Pick A Card: Shuffling Through Cinematic Tarot Readings
The new thriller 'Fear of Rain' joins the long list of movies that use fortunetelling to sell uncertainty
by T. Bloom [image from Fear of Rain, 2021]
Designing a set of tarot cards to appear in a film has always been a LIFETIME DREAM of mine, and now that it’s been suddenly checked off the list I don’t know quite what to do with myself. Except brag about it for ten minutes, I suppose… but that’s an empty pleasure unless I can also present a little backstory about the project, and share examples from movies that infected me with this dream in the first place.
First things first, Fear of Rain is a new film that’s available to watch right now. It’s a teen thriller about mental illness that features Katherine Heigl and Harry Connick Jr. in the parent roles, and I described it to a friend as “Skeleton Key except with schizophrenia instead of voodoo.” Read into that what you will!
A friend had been hired as prop master, and roped me in just as I was about to leave for New York to work on a different production. I ended up with just three days to finish designs for Death, The Moon, and The Sun, plus a card back. This time period was to include any feedback and revisions! This was not ideal! Good work takes time. However, this was the price of accepting both gigs, and I was not about to hand this one to someone else.
Below you can see the finished result, which ended up appearing in two (spoiler-free) scenes in the completed film.
Since time was of the essence, I steered away from creating original illustrations, and instead cobbled these from William Blake’s artwork, mainly from The Book of Urizen. This seemed like a safe artistic choice considering that I never got to see a copy of the script; Blake’s mystical works continually resurface in new forms, in no small part because they’re in the public domain. (This was convenient to me as well!)
There’s virtually no symbolic overlap between Urizen and classical tarot archetypes, so I just drew freely from whatever images were most useful. We ended up with two versions of The Sun, because the first one I submitted, photographed below, was deemed “too scary.” Now that I know the context, I understand why! Although design-wise, I still prefer the original.
Is this a somewhat bizarre set of cards to end up in the hands of a high school boy? Absolutely. And the finished deck created by the prop department appears to be rather short on cards, more like one of those 22-card “majors only” decks. But there are tons of these on the market! The deck’s owner, Caleb, uses the cards less as a divination tool and more as a symbol-laden prop for sleight-of-hand purposes; he’s an awkward kid trying to break the ice and meet new friends. This, too, checks out when compared against our reality. So, let’s just go ahead and pretend Caleb or a family member backed some artist’s Kickstarter and ended up with these as a reward.
I’m proud that the deck appears relatively plausible, especially since the cards’ meanings are only faintly alluded to — which is actually preferable, since the more people tend to say about tarot cards onscreen, the greater the departure from anything resembling actual occult tradition.
What a perfect segue into my childhood interest in this subject matter!
Like so many, my first exposure to tarot cards in any form was via Jane Seymour’s character “Solitaire” in the ‘73 James Bond film Live and Let Die. I watched this crap whenever it was on TV, grateful for the lurid horror elements as well as the various cultural touchstones that were all brand new to this small-town kid: jazz funerals, Harlem speakeasies, ritual snake-handling, running across the backs of alligators to escape a villainous trap. Really worldly stuff!
I somehow understood the deeply problematic nature of this film, even though I had no words to explain my discomfort. Still, it’s the kind of stupid movie that you probably have to be a child to truly enjoy, or to find the threats convincingly dangerous. To older or more discerning eyes, it’s all just absurd and offensive.
(The opening credits still slap, tho…)
That includes Solitaire’s storyline, but I was in love with her anyway. A card-slinging informant with gleaming hair who gets to ride around in nice cars with gangsters? If it was somehow possible to grow up and become this, I needed to learn all about it.
Unlike so many other fictional characters, Solitaire’s cards weren’t just a prop for her clairvoyant abilities; they were her primary instrument for communication with the unknown. And of course, this proves to be her great weakness, since that connection is broken upon being “seduced” by Bond (an umbrella term that has historically included most of what we’d call “date rape” or “rape by deception" today) and becomes just another lady for him to drag around and escape danger with for another hour or so. Even moreso than most of Bond’s conquests, Solitaire was left far worse off as a result of having known him.
Still, there was a sincerity to her readings that is strangely convincing onscreen, and served as an enticing advertisement for serious occult study, however misleading an ad it might have been. The tarot deck used in the movie — now available as Tarot of the Witches, by Fergus Hall — was released at the time “with a 007 logo on the back of each card, and a special James Bond box,” both capitalizing on and contributing to the era’s New Age craze. The accompanying book was written by Stuart R. Kaplan, the man who was primarily responsible for popularizing tarot in the 20th century
I have one of these sets! Here it be.
I love all film depictions of divination and fortunetelling, even the ones that are stupid to the point of feeling like a personal betrayal. At one time I used to collect clips of them, ranging from Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones to… well, Carmen: A Hip-Hopera. The brilliant tarot author and teacher Mary K. Greer has compiled an impressive cache of tarot scenes on her blog.
