Paul Schrader’s Religion of the Goddess: A Review of “First Reformed”
Near the beginning of Paul Schrader’s 2019 drama First Reformed, the troubled protagonist Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), finds himself engaged in a life-altering debate with a climate activist. Michael, the husband of the pregnant Mary, one of Toller’s parishioners, frantically throws Thunberg-style statistics and rhetoric at the reverend, warning of the nightmarish eco-apocalypse that the next generation will experience. Toller tries to pull Michael back from the brink of despair: “Wisdom,” he counsels, “is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously, hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.” He fails.
Days later, Michael blows his own head off with a shotgun, and Toller is sucked into the same abyss. Shortly before the suicide, Toller had quietly confiscated a suicide bomb vest belonging to Michael discovered by his terrified wife. Now he hides it rather than giving it to the police. Michael had used alcohol to dull his pain. Toller’s angst-ridden journaling sessions become similarly liquor-soaked. He starts spending late nights pouring over websites about the looming eco-apocalypse. He internalizes the question Michael posed to him about man’s sins towards the environment – “Can God forgive us?” – and puts it on the sign outside of his lonely church. Finally, at the end of First Reformed Toller dons a suicide vest, and prepares to detonate at the church’s 250th anniversary celebration, stopping only when he notices Michael’s widow Mary among the congregants.
Notwithstanding a long and checkered career in film, Paul Schrader will ever be best known for writing the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). As we discuss in our “Joker Cycle” article, Taxi Driver is the key cultural product for understanding how the figure of the outsider was transformed into the figure of the lone nut and finally the incel – the weirdo loner allegedly motivated by fame or infamy and hence prone to assassinate public figures and engage in otherwise motiveless acts of violence. Taxi Driver itself is said to have inspired an attempted assassination of the recently elected President Reagan by the lone nut John Hinckley who developed an obsessive identification with Taxi Driver protagonist Travis Bickle. But Hinckley was not just a lone nut. His family was close enough to Vice President George H.W. Bush that his brother was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush a day after the assassination attempt.
The Joker Cycle feedback loop is a directed feedback loop between real acts of spectacular violence supposedly perpetrated by deranged outsiders and media representations of this violence. Located at the intersection between the individual, MKUltra-style mind control to which both Hinckley and Mark David Chapman (convicted for the shooting of John Lennon a few months earlier) were subjected, on the one hand, and the psychological warfare and cultural engineering to which the entire population has been subjected, on the other, the Joker Cycle is both synthetic and organic. The idea is both to inspire crimes and to provide a plausible psychological explanation for the actions of specifically programmed assassins.
With respect to Schrader himself, it is useful to note that at least one of his recent films, Dying of the Light (2014, starring Nic Cage), received CIA support, and also his previous history as a “psyop surgeon” in films like Patty Hearst (1988) which suppresses “kidnapper” Donald DeFreeze’s history of being a Federal informant, and evidence that he was the victim of MKUltra experiments while incarcerated at Vacaville.
Schrader self-consciously returns to his roots in engineering the outsider archetype. First Reformed follows Taxi Driver by featuring Toller scribbling his increasingly warped personal reflections into a diary. In Taxi Driver, the diary writing was based on the journalling habit of Arthur Bremer, the young man charged with attempting to assassinate George Wallace; Bremer’s work was later published, the prototypical “madman’s diary,” and his motivation presented as a frustrated man’s hunger for fame at all costs. Bremer himself claimed partial inspiration for his actions from the protagonist of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a psychopathic delinquent subjected to psychological programming.
First Reformed, then, follows a long line of cinematic depictions of the incel archetype overlapping with media-inspired political violence allegedly committed by lone nuts incels – but with a new twist. Schrader and Hawke both underscored the intentionally obscure nature of the film’s messaging. “This one is designed to be ambiguous,” says Schrader, contrasting it with the supposedly more straightforward Taxi Driver. Hawke similarly describes the film as not easily ideologically categorized, because “every character is right at one moment and wrong in another moment.” But First Reformed is less ideologically cryptic than it seems at first glance.
