Paul
Schrader's New Film "First Reformed"
Promises Unique Insights Into Christianity
It
Delivers the Cliché Rich, White, Male, American Villain
and a Perverse
Distortion of Jihad.
As
soon as I heard about "First Reformed," I knew I had to see it. Reviewers
were calling it a "masterpiece." Rotten Tomatoes assigns
"First Reformed" a 98% rating.
Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader has been nominated for or won just
about every big award there is. He wrote the scripts for "Taxi
Driver," "Raging Bull," "Affliction," and "The Last
Temptation of Christ."
Schrader
was raised in the Reformed Church. He attended a Christian high school and
college. He thought about becoming a minister. Schrader said he was inspired in the making of "First
Reformed" by "Ida," a 2013 Polish film whose central character
is a nun.
One
of the first things the viewer notices about "First Reformed" is the aspect
ratio. Most modern films are rectangular in shape, and they stretch from edge
to edge of the wide cineplex screen. Films from Hollywood's Golden Age are more
square-shaped than movies made today. "First Reformed" is filmed in
1:33 aspect ratio, as was "Ida." The image is square-shaped; the
sides do not stretch to the edges of the screen. At first, I wondered if a theater
technician would arrive to adjust the projector. When no technician arrived, I
realized that Schrader had made a conscience artistic choice.
Pawel
Pawlikowski, who made "Ida," chose the 1:33 ratio to recreate the
"antiquated" look of a 1950s TV screen. Was Schrader saying, with
this old-fashioned aspect ratio, that religious faith is old-fashioned, and has
no place in the modern world? There are other clues in "First
Reformed" that might support that interpretation. Rev. Toller, the main
character, uses a flip phone. He drives an old car. These accoutrements could
also be explained as exemplary of his poverty. Some reviewers say that the
aspect ratio is meant to communicate claustrophobia. Religious faith closes you in, limits
you. Schrader himself said that the aspect ratio is about "withholding" from his audience.
The
second thing the viewer notices is that the very first image, that remains
onscreen for some time, would be perfectly at home in the opening of a horror
film. The first image is that of a church, specifically, a
two-hundred-fifty-year-old, Protestant, New England church from the colonial
era. With its white clapboard siding, plain, high steeple, and Greek revival
lines, the church announces, loud and clear: the birth of the United States, Protestantism
and the Enlightenment, the cultural matrix from which America emerged. That
such a quintessentially American structure would be so closely associated with
horror films caused me to reflect. I had plenty of time to reflect. "First
Reformed" is a slow-moving film, and the image remained onscreen for a
long time.
We
have a tradition of associating horror with New England architecture. This
tradition goes back to Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story "The Fall of the
House of Usher," inspired by a Boston mansion built in 1684. In 1851,
Nathaniel Hawthorne published "The House of the Seven Gables," also
about a seventeenth-century New England home. Too, Stephen King lives in Maine.
Our authors, true to our Western tradition of self-criticism, have looked long
and hard at the sins of our ancestors, like the Salem witch trials and the
slave trade that built many New England fortunes.
Churches
like the one in "First Reformed" are our cultural ancestors. It is
good that we can criticize the bad that came of our tradition, but maybe it is
time to reassess why it is so easy to associate its signatures with horror films.
Maybe now is as good a time as any to find the best in our past. If an American
film opened with a shot of a mosque, no fan of American popular fiction and
film would have any reason to associate the mosque with horror. And, yes, I am
mentioning mosques for a reason, as will become clear, below.
The
church stands alone and silent. The setting is winter. The most frequently
repeated technique of horror film is to focus for a long time on something
ostensibly benign, but known to the audience to be a trope of hidden danger – a
church, a doll, the hallway of a family home. Movies require action and tension.
If the camera is focused on an immobile, benign object that appears to be in
conflict with nothing, the tension builds inside the viewer herself. That inner
tension springs when, at the last minute, something horrific explodes onto the
screen. Paul Schrader is a Hollywood veteran. He knows all this. And, indeed,
something quite horrific, bloody, gory, and frightening will explode out of
this church and onto this screen. But not just yet. This is an art movie; the
viewer must exercise patience.