One of my personal faves is the palmistry scene in Jacob’s Ladder, in which a charming woman perched on the stairs at a house party (S. Epatha Merkerson, perhaps better known to you as Reba the Mail Lady from Peewee’s Playhouse) is able to peer directly into the heart of Tim Robbins’s ongoing existential crisis.
Here’s a partial clip, which does contain spoilers for the movie:
In terms of cards, my favorite onscreen reading is probably this one between Calista Flockhart and Glenn Close in Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her (1999). For the life of me I can’t remember anything else that happens in this movie, but I’ve watched this one scene so many times.
The magic of this scene is that Flockhart’s reading isn’t particularly tethered to the shown cards, but it does expertly simulate the feeling of being read by an expert. Her revelations are startlingly direct, almost humorously devastating, but the focus remains on Close’s face so you can gauge her careful non-reaction.
This is a perpetual hazard in divination, and part of the horror associated with it. Advice-seekers may claim to want the truth, but can they handle hearing it? Will knowing it change anything? Can their future be changed?
Different stories find different ways of answering these questions. One of the oldest and most popular relates to Oedipus, who was informed by the Delphic oracle that he would murder his father and marry his mother. No matter how clear the predictions, or how evident the danger may be to others, the various blind spots in our awareness will keep us from avoiding the danger. Thousands of years later, this uneasy relationship with prophecy is still echoed in the tales we tell today.
While tarot is a convenient instrument for telling stories about inescapable doom or painful reckonings — especially in a visual medium, such as film — that’s not the kind of foresight the deck is designed to assist with at all. Tarot imagery is rooted in early Christian symbolism, Neoplatonic philosophy, the classical elements, and Pythagorean/Kabbalist numerology. The cards comment freely on life’s ups and downs, but there is an underlying intention coded into the cards, nudging us toward the path of progress and illumination, and helping us view setbacks as constructive lessons, opportunities to correct course and pursue our ultimate fate. (For those who’d like to learn more about all this, I tend to recommend this book by Robert M. Place.)
These are the kinds of lessons that often require an outside view. And whereas any wise friend or loved one may be qualified to give you advice, it can be difficult to trust such people to see the whole truth, or feel comfortable speaking honestly, or selflessly consider your best interests if there happens to be a conflict with their own.
This is why divination tends to require the intervention of a true Other, someone who can view the querent outside of their usual context. And while fictional accounts paint these types as prophets, psychics, and telepaths of extraordinary power, historically diviners have been Other in more mundane ways. They’re usually someone at the margins of society: a foreigner, a child, an indigent, a traveler, a hermit, a “weird woman” or gender non-conforming person, someone with an infamous past.
This is definitely something you’ll recognize in film depictions — including Fear of Rain, in which tarot cards aid in telling a love story between two lonely outsiders. And in cases where a diviner isn’t available to you, the deck itself stands in as a kind of wise friend, offering input and challenging you to deeply consider it, perhaps even act on it.
But whom, exactly, is speaking? What forces, if any, are guiding this input?
These are questions I have spent decades attempting to answer for myself, mainly via an ongoing blog project called Arcanalogue — a neologism that crudely translates to “conversation with the unknown.” Lately, more of my writing output is devoted to JUDGEMENT. But follow Arcanalogue on Instagram if you like pretty card pictures!
The deck’s answer to these questions (if it can be trusted!) comes in the form of The High Priestess, the second card in the deck’s main suit. Her presence serves as a counterpoint to the later card, The Hierophant, who presides over conventional wisdom, common sense, institutions of learning, all the teachings that are widely accessible in broad daylight. Diviners can surely serve as Hierophants too, particularly when they teach others about the histories and techniques related to their craft.
The Priestess operates in shadow, representing the voices speaking to us from within, or directly from a mystical source; these are forms of learning that must be discovered or secretly toiled over, the lure of the esoteric that calls to something buried in the seeker.
This describes the experience of divination itself, which cannot itself be taught: it can only be felt, pursued. It can be enkindled in others, particularly during readings when the diviner takes on the role of Priestess, challenging the querent to look deeper (or much further beyond) than they were prepared to.
In either instance, whether engaging with the Hierophant or the Priestess, we allow ourselves to be led, step by step, toward higher truths that may have seemed unattainable or unimaginable to us before. This will be important to consider when someone turns over the Death card for you, which… well, considering the odds are 1/78, it’s just gonna happen eventually.
Sometimes life’s next steps are foreseeable, and we reach them via careful planning. Other times they land in front of us unforeseen, and we have to make difficult choices without knowing for sure what will happen next. In either instance, tarot reading can be a useful exercise in meeting that challenge, and considering a problem from different angles.
Hopefully this won’t be my last tarot design challenge; ironically, the production I rushed away to work on for several weeks afterward was tanked by Covid. If I’d said no to the quickie card gig, I would have nothing at all to show for that time. How much should I read into the fact that one of my last pre-quarantine projects was designing a Death card for a character to draw, in one of the last films produced before a deadly pandemic closed everything down?
Let’s just accept Isabell Jewell’s cagey reassurance in The Leopard Man (1943) as the answer to that: “Cards mean different things at different times.”