The central intention behind Schrader’s collision of American Christianity with climate doomerism is made clear in the contrasts between the three main male characters: Toller, Michael, and the Reverend Joel Jeffers, the head pastor of a neighboring megachurch that expends the resources to keep Toller’s historic but dwindling First Reformed running, and Mary’s relation to each of them.
Mary is an obvious stand-in for the Virgin Mary whose pregnancy underscores her Earth Mother association, representing the spiritual concerns at the heart of the film. Schrader’s movie depicts American Christianity being devoured by the new religion of the Gaian goddess. Interestingly, the Joel Jeffers character played by Cedric the Entertainer, whose name evokes the infamous prosperity gospel huckster Joel Osteen, is depicted with surprising sympathy. Jeffers chides Toller for being “always in the garden” (of Gethsemane), engaging in an agonized internal struggle at the expense of other aspects of religious ministry. Schrader has stated that “Jeffers is 100 percent right. People have a tendency to stereotype the megachurch minister, but he’s right.”
At the same time, Jeffers and his church Abundant Life are shown to lack the spiritual authenticity that characterizes Toller. Mary seeks help for Michael at First Reformed rather than the larger, wealthier church, because the latter feels “more like a company than a church.” His megachurch mindset leads Jeffers to dismiss the urgency of Toller’s environmental concerns and to deride Thomas Merton, the enormously popular twentieth-century Catholic mystic who Toller idolizes.
The film broadly sides with Jeffers against Toller’s bottomless angst but with Toller’s sincerity against Jeffers’s indifference to activism and mysticism. With respect to Michael, Mary says that she shared his beliefs, but not his despair. As sexual tension builds between Toller and Mary, culminating in a passionate embrace in the film’s last shot, he demonstrates that he too has come to share Michael’s climate catastrophism (views endorsed by Schrader) and devotion to the earth. After Michael’s suicide, Mary asks Toller to engage with her in what she and Michael call the “magical mystery tour,” in which she lays on top of him, fully clothed, and breathing in unison. With Mary’s body pressed against him, the pair begin to levitate: the script describes them becoming “a single organism.” Starring into her eyes, Toller has a vision of wonders of the natural world collapsing into horrific scenes of pollution and ecological destruction.
Michael’s atheistic environmentalist radicalism was insufficient as an ideology fit for the service of the Earth Mother. Because he was spiritually hollow, he was overwhelmed and destroyed. Toller, however, has the spiritual depth necessary to properly honor and serve the Gaian goddess. Michael shoots himself alone in the woods, but when Toller is about to kill himself, the Earth Mother Mary shows up to provide a salvific sensual encounter.
Despite being the reverend of a historic Dutch Reformed church and therefore presumably adhering to the denomination’s Calvinism, Hawke’s character has a decidedly mystical streak in his religiosity which hints toward a post-Christian New Ageism. His spiritual hero, Merton, was a proponent of ecumenical blending of religions, as well as an advocate for global government. Toller’s bookshelf also includes The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century work of Christian mysticism, and the script also mentions the presence of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Living Buddha, Living Christ.
First Reformed depicts a moribund American Protestantism bifurcating into the superficial positivity of prosperity gospel evangelicalism on the one hand, and the angst-ridden remnants of historic Protestantism on the other. Ethan Hawke has commented positively on how Merton was popular with the hippies for being less dogmatic than other major Christian thinkers. Schrader’s film suggests that Toller’s religious intensity is best decoupled from its Christian heritage and enjoined to a spirituality that foregrounds the sensual, the ecological, and the feminine. Thus the spirituality of the goddess (the state religion of globalism as well as the true faith of Hollywood) finds its ideal host in an American Christianity that has been denatured by liberalism to the point of unrecognizability.
