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'Poker Face': A Love Letter to Scapegoats
When truth-telling hurts.
Posted March 16, 2023 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Rian Johnson's "Poker Face" captures the experience of growing up as a scapegoat in a toxic family system.
- "Poker Face" reminds us that knowing the truth is not enough; there must be systems in place that can hear the truth.
- "Poker Face" gives viewers tools for learning how to ground themselves in truth in a world of "fake news."
“Bullsh*t.”
So says Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) in Peacock’s recently wrapped first season of Poker Face (2023—). Her catchphrase is a beacon of light to scapegoats everywhere.
Truth-Telling: Gift or Curse?
Charlie has a unique gift: she can tell with perfect accuracy when someone is lying. This skill comes in handy as Charlie hits the road to escape her murderous former boss. With nothing but her beloved car and a carton of cigarettes, Charlie travels the United States in search of temporary work and shelter before heading on to the next, staying one step ahead of her captors.
But there’s a hitch: Charlie’s friends keep getting murdered. Time and again she’s thrust into situations where she confronts the subtle lies, omissions, half-truths, and gaslighting of murderers who by and large go undetected to those with less refined gifts.
Charlie, much like Lyonne, has a scrappy charm. Her inability to hold down a stable job, maintain long-term friendships, or stop drinking and smoking isn’t pathologized. Her behaviors don’t cause viewers to question her essential goodness as they would in a less nuanced series. She’s neither hero nor villain, just human.
Because she cannot help but live in truth, she attracts sweet and broken people who are similarly unable to follow polite social scripts. Charlie shows viewers what life might look like if we all told the truth, small talk be damned.
Her gift also leads her into the snares of psychopaths, narcissists, and career criminals.
The episodes follow a predictable rhythm. In the first half of each episode, Charlie is largely absent. We instead follow the murderer (or murderers) as they slowly enact their plans, often with meticulous detail. In one particularly hilarious scene, we watch as a paraplegic nursing home patient played by Judith Light scales a wall using only her upper body strength to murder her former cult-leader boyfriend who abandoned her in the 1970s. The murders only get more inventive from there.
The second half of the episode shows us these same events again from Charlie’s perspective. We see her forming relationships with the victims and perpetrators before the crime occurs with her signature brand of no-nonsense empathy. It’s in these conversations she has with future victims, especially, where we see glimpses into Charlie’s trauma. In one episode, she states through silent tears how her experiences with the inescapable, repeated trauma of watching so many of her friends die has led her to feel chronically unsafe.
Unlike creator Rian Johnson’s other “whodunit” films like Knives Out, viewers know who committed the crime, their motive, and how they did it at the start of each episode. The pleasure of watching Poker Face isn’t about solving a mystery but watching Charlie discover the truth viewers already know. We know Charlie is in danger long before she does, given our unique perspective as viewers. The tension of the series arises when time and again Charlie’s innocent search for answers routinely leads her to face off against psychopaths. She catches these murderers because they lie about something small and inconsequential. In Charlie’s efforts to figure out the “why” of the lie, she unintentionally uncovers the murder plot, often once it’s too late.
A Word on Scapegoats
The series is like a big wet kiss on the lips to scapegoats everywhere. Here’s a series that depicts the fate of truth-tellers unable (or unwilling) to ignore their commitment to reality. While the truth is often heralded in popular culture as a moral good—heroes will win the day because they have the truth on their side—the reality of living in truth is rarely so simple.
For those raised in toxic family systems, particularly in households with a narcissistic caregiver (or caregivers), children are assigned inflexible roles. If there are two children in this family system, one child is deemed the “golden child” and the other, the “scapegoat.”
The golden child is groomed to behave in alignment with the needs and desires of the narcissistic caregiver. If the golden child sticks faithfully to the script, he’ll be “rewarded” with attention, praise, and material resources that the other children in the family do not.
While the golden child receives the positive projections of the narcissistic caregiver, the scapegoat is the repository for the narcissist’s split-off negative projections. The narcissist cannot withstand their internal emotional landscape. Their shame prevents them from accessing emotions like dependency, vulnerability, fear, helplessness, unworthiness, self-hatred, etc., and therefore they “find” these emotions outside themselves in other people. In the case of a narcissistic caregiver, the scapegoated child fulfills this role.
