The poker games depicted in western movies are also paradoxical in that they are first and foremost social events, but social events that depend upon ruthless competition. These games sometimes bring together pistol-toting bad guys who are only out for themselves and well-intentioned townspeople who simply struggle to get along and get by. These disparate characters participate at times in a communal activity where certain rules of play and etiquette are typically observed by all (while occasionally broken) and where bullets are forsaken for cards and chips—at least until someone has been caught cheating.
For “the bad man,” the poker game may become a pacifying substitute for the risk and showmanship that is otherwise exhibited in brazen showdowns on the main street of town. “Make your call,” says the dealer of cards as well as the hero or villain with his hand perched above his holster, ready for his opponent to make the first move. There is a Hobbesian tension at play in some of the poker games depicted in these movies, a tension between the structured rules and need for community that help to define the game as a game, on the one hand, and the competitive, every-man-for-himself ethos that brands the Westerner or frontiersman as a determined survivalist standing in the wilderness, or at least at its borders.
The presence of paradox can lead to a sense of ambiguity, since clear lines of definition and demarcation appear to have vanished in such instances. And in the myth of the Old West, ambiguity is emphasized in at least one substantial way, since the frontier communities in these stories lie at the edge of both civilization and wilderness in both a literal and metaphoric sense, and so the patterns of rational order as well as the chaotic forces of irrational instinct are simultaneously present. In addition, there is a clear sense of moral ambiguity in these stories, since gun-slinging heroes can still be unpredictable killers. Consider the character of Shane (Alan Ladd) in George Stevens’s film of the same name (1953) and “The Man with No Name” (Clint Eastwood) in the famous Sergio Leone trilogy of the 1960s. Moreover, bands of marauding desperadoes may nonetheless maintain codes of friendship and honor among themselves, as with the gang of weary train-robbers in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).
And so Western heroes are far from being purely angelic and villains are far from being purely evil. It is undoubtedly the daily struggle of a hard life in a hard land, not to mention the intricacies of human nature itself, which demands this complexity of character, even in the most straightforward tales of cowboys battling Indians. As John Ford, our greatest director of westerns, once declared in a 1964 interview:
There are no more clichés in Westerns than in anything else, and this applies to our moral approach, too. I don’t think I, nor anyone else, have always garbed my heroes in white and my villains in black and so forth. Good doesn’t always triumph over evil. It does-n’t in life and it doesn’t in all Westerns. Usually it does, but I think this is the way it should be. I have depicted some sad and tragic and unjust things in my Westerns, as have others.1
Poker in and of itself—quite apart from its role in cinematic portraits of the Old West—expresses a certain kind of paradox or ambiguity. Poker is as consistent and uniform as its rules and forms of playing dictate, but it is also as diverse as the individuals who compete and as varied as the settings and situations in which they play. This is simply due to the fact that contests in poker playing are more than mere games. They also provide venues for quick-witted dialogue and non-violent rivalry and keen observation, and so the competition involved is highly socialized (“is everybody in?”) as well as highly individualized (“bluffing your opponents,” “every man for himself,” and “winner takes all”).
Players emerge as unique individuals with their own unique strategies, but their ability to play and to execute their strategy depends upon the requirement of observing common rules of gamesmanship and etiquette, at least as far as their opponents can perceive. In poker, diversity is forged out of unity and vice-versa. It is really the metaphorical story of America itself, born out of the tension-filled myth of frontier life in the Old West, but also generated from the balance between survival instinct and sociability, a balance that is demanded at the card table.
Poker also evokes the idea of paradox in providing an exercise in logic as well as intuition. These are two faculties of human intelligence that are sometimes regarded as contrary and therefore incompatible, but they are not necessarily opposed in such an absolute way when it comes to the challenge of making sense of the world. Logic is typically regarded as a structured method of reasoning that deals rather indirectly with our specific experiences of the world and that is governed by strict yet abstract rules of rationality. Intuition is our immediate reception of the world through our direct experiences, in a manner that does not necessarily demand theoretical reflection in order to make these experiences sensible or reasonable. Poker demands both logical reflection (mainly by way of strategizing) and intuition (mainly by way of immediate observation), and so calls upon the intelligence and concentrated attention of the player to make the right choice in the face of opponents who attempt to do the same. Not unlike a duel in the sun, perhaps.
But along with logical thinking, poker involves luck, and the player must choose wisely in the face of fateful limitations. Poker is a game of fortune or chance in which rational decisions really count but in which the player often encounters Lady Luck herself.2 One must do what one can, of course, with the cards that have been dealt, as we must also do in daily life. In poker, one can sometimes cheat successfully, depending upon whether one’s opponents are smart or lucky enough to notice. And in life beyond the poker table, one can certainly deceive others through lying, chicanery, manipulation, or merely “keeping a good poker face.” But one cannot cheat at the game of life itself. Those who lived in the Old West knew this better than we do today, perhaps. There was always the rigor of frontier life and the presence of the coffin-maker to remind one of the rough, unavoidable edges of human existence. Decisions and informed choices are important, but only within pre-given limits or situations, as in each and every round of poker. Bad luck and the specter of death tend to remind one of those hard limits from time to time.
