Healthy Violence and Morbid Violence: “The Card Counter”, Art, and Torture
Paul Schrader’s recently released The Card Counter is a film I viewed with more interest than many others: firstly, because it slots neatly into the director’s tradition of “profession”-oriented films dealing with moral quandaries for which most people don’t have a working understanding of (Blue Collar, Hardcore, American Gigolo etc.) Secondly, and still in keeping with that ‘moral quandary’ theme, The Card Counter is one of the very few films I know of to exhibit the level of inhumanity and cruelty expected of a torturer on the U.S. government’s payroll, and to also reveal the lasting psychic and emotional damage that this type of abuse has on its perpetrators as well as its “intended” victims. Former interrogator Damien Corsetti insists that “virtually every interrogator who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is suffering from some form of PTSD, and is doing so mostly in silence”[i] from which a direct line can be drawn to the unprecedented number of military suicides that have followed in the wake of these conflicts (Corsetti is unsurprisingly among that number of PTSD sufferers, being responsible for the death of a detainee). This is a point made repeatedly via the film’s scripted dialogue and otherwise heavily implied in the on-screen action, particularly in the odd ritualistic actions performed by central character “William Tell” / PFC William Tillich (Oscar Isaac), who wraps every tactile object in his motel rooms in sepulchral white sheets and carries on with a flat emotional demeanor only occasionally broken by irritability or rage.
The taut, economical storyline is based on Tell’s attempts to reintegrate into civilian life via a lifestyle as a nomadic (i.e. “living out of a suitcase”) casino gambler, building off of card counting techniques picked up while in military prison following his deployment. Schrader is shrewd enough to leave it an open question as to why Tell chooses this as the best means of leaving behind or reconciling a hideous past, and my own personal take is that the gambling culture provides a much clearer and more immediate accounting of wins and losses, and at least an elementary sense of purpose, when compared with the ways in which Tell’s former occupation has visibly caused him to question the ultimate value of his complicity in brutal actions. Why he should have been imprisoned for his on-the-job breaches of protocol, while those giving him his orders faced no repercussions, is another question whose answer is only implied, but which nonetheless leads to a palpable resentment (and while Schrader may not name names of those responsible for crafting this policy in the real world, a brief archival shot of a malevolently grinning Donald Rumsfeld is reminder enough). During a casino stop in Atlantic City, a security industry convention being held at the same venue gives Tell a seemingly chance encounter with his former trainer, Major John Gordo (Willem DaFoe), along with a young drifter named Cirk Baufort (Tye Sheridan) who seeks to enlist Tell’s assistance in torturing and killing Gordo as revenge for his own father’s death. The senior Baufort, as it turns out, also served in Abu Ghraib alongside Tell but, while also being dishonorably discharged, succumbed to substance abuse problems and became one of the many military suicides referred to above. This chance encounter fully sets the wheels of the action in motion, and, as is probably evident by now, the film experience all adds up to a very grim study in human “limit-experience,” made more so by its grounding in actual events, and only partially relieved by a convincing romance with Tell’s gambling colleague La Linda (Tiffany Haddish).
For all the well-crafted narrative and quality performances of the film, there were a couple of sequences which struck me on a more personal level, as they relate intimately to my own creative work. The first is Tell’s initial flashback to his time in the service: a continual, disorienting wide-angle shot worms its way through a prison hellscape of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, methodically and vividly confirming viewers’ suspicions about the misery on hand in these sites, while lending a degree of clockwork precision to the proceedings that underscores just how successfully stripped of humanity the torture technicians are. As this sequence unfolds, an equally precise and bludgeoning soundtrack of extreme metal, which seems to be used diegetically, places the capstone upon an apparently well-researched depiction of a uniquely vile experience. During a later sequence in which Tell drives towards another tournament stop with Cirk in tow, a likeminded metallic assault comes on the car radio and prompts Tell to berate his passenger, apparently unaware of this music’s starring role in the daily functioning of a modern torture dungeon: “if you’d ever actually been there, you’d never want to hear that shit again in your life.” When Tell eventually has a confessional breakdown over coffee with his co-conspirator later, delivering a litany of sensory impressions remaining from his experience, it is interesting to note that “noise” is the word he leads in with, and the concept that he returns to an additional couple of times before having satisfactorily made his point about the “unjustifiable” nature of his actions.