A. O. Scott, writing in the New York
Times, also found
"First Reformed" to be evocative of horror. Scott says that horror
films scare us with a supernatural presence, whereas "First Reformed"
is about a horrifying supernatural absence, specifically, the absence of God.
Scott quotes a poem. "The breath of God had carried out a planned and
sensible withdrawal from this land," that is, America. Our nation is now
Godless.
Ethan
Hawke stars as Reverend Toller. In films like this, the viewer always looks for
meaning in character names. Toller may indeed be an allusion to John Donne's
line, "send not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for
thee." This is a quote from a poem that emphasizes that no man is alone,
but, rather, his fate is intertwined with all other fates. The other message in
the line is a memento mori. When you
hear a funeral bell, Donne counsels, don't ask for whom the funeral is being
held. It's ringing for you. "Toller," the ringer of the bell, is here
to inform you that we are all doomed. And by "we" the movie means
humans, plants and animals as well. As usual, one can hold out hope for cockroaches.
Rev.
Toller is in his late 40s. His son was killed in Iraq. His wife left him.
Toller is pastor in upstate New York. In a poignant scene, Toller shows
visiting children a secret door in the church. This door leads to a hiding
place for escaping slaves. The church was a way station on the Underground Railroad.
Nowadays, though, Toller doubts the church's relevance. The church is now more
of a way station for tourists, who visit its giftshop and buy t-shirts, hats
and other tchotchkes emblazoned with its logo. A good percentage of Toller's
dwindling congregants are women he has had sex with and rejected, and women who
want to have sex with him but haven't yet. Mary (Amanda Seyfried) is a
parishioner who is a member of the latter group. Do I have to tell you what to
make of the name "Mary"? Mary is the Madonna, the mother of Jesus
Christ.
Ethan
Hawke's face is alive to every nuance of every utterance. When teaching the
children about the Underground Railroad, he is authentically paternal. When
counseling one of his nuttier congregants, he is authentically gritty and
sardonic. I so wish Hawke's Oscar-worthy performance were in a richer, deeper
film. His performance's quality and intensity diminishes everything else
onscreen, nothing of which is as well-crafted.
Amanda
Seyfried never elevates Mary beyond "generic blonde." Toller's
superior, Rev. Jeffers, is played by the charismatic Cedric Kyles. The viewer
is curious about Jeffers, a large, handsome black minister in a bespoke suit who
shepherds a megachurch. Is he, unlike Toller, sincere in his faith? Is he a
prosperity gospel con artist with a private jet? Is he schtupping his
parishioners? We never plumb Jeffers' character. The script allows Jeffers to
say only enough to be a convenient foil for Toller. Philip Ettinger is gifted
with a juicy part as a would-be terrorist, but his zealous obsession never
rises above the pique of a couch potato whose favorite TV show was pre-empted
by breaking news.
Toller's
church interior is typical of a New England, Greek Revival, Protestant,
colonial-era church. His living quarters echo the same eras and style. Toller,
when at home, walks through the kind of doorways, and looks out the kind of
windows, one might see the Thomas Jefferson character pass and gaze through in
a film about the Declaration of Independence. The windows are framed with
neo-classical columns; the doorways topped with entablatures. Mary's home interior,
on the other hand, features Arts and Crafts touches.
Both
Toller's home interior and Mary's home interior are almost bare. Toller's has a
bed, and that's about it. Mary has a couch and a lamp in the shape of an
eyeball. (God sees all. This is an art movie, remember.) Schrader has said that
the minimal set reflected his goal to keep things simple. Whether he intended
it or not, placing Toller and Mary in architectural settings that their figures
never manage to fill had a different impact on this viewer.
Greek
Revival, Colonial architecture flourished during this country's founding. In
harkening back to the Greek Classical era, our Founders were celebrating
rationality and hope. "Man is the measure of all things," the Ancient
Greeks said. Give me where to stand, and I can move the world, Archimedes vowed.