And so poker, like frontier life itself, is composed of a kind of friction between order and chaos, logic and intuition, intelligence and luck, freedom and fate, victory and mere survival, community and individuality. On the surface, these tensions appear simply as paradox.
Dealings and Darlings
Lovers of movie westerns may recall Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) sitting at the card table when he meets “Doc” Holliday (Victor Mature) for the first time in John Ford’s brilliant and beloved Western classic My Darling Clementine (1946). This scene occurs right after Earp has volunteered himself as sheriff in wild old Tombstone, a town in which he and two of his brothers have recently arrived. The job of sheriff will allow Earp to track down and punish the killers of his youngest brother, a killing that occurred just outside of Tombstone while the older brothers had gone to town after pitching camp. Earp is a famed gunslinger and ex-sheriff who subsequently becomes an effective enforcer of the law in a community that in some ways has come to represent the very futility of establishing order in the lawless West. The injustice of his brother’s death becomes a compelling motive for Earp to remain in town and fight legitimately against the forces of injustice all around him, specifically the vicious Clanton gang, the killers of Wyatt’s youngest brother and a continuous threat to the town.
It’s not surprising that, in a movie about the very tension between communal order and chaotic lawlessness, the game of poker plays a crucial function. Poker is the game that dangerous men play when they are not “in action” out beyond the borders of town. In the above-mentioned scene, Wyatt sits at a table in the back of the local saloon, coolly and calmly pondering his cards (he’s played by Henry Fonda, after all) and surveying his opponents. He then says slowly and philosophically as he slyly detects one of the other players cheating:
I love poker. Yes sir, I
really love poker. Every hand a different problem. I’ve got to do a little figurin’ here. What would I do if I was in your boots, Mr. Gambler? [He quickly spies his opponent getting signals from Chihuahua, the saloon chanteuse played by Linda Darnell, who is standing over Wyatt’s shoulder, reading his cards. She is also Doc Holliday’s girlfriend.] You threw three cards and I stood pat, and yet you raised me. Now the question is: What should I do? Yeah, mighty interesting game, poker. A game of chance.”3
Wyatt’s little speech about poker communicates some basic facts. He recognizes that the game presents diverse challenges, requires concentrated strategizing, and also demands that a player imagine himself in his opponent’s shoes. Finally, we know that Wyatt regards poker as an intriguing game because it depends not only upon strategy, but also on chance or luck.
Wyatt quickly grabs Chihuahua by the hand and takes her outside, scolding her for her role in the act of cheating. She protests, telling him that it is Doc Holliday’s town, not his, and then slaps him. Wyatt dumps her in the nearby water trough and returns to the game but decides to withdraw, since his deceptive opponent already knows his hand. Then Doc enters the saloon suddenly and his arrival is announced at the card table. Wyatt, never one to become unnerved, glances across the saloon at Doc and says matter-of-factly to his fellow players: “Nice lookin’ fella.” Then Doc, spying the cheater, knocks off his hat and banishes the gambler from the saloon, telling him to use the back door, since the other is for “ladies and gentlemen.”
The viewer can surmise that Doc Holliday, now returning to town after a brief time away, had caught this man cheating at cards in the not too distant past. Doc, knowing full well that his rival gunslinger Wyatt Earp is sitting at the table, pretends not to notice him and tells the men to continue their game. Doc saunters back to the bar. The game, however, has been permanently disrupted by Doc’s action. Wyatt collects his chips with his hat and states in quiet disappointment: “Sure is a hard town to have a quiet game of poker in.” He then walks slowly over to the end of the bar, where a fascinating encounter between Wyatt and Doc ensues, an encounter that includes Doc drawing his gun in hostility as well as Doc buying a round of drinks for Wyatt and his two brothers (also at the bar) when he realizes that he is outnumbered. The scene includes the threat of violence as well as the acceptance of community in the face of that threat, an important theme in Hobbes’s theory of how the art of politics originates.
In certain ways Wyatt Earp resides on the border between civilization or community and wilderness, in that he is a new sheriff whose reputation as a killer precedes him. It’s natural that he should be found at the card table from time to time with its symbolic shuffling between ruthless competition and shared humanity. But Wyatt is far closer to being a man of order than chaos, particularly as a former lawman and as the leader of a close-knit family. It is the complex character of Doc Holliday, on the other hand, who most clearly embodies the tensions between good and evil, order and chaos, civilization and wilderness, rationality and instinct.
Doc is a gunslinger who, unlike Earp, does not always fight on the side of good. And yet he does end up fighting on the side of the noble-minded Earp brothers against the evil-spirited Clantons when the time has come for the gunfight at the OK Corral. Doc is emblematic of the morally ambiguous Westerner who was the focus of many of Ford’s Westerns, ranging from his silent “Cheyenne Harry” Westerns with Harry Carey to his classic The Searchers (1956) with John Wayne as the enigmatic and morally complex “hero” Ethan Edwards. Ford, our greatest and most acclaimed director of the Western film, was frequently drawn to the character of the “good bad man,” as seen most especially in his two different film versions of the Peter B. Kyne story of “the three Godfathers,” a tale that features three outlaws who, while running from the law, do everything they can to save a helpless baby born to a dying mother in the harsh wilderness of the sun-scorched desert.4
So it’s no surprise, at least when understood at a metaphorical or symbolic level, that Earp first meets and confronts Holliday over a game of poker. In the same way that the game of poker lies at the intersection of various opposites, Earp and Holliday also sit at a very similar crossroads, one that helps to define the evolving culture of the Old West itself.
