momentary lapse in the mask of war. His real debt bears no name that is intelligible to his world.
The Card Counter arrives at an auspicious moment, just on the tails of America’s withdrawal from a decades-long occupation, and the revelation of the weakness of the Empire’s claims to a nation-building project, a failure if held in good faith, though all the cynicism of our time and that which it evinces behind the headlines indicates the importation of democracy to have been a hollow ruse. This hollowness of the imperial signifier bluntly arrives in the many appearances of the poker champion of the film, a player that is only seen decked-out in the most tawdry regalia of a heartland truck stop, and himself revealed to in fact be Ukrainian, followed everywhere and lauded for each victory by a coterie of fans that chant “USA”. There is never a reason given for his victories at the poker table, but he always wins. Every chant is a background of mockery to William’s own tainted claims to “service,” itself a hollow signifier. The poker champion is Empire as a nationalism void of content, expressing itself only through meaningless triumphs in which the pot is taken, the bluff always victorious; he marks a terrain of engagement precluded by his mere presence.
William tells of the tilt a gambler can engage in, a moment of excess immanent to his asceticism that is a persistent threat, where the quantificative reason of the counter undergoes a seamless transition into diminishing returns and sunk costs. It connects his experience as the arm of torture, a fragment of an Empire’s lashes of blind vengeance in the face of an enemy that chooses to annihilate itself as it strikes. America’s force becomes a mask concealing an irreversible tilt, conquest and global hegemony in the immanent transformation where its becoming of itself is now a being in force drift; a persistent ratcheting up of violence exacted with diminishing returns; hollow violence, as opposed to sacred violence. This mediates William’s past with his penance, and the redemption in the return inward to the deepening of the debt that becomes the only possible moment in which his eternal return can affirm itself as a becoming, the model for the realization of a becoming delayed as a being unacceptable to him.
It is notable that this recursive pursuit of redemption’s culmination in the test of a final moment of grace enjoined with Lalinda is preceded by a moment in which the eternal return rises above its recursion, where William realizes that forgiveness lies in a simultaneous moment of the forgiveness of the self and the forgiveness of the other as identical; one does not occur without the other, forgiveness is social and interpersonal. This is broken in the inability to coerce authentic forgiveness from the other to one even more distant, an inability of economic rationality and the positive redemption of a monetary debt to save one from obvious doom. A crime of history that lies in the body of the individual, a fragment of the social whole, where the totality and the resistance to the aspiration towards it turns inward into a deepening of the debt, redemption can only occur through a further infliction of suffering into the creditor itself. Affirmation is not an open and direct route, but proceeds by negation. The cutting away at the self can only reveal a score yet to be settled, one that an individual responsibility acts as a mask and concealment of the identity of world-historical sin. In his final moment at the table, facing the certainty of the outcome of the match with the poker champion, and knowing Cirk’s ultimate decision, William becomes enjoined to the formulation of Hebbel’s Judith: “Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me — who am I to be able to escape it?”
From the earliest moments of the film, we know this is not simply a desire of Cirk alien to William. He voluntarily faces Major John Gordo’s lecture, his disgust palpable, his resentment and irreconcilability with himself forcing him out of the room, guiding him to satisfy the curiosity of the stranger who recognizes him. Gordo is himself an arch-American figure of the present, the private military contractor that exists apart from and above international law, importing powerpoint presentations of the science of the insurgent body that torture promises, while this scientific rationality proves to be nothing but miserable violence and racialized vengeance abroad, exacted upon the denizens of resource-rich peripheries. Gordo is vulgar, graceless and absent, a man that, for all his knowledge of security, cannot protect his home from the determined actor. We know from the moment he enters, the corner of the frame that reveals William’s ritualistic covering, that he will meet his end. The manner in which William allows it, a quid pro quo of the inquisitor’s tools, completes the sublime morality of the act, homicide as a plane of equal engagement, opportunity afforded by one to whom it is denied. This is the endpoint of destiny as a combination of chance, an affirmation of contingency denied by William as a card counter, but eternally returning in his reconciliation of history that affirms necessity in its pursuit.