The Arts and Crafts movement, which inspired Mary's dwelling, flourished at the
turn of the twentieth century. It reflected hope as well, along with earthiness
and creativity. Toller and Mary are like midgets attempting, and failing, to
inhabit the footsteps of giants. The architecture surrounding them, and all
that that architecture implies, dwarves them. With their fear, their despair, and
their confused failing, they never live up to the ambitions of their cultural
ancestors. Like it or not, Lilliputian Mary and Toller, surrounded by resonant
architecture, are figures of cultural decay.
Mary's
slacker husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), is an environmental terrorist wannabe.
"Michael" means "Who is like God?" The answer is no one,
and that's certainly true of Michael. Mary is pregnant; Michael wants her to
abort his son. Toller, who lost his son in the Iraq war, tells Michael that
bringing a child into this world is much better than sending one out. Michael argues
that by the time his child is an adult, climate change will have raised the
oceans. Overpopulation will have caused famine. Species are dying out at
alarming rates. It is a crime, Michael insists, to bring a child into this
world. Later, Mary reveals to Toller that she has discovered that Michael has
prepared a suicide vest. Toller, rather than reporting the vest to the police,
takes it home. Implausible? Well, you tell me. You've got explosives that could
kill you; do you really want them in your bedroom? There are easier ways to
remodel.
Toller,
meanwhile, must duck the attentions of Esther (Victoria Hill), a beautiful, caring,
professional, Christian woman who loves Toller and with whom he has made love. When
Toller and Esther converse, they do so in front of a wall with Biblical verses
written on it in giant lettering. I don't suppose Schrader is often accused of
subtlety. Toller wants nothing to do with Esther. Esther clearly cares for
Toller, and he can't stand that, possibly because her caring is a reminder to
him of what a basket case he is. Possibly because his egotistical rejection of
Esther is analogous to his rejection of community, or a caring God. Or maybe
it's just that Esther is pushing fifty, a spinster, and she wears glasses and her
brown hair in a bun. Mary is younger, has no glasses, and wears her long,
blonde hair down. When Toller finally says to Esther, "I despise you,"
Hawke is cruelly convincing as a cold, jilting lover.
There
is much emphasis on waste. Toller's toilet is clogged. He is shown using a
plunger and drain cleaner. Toller urinates blood. Jeffers says that Martin
Luther composed "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" while seated in an
outhouse, attempting to have a bowel movement. Pastor Jeffers sings the song
with scatological emphasis. These references to waste are reflected in
Michael's obsession with human waste despoiling the planet.
Michael
shoots himself in the head. In an unnecessary scene, that possibly strained the
film's low budget, the viewer is treated to a graphic image of a dead body in
the snow, brains visible, blood all around. Michael asked that his ashes be
scattered at a toxic waste dump. Rev. Toller must stand at the shore of a
post-industrial slough and see the world as Michael saw it: doomed.
First
Reformed is to celebrate its two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary with a
re-consecration. Jeffers has invited Edward Balq (Michael Gaston.) Balq is a
rich, white, American, Christian male. He's an industrialist. He manufactures …
does it really matter what he manufactures? It's something that is destroying
the earth. Anyway. He manufactures paper. Balq reprimands Toller for
participating in Michael's dispersal of ashes. Jeffers supports him. After all,
Balq donates the money that keeps the door of the church open. In addition to
Balq, the governor and many other V.I.P.s will be at the re-consecration. Oh,
and Toller has visited a doctor. And the doctor has told him what the viewer
has already suspected, seeing his bloody urine. Toller may have cancer.
If
you watch as many movies as I do, you know exactly what will happen next.
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously said, "If you say in the first
chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third
chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't
be hanging there." Rev. Toller, secret drunk, assuming he's dying anyway,
has taken enviro-terrorist Michael's doom-saying to heart. He, Toller, will don
the suicide vest. He will do this at the re-consecration, in the presence of
all those bad white, Christian, American men who are despoiling the
environment. He'll also get rid of Esther, that pious spinster who doesn't have
the decency to disappear after exploitative sex.
