The Transgressive Youth in Paul Schrader’s ‘The Card Counter’
An analytical essay on the youth, and their generations, that Schrader pens into his films
In most of Paul Schrader’s films, a common connection between his characters is that their humanity is being — or has been — brutally ground down by American institutions. No matter what decade or era his films have been released, Schrader seems to be genuinely interested in exploring the way that different generations of Americans deal with this brutality.
This essay will examine the young men in three of Schrader’s most notable films, the generations they come from, and what Schrader is showing the viewer by crafting these certain characters. We’ll shortly examine Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976), Michael Mensana from First Reformed (2017), and most of all Cirk Baufort from The Card Counter (2021).
The Young and the Restless
Paul Schrader’s most recent film, The Card Counter, was released in 2021 and starred Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish (who was wonderful!), Tye Sheridan, and Willem Dafoe. Isaac leads the film as William Tell, the titular card counter who’s a former convict and member of the American military. He served eight years in prison for his role in the Abu Ghraib torture cell that was ran by the US Army and CIA.
Tell narrates the film, as well as dutifully writing in his journal, something he shares with countless protagonists in Schrader scripts. He has been forever changed by what he was forced to do in Iraq — and then by what his life was molded into by the American penal system. He travels from casino-to-casino across the continental United States, sleeping in cheap motels, where he painstakingly re-decorates his room with string and gray curtains to match the cold cell he misses. Tell does this both because he needs to retain control over his life as a free man and former convict, but also because he unexpectedly felt comfortable being confined to the gray, daily routine of his cell in prison.
Tell eventually meets the young Cirk Baufort (Sheridan) at a convention in one of the casinos he roams, where Gordo (Dafoe), the private military contractor who trained Tell in Abu Ghraib, is speaking. Tell’s life had been “back on track” for some time in Schrader’s film, but when he sits down with Cirk to share a drink, he is shocked to his core.
The young Cirk explains to Tell — in an ambivalent and monotone voice — that his father was unlucky enough to be with Tell in Abu Ghraib. He quickly tells him that he sought out Gordo’s lecture because he is planning revenge. His dark feelings for Gordo come from what, he says to Tell, happened to his father overseas:
“[Major] Gordo was at Abu Ghraib. As a private contractor. My father, he visited him there. The beauty of this scheme was, that Gordo, once he became a private contractor, couldn’t be prosecuted for crimes not on American soil. My father, wasn’t so lucky. He was dishonorably discharged, got addicted to oxycodone. He’d been injured. He drank heavily. He beat my mother. He beat me. My mother left one day without saying a word. Without a suitcase. Just…that left only me to beat. Until he shot himself. That was four years ago. So I decided I’d just get into it. Investigate it for myself, find out what really happened. Set things straight.”
Tell replies to Cirk, “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking the exact same thoughts you’re thinking right now. They eat you up.” He tells Cirk to back off, who asks if he’s going to tell on him. William Tell says he’s not, finishing with: “It’s your life.”
Tell allows Cirk to be a “big boy” and decide his own fate in life. Yet, when he is back in his motel cell, he ruminates on the troubled young man he meets, and eventually proposes that they work together on his casino crawls. He’ll teach Cirk how to properly earn a living as a discrete card counter. The idea is that Cirk can pay off his debts, and then some. Cirk tags along for the ride, but Tell is fearful that he is destined to do something else.
Taxi Driving Trash
Travis Bickle is the infamous taxi driver from Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese’s iconic 1976 film Taxi Driver. There are an infinite amount of meanings, themes and messages that can be written about from the film (and many great things have been written), but this section narrows its focus onto the youth of Travis Bickle in Schrader’s script and how he decides to live his life.
Bickle is many things rolled into one twenty-six year old man living in New York City: Vietnam war veteran with PTSD, served in the Marines, an insomniac, depressed, lonely, sexually frustrated, and angry at the “dirty” world he lives around. He narrates a journal entry after becoming a taxi driver, where he says, “thank god for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and the trash off the sidewalks.” He finishes his thoughts in that moment about society by writing, “Someday a real rain will come and wash this scum off the streets.” It sounds like more of a threat than a hope.
In his youth, Travis Bickle is bigoted, depressed, and dangerous. The combination of his disgust for the world and his loneliness drives him to dark internal battles. He tries to court a woman he practically stalked in the city, urges her to go on a real date with him, then earnestly brings her to a porno movie. She’s rightfully furious and embarrassed by the situation, leaves him, and finally tells him her true feelings about him: he’s a creep. He scares her. She wants him to leave her alone.
