Light Sleeper (1992)

directed by Paul Schrader

Jo Rempel

There are a dozen pages at the end of a green Moleskine from early summer 2022 until March 2023 that I left completely blank. I probably felt that a fresh notebook would take a weight off me and make it easier to keep a diary. The second-to-last entry begins: "Living & writing in this fucking diary again—writing just feels like ripping off a band-aid right now," and while I actually rip off band-aids easily and in fact compulsively, a lot of passages give a similar frustration. One from September 2022 reads, "Whole day felt like writer's block [...] have an incredible blockage pertaining to most things that actually happen," then earlier that same month: "Trying to put creative energy into something, it really does get tiring. This is the use of keeping a diary." Literary pursuits felt like a necessity because I felt like I had something to say, and keeping a diary a moral one for when I didn't. Thus the writing and the writing about writing and the writing about not writing is unavoidably self-serious to an overwhelming degree.

The fact that I was raised Christian never left me with a terribly high level of discipline. A sense of obligation towards discipline, however: that did stick. Like the congregational prayers that I whispered in monotone, I believed in the impersonal form of writing, which would do me good. Even now, assertions, random aphorisms will slip in as I write. In these early stages, they obscured my actual thoughts and feelings, so that at times I sounded like an academic running on autopilot.

I watched Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper for the first time around August 4th, 2022: part of that day's entry is a blurby review that I wrote for its own sake. The movie is, in my own words, "Pickpocket for the ‘90s where a criminal profession is not a cultivated skill but rather something one falls into and prays to fall out of." In Pickpocket, a young man named Michel becomes fixated on the idea of becoming a professional thief, and moreover the idea of becoming a better person through putting all his energy into honing one particular skill. Paul Schrader, who wrote and directed Light Sleeper, is a vocal fan of Robert Bresson's: Pickpocket's ending, in which Michel, now in prison, finally confronts the intensity of his feelings for his girlfriend Jeanne, has been cribbed in some way in at least six of Schrader's films. I had put Pickpocket on sometime after seeing First Reformed and The Card Counter, two films in which existentially lonely men feel the structure of the prison which has always held them at the same time as they feel they are overwhelmed by the redemptive power of a woman's love. And now Light Sleeper, where Willem Dafoe's John LeTour is a courier for a small coke operation who's been on the edge of retirement for a bit too long. But there are no promises in his line of business.

Across First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Light Sleeper, Schrader's men are writing in their diaries, whose entries form the films' narration tracks. LeTour recalls how another dealer once told him how "when a drug dealer starts writing a diary, it's time to quit. I started writing after that." The superstition hasn't done its work: though it's unclear how long LeTour has been keeping a diary, he mentions finishing and disposing with multiple notebooks. Maybe writing is his skill, though it doesn't grant him the autonomy he thinks he needs, the autonomy to fall out, slip through the cracks of the wreckage and start over. He’s nearly twice my age. I wonder if I could prorate the amount of times I’ve felt myself burn out from putting too much of myself into my work. LeTour used to take acting classes. Now he wants to get into music production: he's planning to take courses. Anne, his boss, has been making promises to leverage her upper-class connections and pivot into the cosmetics industry. None of it makes much sense, save for the core idea of remaining unmoored, a self-starter.

I'm attracted to Paul Schrader's movies partially because of how their narratives often bleed through into one singular narrative. Whether it's narcotics, counting cards, preaching, or driving an ambulance, by the time our story begins, Schrader's lonely men have all long since reached the point where the monotony of their job has consumed them. Those who want to leave can't, and those who do are now not only trapped in a new job but haunted by the last. And keeping a diary, which is otherwise the assertion of one's most privately held self, that too becomes an obligation. I fear that this moment when form overtakes meaning has already happened and that it is irreversible. I was not brought up to believe in a predestined soul like Schrader was, but the Protestant model that redemption comes and is proved through ascetic and meticulous labor: that, I find hard to shrug off. My ancestors broke away from the established church because they believed in a voluntary "believer's baptism," and in living "in the world, but not of it."

In Light Sleeper, a song performed by Michael Been plays over the title sequence: "I trust my soul to Providence / I trust my soul to grace / But nothing takes away the pain / I can't forget your face." Christian stadium rock provides the ambience as LeTour stares silently from the backseat of Ann's private chauffeur. As much as the music which Been provides throughout complements the narrative’s themes, the way that it conveys alienation so loudly and plainly feels out of reach from where we stand. Providence and grace, the voice says, are the only things that remain constant in these unstable times: the promise of being redeemed from sin when the time comes. This disjuncture between the music and the narration feels like grieving that delusion of purity. I don’t know whether Schrader himself has done so. God’s ultimate providence, LeTour’s ex-girlfriend Marianne tells him, is a selective memory, and grace is blind luck. All that LeTour needs to finally consider his agency in the world is for the notion to strike that his luck is starting to run out.

I never took to prayer in part because I could never take to making a request that way, directly. At times I would sit in silence and understand that life could be something that you merely passed through. It felt very practical, to have no ambition. Becoming a woman, for instance, was a grace that might be afforded, provided that I suffered quietly for long enough. And if you do not trust your soul only to providence and grace, then what is out there to rely on? At one point LeTour visits a psychic, who reads him cold and broad, and reassures him, "Everything you need is around you. The only danger is inside you." Isn't that terrifying? I write to cope with the terrible intensity of being in the world and letting myself be of it as well. Sometimes I write as a remedy for burnout and paranoia. What made me aspire to keeping a diary in the first place though, was watching Paul Schrader films and learning that maintaining an internal continuity can still feel safe, sufficiently detached.

Jo Rempel is a writer and visual artist who lives in Winnipeg, Treaty One, Canada. They work with and around voices and forms that are insistent, ephemeral, and naïve. They are easily amused by small birds and abandoned lots. Further writings can be found on MovieJawn, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Issay!, and their Substack, TYPEWRITER’S REVENGE.