DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)

By: Jake Zucker
April 28, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

LIGHT SLEEPER

Nestled in Paul Schrader’s filmography, between the early triumphs of American Gigolo and his Scorsese collaborations and his more recent resurgence with First Reformed, is 1992’s Light Sleeper. The relative anonymity of this movie suggested to me for too long that it was one best skipped. I certainly missed its initial release; I was six at the time.

Light Sleeper centers on John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a recovering-addict-turned-pusher who follows Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and foreshadows First Reformed’s Reverend Toller as one of Schrader’s trademark “men with a journal.” John begins the film in the employ of Ann (Susan Sarandon), a glamorous high-end dealer with an eye to leaving the drug trade for the world of expensive cosmetics. Schrader has put it bluntly: “Good character’s about contradiction.” The contradictions here — the sober dealer; the crime kingpin angling for entrée into make-up and perfume — are classically Schraderian.

“I’m going to get into recording,” John tells another dealer early in the film, referring to an iffy ambition for music production, but the word could just as easily apply to John’s new habit of documenting his thoughts in marble notebooks. Whereas another movie might have us worried about him leaving such a paper trail, in Light Sleeper we see him toss each one in the trash as he completes it. Again: contradictory behavior for a character/narrator so steeped in hypergraphia. Schrader’s “journal movies” achieve a unique formal convention: the commingling of subjective first-person narration with the objective third-person perspective afforded by a moving camera, an interiority slightly off the more common voiceover. And indeed, the cinematography of Light Sleeper is just off spontaneous, the camera never hand-held, the shots either static or moving at a deliberate, slow pace. We know from the distance of John and Ann’s exchanges that he lives alone and spartanly, and she’s never seen his apartment. (“You don’t?” Ann asks incredulously, when John says he owns no television.) The enduring question of the film is how bound he’ll remain to a life of interiority.

Light Sleeper begins with a deadline — Ann’s impending career shift to cosmetics — but it’s a false deadline, as the tragedy that befalls John does so at another pace entirely. There is narrative power in establishing a clicking countdown, then revealing we’ve been on a different clock — hurtling toward a different climax — this whole time. The heartening joy of wading into Schrader’s filmography is that his “man with a journal” changes with the world and with the viewer. The journaler who in 1992 catches the teetering point of yup-ward mobility gives way twenty years later to the journaler churning the legacy of criminal imperialism (The Card Counter); and a year after that, the churning of white supremacy (Master Gardener). And so on. Tragedies that might have bored me at eighteen, or twenty-five, buoy me now as my Light Sleeperian middle age approaches. The ending here I won’t spoil, except to say that at least two other Schrader movies end on similar images, in similar rooms. Schrader takes a lot of flack for repeating himself, but to dismiss him is like dismissing a fine artist for painting too many still lifes. Worthy artists revisit worthy actions, worthy images.

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DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)

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