../first-reformed

First Reformed

At a glance...

A friend suggested this film as a topical viewing given the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO, and while I do see how this movie is obviously connected to those events, I was kind of stunned in the first half that so much of the establishing of Pastor Toller as a character was about his unrequited desire for creating art. I felt, in his words each time he judged his own writing, a connection to my own writing. The judgment that comes before, during, and after one has written something down on the page was something I was deeply struggling with just a couple days earlier about these reviews I write. When I'm really in the weeds, I think of writing as an expression of pure arrogance, and that standpoint can only exist when I am deeply self-critical and self-loathing. It was unbelievable at first that First Reformed would make its main character so familiar in this way, knowing what I knew about how things would progress. But then I watch the film and the idea becomes clear: our most self-destructive impulses can also be dangerously tied to our most (self-)righteous ones.

Visually, I am a big fan of the narrow and static view of this film. There is hardly any camera movement. The shots hold still, the shadows carve through the composition of the shot, the characters are orchestrated and placed so that the visual matches the emotion of the dialog or the narration. I'm thinking of the placement of Reverend Toller on the diner seat when he has his awkward conversation with the big men in town that he is unfortunately forced to interact with. I'm thinking of the way the trip to Mary Mensana's house is filmed with a static view that puts the front door, the car, and the sidewalk and neighboring houses in different arrangements and orientations depending on what is about to happen in the house. And I'm thinking of the flooring in Toller's little house, and the long dark shadow that cuts through the back of the floor when he has his first moment of physical intimacy with Mary. Images that stick out in my mind like photographs, because they are philosophically photographic. There's many great lines in this film where the good Reverend relates himself to darkness, and that feeling is unflinchingly correlated to what we see on screen.

But I will say, First Reformed is challenging me a lot on its implications and conclusions. In my own head, as a joke, I have starting thinking of First Reformed as an edgelord movie for me and my internal edgelord. Reverend Toller is my Joker, I guess. And if I identify so strongly with a self-hating and self-critical character who is spiritually drowning in his own guilt so much that he has to physically do so with alcohol, what does First Reformed have to offer me? At the end of this movie, I wanted Reverend Toller to die. I wanted him to strap up, walk in, and be a hero. I was in so much denial about how this was going to end that when it all finally cut to black, my friend snapped her fingers dramatically and it was like a spell had been broken. Even after that sound, a part of me was so unbelieving in the film just ending that I remained clenched for a few moments, before exhaling, feeling like Paul Schrader had blue-balled me. As yet another entry in the list of films that implicate the audience's participation in the violence, I was bloodthirsty. I saw Toller's struggle and radicalization as like my own, I saw his turn for towards violence as an unequivocally positive force in his life, and I don't want to write on a public review how much of that was because I felt a certain envy that I hadn't yet destroyed myself in a similar way. I was so excited for Toller to die because then I could see him as a successful example of the move towards violence we need if we are to change things.

But he does not perish. He does not become a martyr for a cause we might see as just. What we do see are connections between the ultimately failed self-detonation and so many other kinds of isolation and self-harming behaviors in the pastor's life. I think my favorite example of this is how argument and debate is depicted in this film, in yet another thing that is so fucking relatable to my life experience that it feels a little spooky. The first time Reverend Toller gets into an argument at the diner, he tells us in narration that the silent ones always seem wiser. He laments his failure to adhere to his own advice, and the conversation that ensues is unsatisfying and violent. He raises his strong questions, but he is in an environment where no one around him wants to hear what he has to say. His questioning is therefore meaningless. Those of us who have tried to be like the Reverend in these conversations intimately know that in order to genuinely persuade another person, that person has to already be doing a lot of work to have a curiosity and openness to the point of persuasion. It's why debates and the marketplace of ideas have never, in my experience, actually convinced someone with any lasting effect. The arena simply provides rules for judgment, but no one involved fundamentally changes. Certainly I have found it is better shut up and spend time with my radicalized friends than to verbally spar with strangers in bad faith.

In fact, you can see just how effective spirited debate is in this film right at the end, when Toller argues with his benefactor, Pastor Joel Jeffers, about his environmental concerns. This is the most engaged the debate over this topic ever gets for us in the audience because the participants are all speaking the same language. Toller and Jeffers are both able to quote powerful-sounding scripture to justify their points and while we may believe one side over the other, the only judge who could cleanly resolve their theological questions is god, and he's not in the room right now. The debate gives neither Toller nor Jeffers any peace, nor does it lead to Toller getting the upper hand for the rest of the conversation like he may have wished. We are often lead to believe that through proper and thorough conversation, we may usurp the power of those that loom over us, but it fails pathetically here. Only the vest remains.

First Reformed is a movie that I am seeing and writing about during and in-between my own depressive spirals, and probably that's why it's hitting me so hard days and weeks after. It is, to me, a meditation on insecurity and guilt as it relates to our desire to live artfully. The hollow spirituality and discarded journal pages are extensions of the same unfulfilled desire which is the burning root of our shame. The vest and all of the factual exposition about impending climate catastrophe are just props to evoke our own sense of righteousness and defensiveness, so that we may come closer to the Reverend's ailing and decaying body and partake in his delicious self-destruction. That it doesn't happen, that instead he returns back to the one positive human connection he has, and lets go of his own mutilation for even just a moment, is unsatisfying to me, and that feeling worries me. It's one of the most personally challenging films I've seen this year.

/2017/ /4 stars/