Schrader can be viewed as a filmmaker of Empire in decline, his character studies examining the ethical determinations of a subject individuated to a fragmentation so extreme that, as it becomes increasingly aware of its complicity in patterns of global violence, the identity of itself as self is increasingly constituted and undermined by the impersonal devastation meted out in the name of and by the culture from which it is cut. What de-rangement (taken out of situation) is produced by such accumulation of moral debt, debt as the language of moral economy? And further, what does it mean to owe humanity when the ledger is a rigid sheet of individuals all at war with themselves as much as each other? Historical consciousness remains blocked by the gauze of simple and vulgar attractions, games that can be estimated and fixed, where one only finds stability as an included middle, between the poles of sovereignty or its recognition that evince violence as their raison d'être. The casino floor is a world of class society in the hopeful promises of its instant transcendence and the ultimate intransigence of the manner in which it subordinates becoming to its being. Petit-bourgeoisification is the American ideal long since eroded, a quality of life that is no longer even promised by its imperial violence, and the lonesome aberration of the penitent stoic can only bear its cycle so long, for the debt may be redeemed, but not in a manner of which he may choose. This persistent hollowing out of the American class structure that simultaneously rigidifies and degrades into its most decadent forms recalls Du Bois’ formulation of the plantocracy’s decimation in the post-Civil War American South:
“With the Civil War, the planters died as a class. We still talk as though the dominant social class in the South persisted after the war. But it did not. It disappeared. Just how quickly and in what manner the transformation was made, we do not know. No scientific study of the submergence of the remainder of the planter class into the ranks of the poor whites, and the corresponding rise of a portion of the poor whites into the dominant portion of landholders and capitalists, has been made. Of the names of prominent Southern families in Congress in 1860, only two appear in 1870, five in 1880. Of 90 prominent names in 1870, only four survived in 1880. Men talk today as though the upper class in the white South is descended from the slaveholders; yet we know by plain mathematics that the ancestors of most of the present Southerners never owned a slave nor had any real economic part in slavery. The disaster of war decimated the planters; the bitter disappointment and frustration led to a tremendous mortality after the war, and from 1870 on the planter class merged their blood so completely with the rising poor whites that they disappeared as a separate aristocracy. It is this that explains so many characteristics of the post-war South: its lynching and mob law, its murders and cruelty, its insensibility to the finer things of civilization.”2
Schrader’s transcendental style takes the economy of time as a practice within which the audience’s participation is elicited as cinema’s power is turned against itself, the spectator becomes subject. This is then a supremely American film, where we cannot be made safer for all our terror, and the moral debt that weighs on William is a moral debt that can only be owed to the world. To sublimate the exploitation of the economy of time of the film as artwork into a meditation on stolen life as Schrader does also places history into a portrait of decadence, where cinema’s own pretensions to the helm of medium of nationalist myth were already eroding by his entrance in the 1970’s. If there were any claims to the heroism of America’s nationalist myth after World War II, its decadence is a maneuver of historical reflexivity that demands reconciliation with political narratives in cinema, a turning-inward of the American audience that Schrader makes only felt through Abu Ghraib in a distorted frame that forces inclusion through its disjunction of the transcendental style’s contemplation of time. The Card Counter is a moment of Schrader’s own eternal return, a repetition which suits itself in this perpetual contemplation of an epoch of crises moral and ethical on the level of the individual and sociopolitical. Even in the disintegration of the class structure that once justified the unjustifiable, how does the debtor redeem within that which the redemption afforded cannot be recognized? The imagic motif of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket returns as Schrader’s eternal return to grace, a repetition where the difference in this instance is a newly profound sublimity, a new position of the frame which forces the contemplation of grace and its constitution in a touch that cannot be completed. What is grace in a world in which both the debtor and the creditor cannot be redeemed?
Marx, Grundrisse (1973) p. 173: “On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time. The labour of individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose? The identity of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.”
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1992) p. 54