All of this is personally relevant because, over the past couple decades, I have composed and performed a type of sonic art built up from material often perceived as “noise” in the aggressive and interrogatory sense that the “William Tell” character would understand it. This material has also featured deliberate psychoacoustic tricks meant to disorient the listener, and sometimes extended segments of undifferentiated sound (which never truly is that undifferentiated when allowed to persist long enough, but that is a topic for another essay). As the above dramatized incidents from The Card Counter communicate, all such things are never too far from the seasoned torturer’s toolkit, and this remains one of the harder things for me to grapple with as a creator. Though I doubt that what I do is on the radar of anyone involved in that profession, even with the limitless data-gathering capabilities of the United States’ government-‘big tech’ pact, Schrader’s recent artistic meditation on torture gave me pause to think yet again about art that is torture. This film revived an unresolved question for me: is there really any foolproof way for an ambiguous, aesthetically violent experience to not be “rehabilitated” as one that serves a specific political agenda?
I suppose I can take comfort in the realization that virtually any sensory input can become tortuous when the person experiencing it has no say in when they get to stop experiencing it: seen this way, all that has often been needed to drive captive listeners insane is the theme from Barney the Purple Dinosaur, and, as true to actual reality as the Card Counter depictions were, there’s really no need to rely on music that features all the “soundmarks” of an unpleasant or traumatic experience to achieve this. Yet, at the same time, I understand full well where the detractors of extreme aesthetic experience feel that unusually harsh material is simply paying obeisance to a climate already defined by psychopathic levels of violence. Taken on a case by case basis, this is not totally untrue. All the same, I would argue that much abrasive creativity is predicated on the assumption that a degree of unpleasantness can indeed be a learning experience, one whose long-term benefits will outweigh the initial shocks to the system, and which will in the end by culturally generative.
Simply put, there are distinctions to be drawn between different forms of aestheticized violence. As the inimitable Alejandro Jodorowsky once said of his fellow surrealist filmmaker and playwright Fernando Arrabal, “there’s morbid violence, which forces you to ‘give up’, and healthy violence, which is a denunciation [of violence]…Arrabal’s is a violence that denounces, and I like that”. Cogently expressed though it may be, this is not an insight unique to Jodorowsky, and owe don’t have to stray far from Arrabal’s theatrical medium to find other remarkable examples of extreme violence being something other than a perpetuator of itself. While unpacking the social and moral ambitions of Peter Weiss’s 1963 stage play Marat/Sade, Martin Esslin inadvertently explains the difference between the respective goals of “morbid” and “healthy” violence; of coerced and externally imposed torture as the purest evidence of an authoritarian society seeking to re-make the world, and self-imposed torture as a means of re-orienting the self in the world:
Marat, the social revolutionary, believes that violence has to be used to make man good, by creating a just society, even through terror; while de Sade, the author of the most cruel fantasies of torture, having looked so deeply inside himself, has come to the conclusion that only if man faces his own cruelty on an individual basis, and thus gains insight into the corruption of his nature, can a non-violent and just world be established…[ii]
This latter principle of using explicitly violent art as a means of exposing latent aspects of violence and cruelty in “civilized” democratic societies, or as a type of abreaction therapy meant to purge us of dependence on these societal structures, has been used by quite a few artists in recent history, often at great personal risk to themselves. Yes, there is a small cadre of artists, particularly within my own electronic music field, who do market themselves as sadists and would happily admit that their work is “morbid violence” aimed at breaking down psychic defenses and making victims of their audience. Bearing in mind that it is generally a good idea to listen to people when they tell you who they are, it is still difficult to gauge the sincerity of this contingent, particularly when there has been such a tradition within this culture of “over-identifying” with various systemized forces of oppression (i.e. projecting a death-fetishizing message that no sane propagandist would use for a recruiting tool) — the end result is often, again, a simple exposure of a latent violence and cruelty greater than what is contained in the grooves.
All this aside, there is no shortage of creative works that use the aforementioned “healthy” violence to comment upon the general uselessness of the “morbid” violence in achieving its objectives. Numerous performance, conceptual and multi-media works since the 1970s have directly referenced torture in a broad sense, such as Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture video installation, viewed by the critic James Rondeau as a comment upon the constant tortuous “surveillance” of an art market that traps the artist “in a terrible logic of his own making” and “suggests that the invasive surveillance — by an ever more curious market demanding ‘new tricks’”.[iii] Chris Burden’s 1971 piece 220 — in which the artist was strapped to a gallery floor “with copper bands bolted to the concrete” and “two buckets of water with live 110 [volt] lines submerged in them […] placed near me” was one of several works in his oeuvre pointing towards the resourcefulness, brutal economy and raw ingenuity that we manage to apply to acts of extreme cruelty.