If
you watch as many movies as I do, you will also feel so disappointed. A rich,
white, American, Christian industrialist is the bad guy? Really? Talk about a diabolus ex machina – a stereotypical
villain who has nothing to do with anything that has gone before, no organic
integrity for the movie you've been watching, and none for the real-life issues
the film wants to address. For a really villainous white male, Schrader should
have just injected Hans Gruber from "Die Hard" into "First
Reformed."
A fan
review written by thirty-year veteran Pastor Dave Gipson pointed
out the silliness of Balq. Churches being "underwritten by evil
corporations is not a usual scenario. I know of no churches that receive
corporate funding. It simply doesn't work that way. And if Schrader had
bothered to ask anyone, they could have told him."
Not
just rich, white, American, Christian men damage the environment. It is also
damaged by poor agriculturalists who burn forests and increase desertification.
In Muslim and Hindu societies, little girls are forced to marry adult men and pump
out as many babies as possible as quickly as possible, whether the farmstead
can feed them or not. In much of the "Global South," any concept of
environmentalism has yet to gain popular support.
If
Schrader really wanted a believable villain who uses his money to control what
can and cannot be said about theology, he need look no further than Saudi
Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who writes big checks to Georgetown
University, which pumps
out pro-Islam "scholarship."
"First
Reformed" depicts Toller as utterly isolated, as if no Christian had ever
engaged in activism. When Toller attempts to discuss environmental destruction,
Jeffers swivels his chair so that its back is facing him. This is nonsense. The
current pope, author of "Laudato si': On Care for Our Common Home," has linked environmentalism with
Christian faith. There are the Berrigan brothers, Jim Wallis, Martin Sheen, The
Catholic Worker and the Nuns on the Bus. There are Christian communities, like
the Amish, who live with minimal modern conveniences. There are eco-friendly Bruderhofs,
Christian communes, in New York state, close to the setting of "First
Reformed." If Rev. Toller really wanted to help the environment, he would
have many Christian allies. Indeed, he would have allies in industry. There is
nothing the modern industrialist wants more than a "clean" image.
Since
9-11, The Religion of Peace website claims, Muslim terrorists have
carried out tens of thousands of terror attacks. Suicide attacks are "the preferred tactic of Islamist terror
organizations."
Children, from Africa to Israel to Afghanistan to Indonesia, are frequently
deputized to carry out suicide attacks. In 2017, the United Nations reported that, "Since 2014, 117 children –
more than 80 per cent of them girls – have been used in 'suicide' attacks
across the region" of Nigeria and Chad. How many Dutch Reformed ministers
in upstate New York have donned suicide vests? And yet "First
Reformed" depicts Toller and Jeffers bemoaning "jihadism" among
Christians. One reviewer called the film a "Calvinist jihad."
A website quotes Schrader equating Christianity and Islam.
Christians, Schrader insisted, are prey to "a jihadist fantasy. It’s not
much different than the Muslim kid who has that same fantasy. Christians have
been having it for thousands of years … It is built into the DNA of
Christianity. Christianity can be jihadistic just as easily as Islam."
In one interview, posted online in Italian, Schrader
said his character's donning of a suicide vest is, "Part of Christendom.
Christianity started as a blood cult, you had to sacrifice animals … Songs like
the one in the film where they say 'Did you wash yourself in the blood?' What
does it mean to wash oneself in the blood? … This is jihadism. When we talk
about Muslim 'madmen' and their jihad, we should remember that this aspect of
our religious tradition, however, is like jihadism!"
Paul
Schrader exploits the MacGuffin, or plot device, of a suicide vest to solve his
problem. What is Schrader's problem? This – spirituality is largely an interior
phenomenon. Spirituality is about what people think, feel, hope, and work
toward over years. Movies are about grabbing the viewer's attention with
sensational, novel, action. Exploding cars, or, for something really new, an
exploding car being driven by Godzilla. As Schrader said in an interview, "Everything inside cinema rebels
against spirituality. Cinema is based on action and based on empathy. These are
not elements in the transcendental toolkit. In many ways, people who try to do
spiritual or contemplative films are working against the grain of the medium
itself."
Wait,
there's more. Movies are about sex and violence. We've already addressed the
violence. Let's address the sex.
