DECEMBER 9, 2013
Why Poker Resists The Sports Film
The sports documentary has a shape that works: a season, a build, a contest with a scheduled ending, and a result that arrives in front of a crowd. Poker offers almost none of that, and every attempt to force the shape onto it produces the same distortion.
The missing clock
There is no season. There is no scheduled ending. A player's year is a continuous stream of sessions that begin and end for reasons of tiredness and appetite, and the meaningful units of it are statistical rather than dramatic. A month that mattered enormously looks identical to a month that did not.
Tournaments supply a borrowed clock, which is why they dominate poker on film. But tournament play is a small and unrepresentative slice of the activity, and building a film around it is like building a film about musicians entirely around competition finals. It is filmable precisely because it is atypical.
The problem of the visible stake
Sport shows its stakes physically. Effort, exhaustion and injury are legible on a body. Poker's stakes are financial and psychological, and both are invisible by nature. A player losing badly and a player winning comfortably present roughly the same image to a lens: someone sitting still, looking at a screen, moving a hand occasionally.
Which leaves the form with a choice. It can manufacture visible drama, usually with music and cutting that tell the audience how to feel about a hand they cannot follow, or it can accept the stillness and find the material somewhere else entirely, in what people say about the hours rather than in the hours themselves.
The second option is harder to watch and considerably more honest, and it is the option that the subject keeps insisting on. Poker is not a spectacle that happens to be quiet. It is a quiet thing that has occasionally been dressed as a spectacle.