Those raised in the scapegoated role understand intimately the questionable “gift” of telling or knowing the truth that other members of the family do not. While telling the truth can endear a scapegoat to folks who treasure intimacy and reality, telling the truth can just as easily lead a scapegoat to certain ruin when in the line of fire of a narcissist or another dangerous person.
Poker Face ultimately reveals how pointless the truth can be if there are no structures in place that can hear the truth. For scapegoated children, the forces working against them are severe: their parents lie to them and others about what happens in the home; children have no power in society; smear campaigns mean the child will be seen as the problem, not the parent; children are voiceless.
Charlie is similarly constrained by social forces that mean she cannot do much with knowing the truth. She can’t go to the police because she’s on the run. She’s poor, a woman, and without familial or social connections. The series takes great pains to show how frustrating it can be for someone like Charlie to know the truth and to ultimately be unable to do anything with that truth. Charlie’s helplessness becomes our own. We feel with Charlie how knowing the truth can in fact lead to an increasing sense of hopelessness, apathy, frustration, and disconnection, and cause one to shut down.
*Spoilers Ahead—Season 1 Finale*
The Isolation of Truth-Telling
In the final episode of Season 1, we’re introduced to Charlie’s sister, played by Clea DuVall. Charlie’s on the run, as always, and climbs into her sister’s house wearing a penis ring and a flashy cocktail dress, with leaves strewn in her hair. Charlie’s sister lives exactly opposite her sister: She lives in a suburban home with her daughter. She’s the image of respectability and stability. The two meet in a tidy laundry room, a perfect place to symbolize the gulf between her sister’s domesticity and Charlie’s wild nomadism.
Their relationship is strained, but viewers don’t know why. Charlie’s sister angrily questions aloud why Charlie’s commitment to truth with their father was worth not knowing her own niece. (No more is mentioned about Charlie’s father or their history.) We only get a glimpse into how Charlie’s insistence on living in truth has severed ties with her family and support system.
In an unexpected turn, Charlie’s sister makes an empathic evaluation of Charlie. How she likely helps many people she meets on the road. How she’s likely beloved. How even her sister loves her in a way.
But it’s not enough. Not for either sister. Charlie leaves shortly after arriving, their alienation from each other left intact. If viewers thought Charlie’s ability to tell the truth was admirable, it’s this devastating scene where they realize the high price Charlie pays for knowing the truth.
Truth Requires Presence
It’s not all bad news for Charlie or truth-tellers, however. Charlie’s “superpower” enables her to experience the rich textures of daily experience with an enviable sense of reverence and awe. Her receptivity to experience gives her a synesthetic appreciation for art, nature, and human connection that’s reflected in the use of mise-en-scene.
In one episode, a character writes a hit song. As he plays it, the scene turns silent. We see the camera cut between the singer and his audience in slow motion. We see a close-up of Chloë Sevigny’s face. Suddenly, a spotlight encircles her, the background fading to black. She looks in awe. The world has stopped. The use of lighting, editing, and camera distance work together to represent visually what happens internally when someone hears a song that cuts to the quick of an emotional truth. It’s immaterial that we don’t hear the music to understand its impact.
In another episode, Charlie uses other senses, like taste, to ground herself within the reality of the moment. She’s able to solve a murder by tasting wood chips, for example. We see her methodically lifting chips to her mouth as the camera slowly pans toward her face. The series invites viewers to slow down with Charlie, to open themselves towards the patience of sensing into the present moment. The truth may seem immaterial or elusive in the era of fake news, but Charlie shows us what it takes to maintain one’s stance in reality: a commitment to grounding through the senses.
This series is a love letter to scapegoats in a historical and cultural moment where the truth is routinely under question. Poker Face encourages viewers to tackle the complexity of experience and to take seriously the pressures and pleasures of finding the truth. Doing so doesn’t always lead to justice or glory, and we have a right to feel helpless, enraged, and disheartened by that fact. But like Charlie, the search for the truth for scapegoats can lead to a life of deep connection, reverence, and radical authenticity. And yes, maybe some loneliness.