More relevant to this discussion, though, might be the performance work that theater critic Anthony Kubiak alights upon: “some recent work by well-known performance artists examines the nature of torture and its sometimes subtle effects on the body…the endurance works of Abramovic / Ulay, for instance, demonstrate among other things the intense pain of sameness and the miniscule changes that appear within that sameness as a result of fatigue, hunger, and deprivation.”[iv] Insofar as these works of endurance art or “vow art” require the audience to at least share some aspect of the performers’ emotional stress and sense of dangerous uncertainty, they approach the aforementioned situation in which the lasting trauma of institutional torture is eventually shared in by both abuser and abused.
These types of “endurance”-based works also manage to illustrate some of the key points made by neuroscientist Shane O’Mara in his disquieting book Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation, which aims to discredit the idea (famously documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on CIA Torture) that torture is a fast track to actionable intelligence, which can in turn help to achieve military objectives and to prevent catastrophic damage to civilian targets. Among O’Mara’s revelations is the fact that, under unrelieved stress, cognitive and motor impairment is so severe that the confessions of a tortured suspect would be no more reliable than the incoherent babbling of a two-sheets-to-the-wind drunk. Though O’Mara focuses his study purely on the set of techniques that have been deemed as some sort of “humane” Western counterpart to barbaric acts of mutilating and disfiguring (e.g. sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, social isolation), he does show how the short-term and long-term neurological damage differs very little between modes of torture. Proponents of the so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario might be surprised to know that such widely used methods as sleep deprivation can take up to thirty days to take effect, if in fact they do so without first taxing neural architecture to the point of uselessness.
Here it is worthwhile to draw another comparison, this time to Antonin Artaud. An indefatigable figure of 20th century transgressive and alchemical art, Artaud called upon the influence of absurdist / anarchist predecessors like Alfred Jarry, and by expanding the theoretical reach of said violent absurdism, literally inaugurated a new art form — The Theatre of Cruelty — named for the calculated infliction of suffering. Though never tortured in the sort of capacity we see in The Card Counter, he was arguably on the receiving end of a similar “morbid violence” in the form of would-be therapeutic electroconvulsive therapy, and was at any rate the perennial image of the hyperaesthete who was so tormented by general society as to be arguably “suicided” by it (this was, in fact, what Artaud famously claimed to be the fate of van Gogh). Indeed, life as a slow death of a thousand cuts is the impression received by some of Artaud’s protests (e.g. “I bear the stigma of an insistent death that strips real death of all terror for me”), with even his dream life being plagued by a “flood of conflicting desires” which “struggle endlessly for possession over me.” The picture of Artaud that eventually emerges from surveying his work — particularly the scathing 1947 Pour en Finir avec le Judgement de dieu [To Have Done With the Judgment of God ] — is that of a traumatized individual nevertheless still possessing a reserve of psychic energy with which to turn the weapons of his tormentors against them. Artaud’s many published letters attest to his belief that there is no human death that has not been consciously directed or magically willed, and a body of work animated by such a belief naturally became the work of a man simultaneously torturing and tortured.
In a vulgar sense Artaud was, as Richard Sonn suggests, “…wedded to a conception of anarchism as revolutionary violence,”[v] again raising the question of the “healthy / morbid violence” distinction and whether one of these ultimately won out over the other, or whether these two pursued one another in an endless cycle. Like a political prisoner regularly abused to the brink of severe dissociative disorder, Artaud embraced various forms of meaninglessness and disembodiment as possible defense mechanisms against yet greater pain, and understood that activities such as melting down the of language were effective offenses against society-as-tormentor. Yet his theatrical violence was never purely denunciatory rather than aggressive, and never wholly concerned with being an impressive rather than coercive form of violence.