In weaponizing liberal Christianity against Christianity, Schrader is reapplying a well-worn formula from the 18th century, when liberal Protestantism ceased the quest for the Kingdom of Heaven and instead addressed itself to the wider liberal project of fabricating a socio-political heaven on earth. The result, over time, was a plethora of post-Christian spiritualities in the form of the ‘New Thought’ movement which fed into the proto-New Age milieu of the era, led by the Theosophical Society. When Toller and Mary kiss in the film’s final sequence, we are witnessing both a dissociative fantasy and the birth of a religious consciousness fit for the globalist regime.
Schrader has commented that humanity is in a “horserace to the apocalypse” to discover whether global warming, AI, nuclear weapons, or a virus will destroy us first. One can easily imagine alternative versions of First Reformed in which one of these other apocalyptic specters drives Toller to a violent despair that reshapes his religious perspective. Each supplies a scenario for apocalypse programming, a mind control technique wherein individuals or populations are manipulated and reshaped by a pseudo-religious idea of the end of the world. But it is also unsurprising that Schrader picked climate alarmism as his preferred instrument given how readily it connects to the gender and sexual dynamics of the Joker Cycle that he helped to define. In other depictions of the descent into spectacular crime, the mind control subject’s immersion into the body of the Great Mother remains a suggestion or implication. But in First Reformed, the alienated man who has reached suicidal and homicidal levels of anguish has the maternal goddess show up in literal and explicit form.
Via his longing for Mary and his increasingly harsh dismissals of Esther, a compassionate Abundant Life staffer with whom he had a previous sexual dalliance, Toller is shown to be sexually repressed. The release of this repression is signified by the closing moments of the film in which static camerawork gives way to a kinetic spinning motion (a primary symbol of trauma-based mind control) around Toller and Mary as they kiss. Explaining that choice, Schrader says that “the spiritual idea of it came from Dreyer’s ‘Ordet.’ That ended with a miracle where a woman is raised from the dead, and her husband’s reaction is one of lust — purely carnal. What holds all of this together is ‘Taxi Driver.’” Schrader has also described the conclusion as Toller being granted a glimpse of heaven as an eternal kiss.
This reduction of religion to the fulfillment of sexual fantasy has more in common with eros-centered occult spirituality than with Christian orthodoxy. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to reconcile Schrader’s involvement in movies like The Last Temptation of Christ (to take an obvious example) with his professed Christianity.
Throughout the climactic scene of First Reformed, we hear the sound of Esther singing the hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” “What a blessedness, what a peace is mine / Leaning on the everlasting arms… What have I to dread, what have I to fear? / Leaning on the everlasting arms.” Meanwhile, we see Toller (his suicide-bombing plans thwarted) mutilating his body with barbed wire and preparing to down a glass of drain cleaner. The lyrics initially sound cynical. But as Toller finds relief from despair in Mary’s embrace, we see that the film is being utterly sincere. Peace in everlasting arms no longer refers to Christ but rather to the all-compassing body of the divine feminine.
This conclusion represents an application of the alchemical solve et coagula (dissolve and coagulate) formula on the levels of both psychology and civilization, a chilling synergy of micro and macro trauma-based mind control. Taxi Driver represented the dissolve phase, manipulating alienated men into violent power fantasies which corrode traditional social structures and values, thereby intensifying alienation. First Reformed moves into the coagulate phase, in which debased masculinity, supplanted by the return of the mother and Christianity, symbolized by a historic parish church targeted for suicide bombing, is replaced by an eco-feminist spiritual syncretism favored by globalist technocrats.
The new phase involves transferring the dangerous outsider archetype from right to left while simultaneously revalorizing his cause. While Schrader and Scorsese have gone out of their way to refuse any political meaning to Travis Bickle’s reactionary actions – Travis’s “hell is a personal hell,” not a real one, Schrader insists on the audio commentary – Toller’s politics are depicted as coherent and just. Toller finally gives up on answering the question at the heart of the film, “Will God forgive us?” Forsaking his faith, he sets out on the path the film also offers its viewers, losing himself in the infantilizing bliss of the goddess.
Brett Carollo & Thomas Millary are the hosts of Psyop Cinema. They can be found on psyop-cinema.com and followed @CinemaPsyop.
