First Reformed is among that handful of films so completely apt to my own life that I could scarcely believe when watching it that I had not seen it long before. The film—an existentialist drama about a Protestant minister's descent into despair and political extremism, after losing to suicide a parishioner whom he had attempted to counsel (okay, none of that has happened to me, but keep reading)—is perhaps the most lifelike portrayal ever committed to celluloid of what it's like to be a minister in a declining small-town church in the Northeast United States. And while the film is certainly not without its faults—there are moments of such terrible apparent self-seriousness that even the most straight-faced viewer, utterly committed to the project of watching this as an earnest art film, will be tempted to snicker—it nonetheless addresses itself to the fundamental dilemmas in our time in a way few films do—and which in some sense makes it feel even more timely now, in 2023, than it was when it first came out.
The film then, whatever else it does, continues to reaffirm my guiding principle as a moviegoer that there is no such thing as a bad Paul Schrader film. Admittedly, I have yet to see the entire oeuvre—maybe there's a dud hidden somewhere in the back catalog—but every Schrader film I've watched has been visually stunning and mysteriously suspenseful. I even admire the ones that many critics sniffed at with greater skepticism, such as The Canyons. I will defend that movie before anyone!
But as for that charge of excessive self-seriousness above: well, I don't think the film can entirely escape it. Less tolerant viewers might have reached the point of rolling their eyes long before I did, during episodes in which the protagonist deepens his political consciousness of climate change by reading online browser print-offs from the National Weather Service or the IPCC, or in which he has a mystic-spiritual vision of flying over the Earth's lush green surfaces, only to see these replaced with blenching coal-fired power plants and the charred remains of gutted forests.
Then there is the dialogue, which tracks the film's underlying philosophical conceptions at times so closely as to become stilted. "I share Michael's beliefs," says the Amanda Seyfried character at one point, "but not his despair." Who talks like that?
Still, any one of these slightly cringe-inducing moments could be defended as part of an artistic whole. The artificial-sounding dialogue, for instance, heightens the effect that we are in a stylized world of philosophic meditation. Many of the clunkiest lines sound like they are Bergman monologues translated hyper-literally into English, and that after all is perfect, given the sources of the film's artistic inspiration.
I would defend the film ultimately, though, not so much by making any claim for it as one of the decade's objectively greatest films, but rather on the basis of the deeply personal meaning it held for me: both because of my professional life up to this point, and the state our world is in now, about half a decade after the film was released.
Of course, nobody who's watched the film all the way through to the end would be anxious to compare themselves to its central character. As unflattering as the resemblance may be, however, I couldn't escape it. Schrader seems to have recorded exactly what it's like to be a minister in a small and dying congregation in a mainline denomination (one would have thought this was a small and culturally marginal enough group of people that no one in the present day would bother to make a film about them, but Schrader was no doubt drawing on his own improbable training as a theology student at a Calvinist college before launching his film career). And even more than that, he seems to have captured exactly the sort of minister that I briefly was, when I held a two-year student ministry in a New England pulpit, in preparation for an ordination I never completed, and when I subsequently preached every few months at a small church one town over in the Boston suburbs.
Schrader's protagonist—Rev. Toller (played to mortifying perfection by Ethan Hawke)—serves a small historic congregation near Albany that resembles countless New England–style meeting houses in which I've preached. His typical audience on a Sunday is reduced to about five to ten people, spread out thinly across the pews—a "bare ruined choir" if ever there was one.
Many people who have not themselves pursued the increasingly endangered profession of mainline Protestant ministry—or something adjacent to it—might regard this as a hyperbolic parody of denominational decline. But the second New England church in which I preached a few times a year before coming to law school resembled it with eerie precision. There was the same limited attendance; I would look out during my preaching Sundays upon the same view that Rev. Toller confronts, of five to ten people seated at maximum distances from one another in the pews—a tiny sanctuary made to seem vast by the dispersion of its few inhabitants. Even the architecture of Toller's church, and its status as more of a museum than an active congregation, bear almost a perfect resemblance to the congregation in which I served. Schrader's vision is no exaggeration.
There is one key difference between Rev. Toller's church and my own, though—the latter, like most of the smaller historic New England churches, could not afford to keep a full-time minister on the payroll. While they had ben able to keep a tenacious hold on their financial independence by relying on an old endowment, they were forced to staff their operation through a mixture of volunteer labor and short-term ministers (like me) hired for one-off preaching engagements.