Artaud’s example, and the light it shines upon the difficulty of keeping “morbid” and “healthy” violence mutually exclusive, is important to consider when looking at those rare examples of noteworthy art created by those hired as professional torturers. Maybe the most striking and emotionally jarring example of this is shown in Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing, which follows a small group of Sumatran gangsters / death squad members instrumental in executing the 1965–1966 Indonesian genocide against suspected communists and subversive elements, and who are now rewarded for their efforts with government positions and TV talk show appearances wherein their heroism is emphatically praised. Though often coming across as repulsively stupid, the film stars Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry show streaks of a morbid surrealist / absurdist genius when being invited by Oppenheimer to re-enact scenes from their torture and murder campaign in the style of Western genre movies (horror, gangster etc.) Though the violence in their psychodramas is often rendered more palatable by the lurid kitsch presentations that their imaginations conjure up, several scenes in The Act of Killing show that this is not solely a therapeutic exercise, but one which eventually becomes the vehicle for their victims’ ghosts to inhabit their tormentors (as when, in a dramatized scene of wire-strangling during an interrogation, Congo plays the part of the victim and shows visible distress, to the point of unwillingness to continue with filming). What begins as a celebration of the righteousness of coercive violence turns into Esslin’s exercise in “fac[ing] his own cruelty on an individual basis” and gain[ing] insight into the corruption of his nature.”
I have a feeling that, while much of what has been said here may be unsettling, probably very little of it is surprising. So let me end with an example that is in fact unusual in this context of conflicting modes of “limit-experience” (i.e. extreme pain vs. extreme aesthetics). I do not know of any survivors of the U.S.-run facilities alluded to in The Card Counter who have gone on to pursue art as a therapeutic means, or who might have had artistic skill prior to their ordeals. I do know, however, of Vann Nath, a Cambodian painter and sculptor who had the misfortune to be alive while the insane Angkar / Khmer Rouge regime was wreaking vengeance on anyone assumed to be in possession of above-average intellectual skill or material attainment. Held in the infernal S-21 prison (a.k.a. Tuol Sleng) of which he was one of seven survivors out of the total occupancy of around 20,000, Nath was saved from certain execution by demonstrating an ability to paint portraits of Pol Pot.
Nath almost certainly lived in an environment of near-constant torture during his baseless internment at Tuol Sleng, as is reflected in his queasy yet incisive paintings of beatings, waterboardings and other regular documented occurrences from this time. Yet his simple, matter-of-fact style betrays no desire to do anything but document these experiences; in other words there is no avant-garde attempt to create a new style, a la Artaud, that would somehow hold a mirror up to the Gorgon of coercive violence and turn it to stone. There is no apparent desire to repay violence with violence; simply a more conventional desire to preserve the memory of traumatic events to warn against their being repeated. To be sure, Cambodia in the wake of the Khmer Rouge nightmare has no need of an aesthetic violence that exposes or reveals: there comes a point when violence is interwoven into the fabric of daily reality, when “limit-experience” is indistinguishable from normative experience, that such an approach would have the social impact and historical relevance of commenting on the weather. Expressions of aesthetic softness would once again be the “radical” mode of creativity. Studies of Cambodian refugees to have settled in the United States since the Khmer Rouge reign of terror have pointed towards a preponderance of “irrational violence” and being “emotionally incapable of interacting with others”[vi] — at such a point where violence is the totality of lived experience, the concept of “competing” forms of violence is maybe no longer tenable.
At least one prominent theorist of violence, René Girard, believes we have already reached the point where violence can no longer “[produce] anything but itself.”[vii] I, for the moment, disagree: I like to think we live in a civilization that has not yet reached this point, and that any creative digressions we take into Artaud-esque extremes will still provide insights into non-abusive means of engagement with life. The proof of this is that much aesthetic abrasion still does torment and annoy rather than getting shrugged off as something that is just “in the air”. For the time being the “noise” tormenting William Tell is still seen as enough of a cruel aberration to warrant some tragic storytelling: no one should look forward to a time when that is not the case.
[i] O’Mara, S. (2015). Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation. Cambridge / London: Harvard University Press.
[ii] Ensslin, M. (2004). The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Vintage Books.
[iii] Rondeau, J.A. (1999). “Clown Torture, 1987, by Bruce Nauman”. Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 25(1), pp. 62–63+101.
[iv] Kubiak, A. (1991). Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology and Coercion as Theatre History. Bloomington / Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
[v] Sonn, R.D. (2010). Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France. University Park: Penn State Press.
[vi] Brinkley, J. (2011). Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land. New York: Public Affairs.
[vii] Girard, R. (2010). Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre. Trans. Mary Baker. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