One
night, Mary shows up at Rev. Toller's residence. She asks to lie on top of him.
My first thought: the movie has suggested that he has cancer in his abdomen.
Isn't having a pregnant woman lying on top of him going to hurt? Guess not. As
Mary lies on top of Toller, their bodies levitate – another trope from horror
films, specifically "The Exorcist" – and they float through blissful
space. They envision magnificent nature scenes. Then they see environmental
destruction. Afterward, Toller insists that Mary not attend the
re-consecration. He's ready, willing and able to blow Esther up, but not Mary.
Now,
Mary is a young, pregnant woman whose terrorist husband just committed suicide.
She's got to be feeling at least three different species of crippling trauma.
The script doesn't allow Mary even to hint at the kind of agony, rage, and fear
that a real woman would undergo under such circumstances. Mary is merely a
mannequin there to function as Toller needs her to function. This
"daring" "progressive" movie is as misogynist as atheists
imagine Christianity to be.
The
day of the re-consecration, Toller dons the suicide vest. If nothing else, I
thought, this movie is going to go out with a bang. Toller looks out the
window. Mary, against his wishes, has shown up. Drat. Toller removes the
suicide vest, and does what any one of us would do under similar circumstances.
He wraps his chest in barbed wire, lacerating and bloodying himself. "If
it bleeds, it leads." Schrader, not himself a man of faith, with no other cards to play, keeps
eyeballs on the screen with shock value.
Inside
the church, Esther begins singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," a
song about how comforting faith is. Esther is an inferior fool. Esther doesn't
care about the environmental degradation of the planet! Esther is too clingy
and pious to confront man's meaningless isolation in an uncaring universe!
Esther wallows in religion's phony comfort.
Toller,
wearing barbed wire the way a Tannenbaum wears tinsel, pours himself a
frat-house-sized helping of drain cleaner. Sure, he's going to off himself in
the most painful way possible, but he's also doing something far more important
in an art film. He's creating a metaphor. He is clogged with waste. He needs to
be cleaned out. Just like the planet! As he is about to raise the glass to his
lips, Mary opens the door. She sees bloodied Toller preparing to scarf down poison.
She rushes to him and slathers him with passionate kisses. Hey. It would make
for an unforgettable Drano ad.
Ending
with sex, Schrader takes the same route that "Ida" took.
"Ida" is a slow, quiet bore of a movie centered on an all but silent,
not particularly bright Catholic nun. As this black-and-white, subtitled
snooze-fest limps to its close, the nun removes her veil and she has sex.
The
one interesting character in "Ida" is Wanda. Wanda is a sexy,
complicated smart-mouth. Wanda is based on Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Soviet-era
Communist judge who sent many Polish heroic anti-Nazi fighters to torture,
death, and unmarked graves. Nuns are stupid and boring. Communist murderers are
sexy, smart, and complex. This is the movie that inspired "First Reformed."
"First
Reformed"'s problems are reflective of many films made by atheists about
believers. The atheist stereotype is that those of us who believe in God are stupid,
pious, bores – like poor Esther, who is worthy to be blown up, or Ida the nun,
who is only interesting in the final scenes, when she removes her habit and
spreads her legs. Schrader and Pawlikowski both prescribe, in their films, the
antidote for crises of faith. One must get laid. To both these directors I
would say, with Blaise Pascal, that there is an "infinite abyss"
inside every man that "can be filled only with an infinite and immutable
object; in other words by God himself."
Ironically,
Schrader's film repeatedly references Thomas Merton. Merton had everything a
man could want. He enjoyed worldly success and certainly lots of sex. And
Merton gave it all up to become a cloistered monk. Church history includes many
who "had it all" and threw it all away to live spiritual lives. Saint
Augustine, Katharine Drexel, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, movie star Dolores
Hart, model Olalla Oliveros, some-time actor Karol Wojtyla, all left varying
degrees of wealth, privilege, success, power and happiness to pursue something
that Paul Schrader never manages to hint at in "First Reformed."
This essay first appears at the FrontPageMag website here.
