Tarot for Dummies

With bonus generational family trauma content, typos, etc.

I told my mom I was going to the movies, to see Tarot. ‘It’s a horror movie about tarot cards,’ I explained as she smeared her new marmalade on some toast (her review - ‘I’m more of a lemon curd person.’) ‘The major arcana comes alive and murders people.’

My mom sort of shuddered - maybe it was the tang of the marmalade - and gave me a superstitious look. ‘Your grandmother always told me to never go to a psychic,” she said. “She made me promise.”

“Well, she actually took me to a psychic, did she ever tell you that?”

“No!” my mother said.

“She told me not to tell anyone. She told me it wasn’t serious, it was just for fun.” That psychic was just for fun - I remember her clear as day, and she was full of shit. She told my grandmother she was going to take a trip on a plane, but my grandmother never got a plane ride in her life. What she did get was lung cancer, not discovered until it had spread, fatally, to her brain, and not long after the reading. Maybe the psychic - whose services were sought at the Tremont Tea Room in Boston, which in the 80s had cafeteria vibes and a wall pasted with yellowing newspaper clips about this elderly, hunched, vague psychic’s ‘gifts’, which had brought her some celebrity - maybe the journey she had forseen my grandmother embarking upon was the ultimate vacay, into whatever dimension awaits us? Probably not.

My mother told me the reason my grandmother had put the kibosh on psychics is that one had predicted that she, my Nana, would have a nervous breakdown. And then, my Nana did have a nervous breakdown. “I don’t know,” my mother shrugged. ‘Maybe the psychic just took a look at her and could tell she wasn’t doing good. Or maybe the prediction made her so nervous it came true?”

“A mentally stable person isn’t going to have a nervous breakdown simply because a psychic suggests it,” I scoffed. “Maybe the psychic was actually psychic, and accurately predicted her breakdown?”

My grandmother’s nervous breakdown is perhaps my mother’s core trauma; she tells the story a lot: coming home and finding the place empty, the panic that rose up in her as she peered through the windows. They’d all moved to my great-grandmother’s house, to stay there while my grandmother recovered at the hospital. An aunt had been a little late to intercept my mom at school, and so she entered this new cycle of her family life jarred, freaked out, abandoned.

I live with my mom, and never know what will trigger these stories, anecdotes which feel unresolved, unhealed, barely prodded; I think the frequent re-telling might be part of the process. She goes on to re-tell how my grandmother once beat my uncle with a belt until my mother stepped into stop it, afraid she’d kill him. How my grandmother stomped and stomped on my uncle’s favorite toy garage; the whole moment of violence had erupted because my uncle had not put his toy away when asked.

“She told me she didn’t know what happened,” my mother is back at the subject of her mother’s nervous breakdown, and I try to stay with her, though I am freshly gutted by the thought of my uncle having his favorite toy crushed beneath his mother’s furious feet. This is life with a Scorpio, or at least this Scorpio: be prepared to be plunged into an intense anecdote likely to provoke a wave of full-body grief, or horror. There are no trigger warnings. “The doctor told her it might be problems she didn’t know she had, that were in her subconscious.”

My grandmother grew up in a violent household; her father was a monster, a drunk one, and my grandmother and her sisters frequently had to flee the house at a moment’s notice, barefoot in the snow, to summon the cops, who knew my great-grandfather as ‘Billy Bastard.’ This central trauma and the many that sprout from it, not to mention having been molested by an uncle, having grown up female in the - what, 20s, 30s? How could there be any end to the problems she didn’t know she had?

I’m not an official spokesperson for this product but I would be.

And with that little chat, I’m off to the movies. My husband has thoughtfully bought me 100 bags of Piquant Popcorn from Trader Joe’s to sneak into the theater. As I may have bragged her previously, I’m an AMC A-Lister, which means I have to see three movies a week, but I do not have to sicken myself with three large movie popcorns a week, not when I can instead eat three bags of Trader Joe’s Piquant Popcorn, a product that is not giving anyone popcorn lung, etc., plus comes pre-nutritional-yeasted.