Rev. Toller's church, meanwhile, faces the same economic problem, but has found a different solution—one which also serves Schrader's purpose of underlining the theme of historical decline, and Rev. Toller's own sense of mounting humiliation. The congregation in his case has recently been acquired—and is maintained as a museum-piece and historic oddity (with Toller kept as curator and tour-guide)—by a cheesy non-denominational megachurch next door—a sort of private equity firm of religion.
Apart from its grasp on the dismal state of mainline Protestant denominations, however—shedding members, finding themselves displaced in the religious landscape by a dominant model of church-as-big-business, which has made the once-respected title of pastor synonymous in many people's minds with microphone headset–wearing charlatan—Schrader also gives us in Toller an image of the ineffectual and self-doubting minister in which I find a searing resemblance to myself, in my ministry days. Rev. Toller pulls up to counseling meetings in a beat-up navy-blue Nissan car that has seemingly never been through a car wash (okay, mine was a Honda Civic, but otherwise—down to the thick and immovable layer of dirt that would accumulate each winter—the parallel is uncanny). He walks around dressed all in gloomy black clothes, regardless of occasion or time of day.
And Schrader captures with poignant accuracy the strained social awkwardness that is endemic to so many ministerial encounters. Toller throws himself into attempts at service and self-sacrifice, only to have his own clumsiness do more harm than good. In a scene that all-too-viscerally reminded me of some of my own most embarrassing pastoral mishaps, he accidentally upends a bowl of hot soup on a man in a wheelchair, whom he had intended to serve as part of his ministry in a soup kitchen.
When he is approached by a young couple for counseling, Toller suffers from the same insecurity that many contemporary ministers do—the uncertainty whether oneself has truly any comfort or wisdom to provide in the face of cosmic despair; the awareness of one's own relative lack of specialized training or service to offer, in a world filled with a proliferating series of other professions, which have constructed for themselves a more technical lore, and which can promise more scientific or technological cures—with the veneer of rationality and certainty—for a person's afflictions.
Rev. Toller's breakdown in the film comes after his more limited and traditional tools as a minister fail him in his effort to succor a congregant. He is asked to counsel a young climate activist, and new parent, who is battling depression and a sense of despair and meaninglessness in the face of ecological catastrophe. On a planet hurtling toward its own destruction, the young man asks, what right does he or anyone else have to bring new life into the world? Rev. Toller is not the sort to brush him or anyone else off with glib answers about God's plan or an otherworldly salvation. But what exactly, then, does he have to offer? Many ministers have asked themselves the same question in the midst of a pastoral encounter.
Toller begins by telling the young man that he is not the first to suffer from despair; it has been present in human life from the beginning of history. What appears to him then as a perfectly rational response to an objectively hopeless scientific situation—irreversible climate change, a planet already pushed past the brink of ecological destruction—is actually a manifestation of an older and deeper human dilemma that countless generations before have contended with and survived. (He references Kierkegaard at this point, but one could equally well cite everyone from Ecclesiastes to James Thomson as proof of Rev. Toller's thesis that despair and existential dread, the sense that all is nothingness, is no uniquely 20th- or 21st-century phenomenon. "The mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall," as Hopkins wrote in the century prior.)
To this line of argument, however, the young man replies that the modern era confronts something radically different from anything prior generations had to experience: namely, the possibility that human technology could end up destroying us. Thus, despair, it could be argued—even if hardly a new phenomenon—has more of reason on its side than ever before. Rev. Toller is forced to concede this point. "Man's great achievements," he says, "have brought him to the place where life as we know it may cease in the foreseeable future. Yes, that's new."
And so it has been with multiple changes of the last one hundred years—the creation of atomic weapons, the rise of global temperatures and the staggering carnage of natural life that goes under the name of "biodiversity loss," and now, the kindred anxieties about emerging AI technologies. Because of all these changes, pastors and counselors can no longer say with integrity that a person's apocalyptic fears or concern over humanity's future are a mere external projection of their own inner psychic turmoil. Despair might indeed appear, in the modern era, to have reason on its side. "If humanity can't overcome its immediate interests enough to ensure its own survival," Toller admits, "then you're right: despair is the only rational response."