Unfortunately, she is a volunteer for a fictional presidential candidate in the film. Travis soon puts his life’s target on Senator Palantine (my apologies if you read that as Palpatine — I can relate!), training his body and mind to go back to those days of combat and toughness that he experienced in the war. He buys weapons off the black market, shaves his head to shape a horrifying skinhead mohawk, and walks out to a political rally so he can fulfill his life’s quest: assassinating an American politician and public figure. He just wants to follow in the footsteps of what was normalized in his generation by witnessing the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy.
He fails. He couldn’t do it. So what does this young and troubled Schrader character do instead?
He uses that energy to “save” an underage prostitute from the adult men who are using her for sex and money. He nearly dies in the bloody process, endangers a teenager who was forced into sex trafficking, but comes out of a coma and returns to a slightly different reality at his job! The people who were nervous around him are now thanking him for his service — again. In America’s eyes, he’s just done another tour of duty as a patriotic American, but then gets thrown back into the fray of what he views is a detrimental society.
Travis stays a lonely and nervous taxi driver, scanning his nightly drives of New York City for, what he calls them: trash.
Lectures and Practice
After agreeing to tag along with William Tell, Cirk has been lazily following him along their gambling sprawl, learning how to make the living that William shows him. He is blunt with his words and lazy with his actions. Cirk doesn’t seem enthralled with what he’s learning, or even thankful for Tell’s guidance towards living a life that isn’t consumed with a thirst for revenge.
He soon finds himself sitting in a diner with Tell as they are discussing the life on the road so far, and if Tell has changed Cirk’s mind at all about seeking revenge against Gordo.
When Cirk recites to Tell his — basically a manifesto — on how he plans to torture Gordo to death, the viewer can easily tell he’s practiced it. It is the first time he appears to be interested in living; there’s a sly smirk on his lips as he acts like he’ll eventually torture Gordo. It reads as something that he’s probably picked up off the internet and message boards, just like the private information about Major Gordo, or techniques on how to torture someone to death.
Cirk Baufort is a child who was raised by beatings from his PTSD-ridden father, then took that anger and pain to an unfiltered access of the internet. His generation is part of one that has only known instant gratification daily. They can find anything on the internet that they desire, practically instantly. They can see anything, read anything, buy almost anything. Everything is within reach. So when Cirk decides his life’s work is to seek revenge on the man he believes destroyed him and his family, he doesn’t “plan” this revenge in the way that someone of Tell’s caliber would. Tell has been trained by the American government on how to torture to the highest degree. Cirk was trained by his computer. He has no real life practice, unlike Tell.
Which is why he offers Tell to be his partner in this revenge plot. Tell says that Cirk is basically delusional, that his plan isn’t well thought out, and tries to wake him up by telling Cirk true, horrid stories of the abuse men faced in Abu Ghraib.
He only captures Cirk’s interest even more.
Utter Despair and Hopelessness
Michael Mensana is a thirty-one year old millennial who is a depressed, radical environmentalist in Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed. He is a vital character in the first half of the film as the main character, Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), is trying to help the troubled young man from his bleak thoughts.
Michael has a pregnant wife, Mary (played amazingly by Amanda Seyfried), but he wishes she would have an abortion. He tells Toller that he and his wife’s children will experience this “unliveability” that will soon befall on the planet. When he meets with Toller, they debate and discuss modern existential topics like climate change, religion, and personal responsibility. Toller finds their conversation “exhilarating”, but is worried about the clear signs of depression and despair that ooze out of Michael.
The clearest sign to Toller is that Michael is adamant in his belief that it is immoral to bring a child into this world. He is on the verge of tears during their entire discussion at Michael’s home. He asks Toller, a pastor, “can God forgive us…for what we’ve-uh-done to this world?”
Toller replies, “I don’t know…who can know the mind of God? But we can choose. A righteous life. Belief. Forgiveness. Grace…covers us all. I believe that.” He leaves Michael with a choice.
Michael chooses a different path than Travis did in Taxi Driver. He is around the same age as Travis, but is from a generation that is farther removed from the ills of the 1970’s New York City that Travis chose to live alongside, who was always aware of his surroundings. Michael grew up in the ‘90’s under a “morbid” businessman father (according to a character in the film), always aware of what America — and other nations across the globe — were doing to the planet.