I peek at the online reviews for Tarot shortly the film starts and learn it has a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. Let’s go! I can’t say I’m surprised - it doesn’t look that great, but my husband will see absolutely any horror movie ever, period, and as a tarot reader I feel somewhat obliged to check it out. Plus, it’s set in Boston, my home town- though the only Boston we’re going to get is five seconds of drone footage of the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, a bridge that has become sort of iconic but which did not exist when I lived there. The actual film was shot in Serbia, which makes me think of Moira Rose jetting to Bosnia to shoot The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening on Schitt’s Creek. I would almost suffer the cruelties of both pandemic and my pandemic divorce just to re-experience the thrill of watching Schitt’s Creek again for the first time, But, anyways.

The crows have eyes . . . and you better not look them in it.

Immediately, you cannot wait for these college students to get murdered. They are the worst. Not even because they are bad people; more because they are bad actors, unable to put some desperately needed oomph into the ridiculously banal dialogue. It took two people to write this script. To come up with shit like: “Our friends are dying.” “I know. I miss them.” “Yeah.” Does Hollywood need writers? I know some.

The premise: these losers rent a mansion in the Catskills (are the Catskills even in Massachusetts? I lived in Chelsea, Chelsea people don‘t really travel beyond Revere or Eastie) and they accidentally stumble upon a ridiculous tarot deck where every card is bad news. While flipping through, we see the peaceful Four of Swords, the intelligent Six of Swords, all given the stabby Ten of Swords treatment: demonic figures, their backs sprouting daggers. Wouldn’t you know, one person can actually read tarot, and she’s an Aquarius! (I did feel seen) She spouts some bullshit about how tarot and astrology work together, which they can, but not in the way she is talking. After resisting - because it’s ‘bad luck’ to use a deck that doesn’t belong to you, huh, tell that to my bestie Peter who recently stayed in my office/guest room and was pulling from my Thoth deck every day! What do I care? I like to remind people that these sacred decks were made in the same factories that make, like, games and whatnot - anyways, the Basic B Aquarius resists, but then capitulates to giving everyone ‘horoscopes’ which is what she calls the readings, for some reason. We learn everyone’s sign - I do love this, I’m always wondering what sign movie characters are - oh! as I was singing karaoke the other night, tripping out on how aggressively nostalgic Jonathan Richman is - like, it’s practically abusive - I was like, Is this bitch a Taurus? And, yes, he is! Because astrology is real, not that this film would convince you.

In the 7th House, no less. A girlfren really is something he understands.

So - everyone who gets a reading is doomed to die in a manner related to the reading itself - i.e. the Libra is told she’s be ‘climbing the ladder of success’ but not to let it ‘pummel her’ and she gets completely pummeled by a ladder. Wielding the ladder is The High Priestess card come to life, looking like a maniacal goth on a meth bender - big black hair, brandishing an upside-down cross, nothing like the chill, introspective High Priestess we know and love. I had told my mother it was an interesting moment to make a film meant to exploit susperstitious fear of the tarot, as we are famously in an era where people pretty much get it’s not a tool of Satan (unless that’s your thing). But, with tarot being so popular, maybe they thought they would draw people who love it to the film, and look, here I am, drinking an ICEE made exactly the way my kid makes it, as he is a culinary genius - alternating foamy squirts of cola and cherry.

Okay so next the Capricorn characater - a bland ‘nice guy’ - gets chased in front of a train at Haymarket Station by The Hermit. First note - The Aquarius says that Capricorns are ‘rule breakers,’ but I recall when Beth Pickens, the most Capricorn of Capricorns, became paralyzed by fear at the suggestion we sneak into the sold-out Justin Vivian Bond show at Joe’s Pub, a crime which only required us to shift a foot or so to the left, and which the ticket taker clearly did not give a fuck about. So, I don’t know that Caps are the biggest rule breakers. Second note - I came to this place for magic, yes, but also to see the monsters, and The Hermit was basically a shadow holding a lantern. Do better. I’ll end on a posotive - it was quite exciting to watch this Chad get chased through Haymarket Station, which was my station growing up, the place where the Woodlawn 111 bus dropped Chelsea people off in Boston, the end of the line. I spent much of my teen years almost getting chased onto the tracks here by packs of young Irish-American men upset by my costume, so it was somewhat cathartic.