Toller therefore shifts tack, in the face of this argument. He offers the young man instead a kind of existentialism. What all of his reasoning goes to prove, Toller argues, is the irrefutable fact of uncertainty. No one can deny it. The world could wink out in a fatal cataclysm; it is beyond any mortal to affirm this will or will not happen. But in the face of this uncertainty, we have a choice as to how to confront it. "Courage is the solution to despair," he counsels."Reason provides no answers. I can't know what the future will bring. We have to choose despite uncertainty. [...] We can choose a righteous life."
The lines are, in my view, the apogee of the wisdom that Rev. Toller will attain in the film. But they fail to move the young man, who proceeds to take his own life before their next meeting. This sends Toller on a downward spiral, leading to a series of increasingly extreme acts. Part of the film's tragic irony is that Toller should offer the only and the best counsel that any minister—or any person—can provide in the face of despair—namely, that the future is unknowable, and that we live under conditions of ultimate uncertainty, but that our freedom of action nonetheless imposes choices upon us (to do nothing is itself a choice), and so we can choose to do the right and just thing even without knowing what if anything it may ultimately lead to—and yet this answer is still nowhere near good enough to save the young man's life.
It is this attempt to retrieve meaning in the face of human-made apocalypse and technological change that makes Schrader's film, as I said at the outset, seem almost more timely for our present moment than it was for the one in which it first appeared (which was, of course, only five or six years ago, but already seems a separate world). The apocalyptic mood of our time has surely only grown more severe since then, in the wake of a global pandemic and the rise of next-generation AI technologies with the ability to convincingly mimic many of the operations of the human mind.
Of course, many young people in 2017 already felt the sense of cosmic despair that the young man in the film experiences, and about the same topic too: climate change. Perhaps if I were a better person, I might have felt it then too, but the truth is I didn't. In 2017 I was to be sure deeply worried about the future of American democracy following the election of Donald Trump (concerns that can't be said to have been overblown, in light of the events that followed), but I never regarded climate change as an apocalypse. I accepted intellectually all the arguments about the threat that it posed, and still do—but on an emotional level it nonetheless still seemed to me remote. The recent technological changes in AI, however, have hit closer to the sources of my own pride and plans for my future—particularly by threatening to displace the act of writing.
The sense that—even if the world will not literally end—we are in any event likely to inherit a very different future from the one we had envisioned for ourselves, and around which we have shaped our lives and choices up to this point, is one that many people felt much earlier on about climate change. It is also the one that I and many other people are now experiencing most keenly with regard to the rise of AI. The New York Times, for instance, ran a piece yesterday profiling the so-called "Godfather of AI," Geoffrey Hinton, who had co-developed the initial concept of neural networks, and who is now questioning the wisdom of having helped bring this technology into the world.
Almost everyone concedes, Hinton included, that the current AI language models are not themselves some sort of direct apocalyptic threat. But they confront us in a particularly unsettling way with the rapidity of human technological change, and therefore the inherent unknowability and frightening uncertainty of the future. "Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now," the Times quotes Hinton as saying of AI technology. "Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary."
Of course, it's not certain that this technology will advance at the same exponential rate indefinitely that it has in the past few years; it's also not certain precisely what effects it would have on human life if it did. And despair is nothing other than an assertion of certainty as to outcomes. This is why, in reflecting on the experience of his pastoral encounter, Rev. Toller meditates on a quotation from Thomas Merton—something about how despair is the ultimate assertion of human pride, because it claims a certainty as to the future—that there can be one and only one possible outcome—rather than conceding the limitlessness of God's potential for creativity. And even for non-theists like me, there is truth and wisdom here: if there is one thing that history teaches, after all, it is the limits of human prophecy. The future, whatever it proves to be—good or ill—will probably surprise us.
And so we are thrust back upon Rev. Toller's counsel to have courage in the face of uncertainty, and to choose righteousness even without knowing what good, if any, it might do. I am reminded of the existentialist wisdom with which John Fowles rather abruptly and unexpectedly closes his postmodern historical novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman: "[L]ife [...] is not one riddle and one failure to guess it; [it] is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's irony heart, endured." He too, that is, counsels courage in the face of the future's unknowability. Endurance, without promise of ultimate knowledge. Choice, while knowing only that whatever the future may be, it is not a single all-or-nothing throw of the dice, but an endlessly-ramifying series of causal sequences that pass the limits of human understanding or foresight.
Rev. Toller was right, then, if only he had heeded his own advice. But it is part of the tragedy of Schrader's film—and of life—that even those who know the only answer to despair are not themselves thereby made immune to it; nor is the answer enough in all cases to save our fellow sufferers.
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