Michael’s life’s work is to be willingly and forcefully combative against, who he views, has destroyed the earth. He wants to fight those who are speeding up climate change, and finds himself going through dark mental health battles as he sees the end of the world as absolutely inevitable. His child, in his eyes, will be alive in a world that is unlivable. He says this as his fault. His wife Mary will not abort the child (as is her right), so he kills himself instead, as Toller finds the almost headless body laying in a red puddle of white snow. He could not live with himself.
Michael’s choice was violence on just himself, instead of the radical environmental extremism he had been secretly planning in his garage, where Toller finds a suicide vest that Mary showed him. Michael didn’t get an act of valor, or is remembered as a “savior” like Bickle was in his 1970’s New York. The only way out for Michael was suicide, just like the thousands of forgotten Americans who die from it every single year.
This Is The End
As Cirk continues to learn the specifics of Tell’s life on the gambling tour, specifically the World Series of Poker, he still is only half-interested. Sometimes he listens to Tell explain gambling maneuvers or strategy with a tepid look on his face, resembling the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. For Cirk, he’s only on a field trip. And all field trips have an ending, and a return point.
Before being let off the ride, Tell drives Cirk to the prison building that he spent eight-and-a-half years in. He wanted Cirk to meet a tough figure from his past, but Cirk clearly was frightened at the prospect. He’s scared, adamantly tells Tell, “I ain’t going,” and is ordered to just park the car.
Soon after, outside a motel pool, Cirk giddily shows Tell that he can find Gordo’s house in Virginia off of Google Earth. He continues to not show William Tell any concrete interest in following in his footsteps. He won’t even take Tell’s advice in attempting to find and reunite with his mother. Frustrated with Gordo still being on Cirk’s mind, Tell begins to plan.
After being fed up with Cirk’s overall aimlessness, Tell brings him to his motel room late one night. There he interrogates Cirk using the dangerous style that he learned under Major Gordo in Abu Ghraib. Cirk is emotional, tries to run away, but Tell slams him back onto the bed. He’s facing a scared child, who looks and sees a bag of weapons and torture devices by Tell’s feet. Then, William Tell gives him a proposition: he is giving him over $100,000 dollars he recently won in poker for Cirk to pay off college and credit card debts, go back to school, and reunite with his mother. William tells Cirk that it is not a proposal he can afford to decline, and that if he’s cheated, he’ll hunt Cirk down and show him what true torture feels like. Cirk is frozen — but then shakes his hand, thanks him, and seems to set his life back into a progressive motion.
Then he is on his own.
Tell rolls on to the finals of the World Series of Poker. He’s succeeding, and checks his phone during a bathroom break at dinner. He’s expecting to hear from Cirk after reuniting with his mother in Oregon. He looks at the text from Cirk, “Wish you were here,” attached with a photo that makes the attentive viewer’s stomach drop to the floor: the Google Earth photo of Gordo’s Virginia estate.
Tell is floored at his broken, failed connection with the abused young man that is Cirk. He tries to call his former road partner but gets no answer. He can’t handle being at the end of the poker match and abruptly leaves for his motel room. There, he watches the local news report from Virginia where Gordo has killed an unidentified intruder who was armed and shot first. Someone who was on a mission.
Cirk, ultimately in his death, is the final progression of Schrader’s versions of a radical youth. He is from Generation Z: one that, again, has grown up with the instant gratification of unfiltered internet use all of their lives. Cirk could research whatever he pleased at a seconds notice, as well as purchased nearly anything he could have imagined, and it would have been delivered to his feet in a matter of days. Combining this with his abusive upbringing, he is molded by his society into a young man who needed answers for his troubled life.
Cirk tried college but he didn’t fit in. His father abused him. His mother left him. He went down a dark corridor of vengeful hopes and dreams. No one could stop him from making his own choices, no matter what they tried, in Schrader’s film.
In The Card Counter, Schrader is not saying, “this is what Gen-Z adults will be like”. He is putting a character on screen that we have seen multiple times before in his own stories who have been created this way by their American upbringing. His modern and most recent character of Cirk has more in common with real Americans like Christopher Dorner and Ted Kaczynski, instead of someone like the hardworking and optimistic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, using her life to bring positive change to America.
Schrader is analyzing how much darker certain aspects of the youth have gotten in his lifetime. Paul is seventy-five years old, and has seen many, many decades of young Americans. What he shows us in The Card Counter is that this generation, in his cinematic eyes, may ultimately be the bleakest and most transgressive. What else would you expect from a generation that has only known debt, war, climate disasters, and brutality?