The transition from a Hobbesian state of nature (“wilderness”) to a state of civil society (“civilization”) is certainly not some easy transformation that can occur overnight. The very tension between a condition of primitive warfare and survival, on the one hand, and a rationally ordered community, on the other, is clearly captured in the literary and cinematic stories of life in the Old West, and it is symbolized by the paradoxical role of the poker game in these myths of a long-ago American frontier.
________
1 John Ford interviewed by Bill Libby (1964), “The Old Wrangler Rides Again,” in Gerald Peary, ed., John Ford Interviews, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 49. Originally published in Cosmopolitan 156:3 (March 1964), pp. 12–21.
2 In Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, a medieval work of spirituality and speculation that combines both poetry and dialogue, Fortune (Chance) appears as an abstract character who haunts Boethius’s mind in his final days in prison, particularly since he has long held a belief in the God-governed nature of the world.
3 The words quoted here from My Darling Clementine are taken directly from the oral dialogue in the movie, not from a written script. The screenplay was written by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, from a story by Sam Hellman and based on a book by Stuart N. Lake.
4 Ford’s two film versions of the Kyne story were Marked Men, a silent movie (1919) starring early Ford regular Harry Carey, and Three Godfathers (1948), starring later Ford regular John Wayne. For a detailed analysis of Ford’s films, and especially his focus on the ambiguities of the Fordian hero, see Tag Gallagher’s John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). As Gallagher states in his brief section on Three Godfathers: “The good badman, as we know, was a frequent Ford character, as was also a trio of badmen, whom he would usually liken to the three magi”(p. 260).
18
Annie Duke Takes on Hollywood: Girl Power at the Poker Table
REBECCA HOUSEL
Anyone who can fake an orgasm can raise on a pair of deuces.
—BRETT BUTLER, Grace Under Fire
In 2005, Tilt debuted on ESPN starring Tarantino-favorite, Michael Madsen, as Don “The Matador” Everest. Madsen’s character name is rich in gender cliché. Don is the word for the head of a powerful male-driven mafia family, and Everest is of course indicative of the mountain to be conquered, as if he, “Matador” might be that fearless conqueror. Besides horribly mixing metaphors, the show obviously employs the old Hollywood stereotype of mostly male poker players using typically male language (especially frequent references to the scrotum). In the opening scene the Matador struts around a casino room where two men have broken out into a fist fight during a poker game. (Those cool, emotionless male characters who only show emotion through anger, and often violence.) He walks with his companion, grins at the stereotypical male display and comments, “Remember when we had our balls hanging out like that?”
The next scene takes Madsen and his companion to a lounge area where the two men are watching television. Madsen gets up and says, “I have to relieve myself,” and heads to the bathroom. Upon entering the bathroom, Madsen is greeted by a voluptuous, scantily-clad blonde bombshell who is apparently there to help Madsen, or any man who enters, to gain some sort of relief. We next see Madsen’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, his face ecstatic, with just a small tuft of blonde hair visible in the mirror where Madsen’s pant-zipper should be. He breathes out and says, “Bulls-eye.” The sequence ran no more than six minutes. Still, the male-dominated language and gender-typing powerfully suggests how manly men, like Madsen’s Matador, should act—and perhaps even more interestingly, how and where women fit into the world of poker.
To be fair, there is a female poker player on Tilt, Kristin Lehman, who plays the character of Miami. She knows how to play cards, but that fact is overshadowed by her physical beauty and the obvious sexual tension whenever she crosses paths with the Matador. Though Tilt, and other television shows and film, include women as poker players, the female characters are clearly never at the same level as the males. Instead they fall prey to stereotypical social models of male-fantasy perfection with long, blonde hair, close fitting clothes on slender bodies, long-lashed light eyes, and pink, glossy lips.
These images become even more disturbing when one considers the recent selling boom of everything poker. Some of the top Christmas gifts in 2004 were not just Kodak digital cameras with EasyShare printer docks, but poker sets. Even the trendy Pottery Barn sold a set of chips and cards complete with an aluminum case and an optional table pad in their teen line for the 2004 Christmas season. No big deal, if it’s a harmless game of cards. But even a brief look at popular culture complicates the case. In Hollywood films and television shows, we continually see poker played alongside a troubling history of gender inequality. Is American popular culture pushing something more than poker chips?
Hollywood’s Gunslingers and Caged Birds
The history of poker in television and film is crucial to understanding the game as a reiteration of gender stereotypes and to understanding its potential for acting as a new platform for women. As Hollywood films begin to treat women in more complex ways, poker is also evolving into a game where women are taking center stage.
Poker and Philosophy Page 22