Now these dummies realize that something is going on and it has to do with the tarot readings - especially after the Pisces, who had been instructed not to run from her problems (my husband and I later discussed how Pisces are more likely to be subtly avoidant), literally runs away from the problem of a stalled car and right into The Hanged Man’s noose.

A quick Goog brings them to the website of a mysterious divination expert who specializes in the confluence of astrology and tarot - I think this is called deus ex machina, and you’re not supposed to do it. They drive out into the woods in the middle of the night and bang on this poor crone’s door, hollering that their friends are dying and they need her tarot assistance. I could not help but wonder what I would do if a pack of hysterical college kids came banging on my door soliticing my own tarot expertise. I admit I would find it rather exciting.

The divination expert is one of only two actors I would not fire were I to remake this shitty movie. I mean, I am attarcted to the idea of a murderous deck of cards, each one staging a kill unique to its properties - what a fun creative challenge, it makes me think of Seven. In my remake, this actress, Olwen Fouere, who you might have noticed in the trailers for the upcoming M Night Shyamalan film The Watchers as the gorgeous elder white-haired lady, she gets to stay, as does the chubby, queer, brown character, played by Jacob Batalon. This characater - Paxton, a stoner Taurus who gtets heavily menaced by The Fool in an elevator, yet weirdly not killed - would NEVER hang out with these dull fucking straight people. I was happy to have a gay in the mix, but wanted to like bring him to a drag show or something.

Get this homosexual some friends

Okay, so, the problem is a million years ago a Hungarian fortune teller gave some bad news to the prince, and when it came true he accused her of witchcraft and murdered her daughter. Full of grief and rage, the fortune teller - The Astrologer, they call her - does some cockamamie ritual, slicing her own throat and catapulting her spirit into the tarot deck, where she lounges until a reading is given, and then she facilitates some supernatural slaugter. The Divination Expert knows all about this, because when she was a hippie youth at Woodstock, all her friends but her got readings with the deck and all were murdered. She’s been waiting for a chance to destroy the deck, and accompanies the kids back to the mansion in the Catskills.

The plan to burn the deck doesn’t work; the cards won’t burn. The Divination Expert decides the only way to reverse the curse it to read The Astrologer’s cards. Now The Astrologer is in the mansion, skulking around like a goth at a goth club who can’t find her friends. She summons the remaining evil major arcana to off everyone. The lovely Divination Expert goes first; after pulling the auspicious Six of Swords, she gets impaled up by a rain of swords falling from the ceiling. The Magician arrives to kill The Virgo - a stage Magician, not a ceremonial practitioner, but it’s the funnest part of the movie. The Virgo gets whisked onto a stage, ankles bound, before a goofily ghoulish audience - think Rocky Horror’s Transylvanians meets the spectors from the Haunted Mansion. She army-crawls backstage and stupidly hides out in a trunk - like, the sort of trunk magicians utlilize to magically saw women in half. Which is what happens to The Virgo, and my only note is that it could have been much, much bloodier.

The Devil comes for the male romantic lead, an actor whose tedious facial expressions put the dumb in dumbfounded for the whole one hour and thirty-two minutes. Frustratingly, we never really see The Devil; from the shadow, he looks sort of like a fuzzy spider? Maybe even cute? He drags the Male Romantic Lead - an uncharismatic Leo, guffaw - into some sort of low-rent hellscape, from which he easily escaped. Maeanwhile, The Aquarius is being chased by Death, who looks sort of like The Misfits’ mascot, The Crimson Ghost. Somehow she dodges death - these major arcana are pretty weak - and manages to give The Astrologer her healing tarot card reading, causing her to turn into a sort of tornado and whirl away, curse broken.

Did I mention that The Aquarius and The Leo had been a couple, but The Aquaruis had mysteriously broken up with him at the start of the film, no one knew why? No, I didn’t, because who fucking cares about these people. But they get back together at the film’s end, in the falsest of the false notes, when The Aquarius admits that she’d broken up with him because the tarot told her to. No girl ever listens to the tarot when it tells her to break up with someone; you just keep picking more cards until you get something pretty. Duh. I don’t even think this movie is worth seeing in a campy, so-bad-it-s-good way. You don’t need a tarot reading to tell you to STAY AWAY, chortle. You’re welcome.