Paul Schrader and the Exploding Man
What happens when a man is pushed to the edge?
It sounds like the tagline for some unremarkable Death Wish imitator, but in 2019, it’s become a question with terrifyingly real answers. What happens when religious fanatics privilege faulty verse over human life? What happens when men take doctrines of white supremacy and misogyny to the extreme? We know the answer to these questions far too intimately.
Paul Schrader, acclaimed writer (films like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull best embody his penmanship) and under-appreciated director, has dedicated an entire to career to questions like these. The vast majority of his films work almost like thought experiments — what happens when a man is forced to exist in a society that necessarily conflicts with his own personal set of values?
With his directorial debut Blue Collar, the question was how male factory workers can maintain solidarity in the face of an uncaring employer and a corrupt union (spoiler: they can’t and violence erupts). With his later Hardcore, it was about how a religious father could possibly come to grips with his daughter’s new career in pornography (spoiler: he can’t and violence erupts). One of his most beloved films as a director, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, adapts the true story of how the titular author balances his obsession with masculinity and traditionalism in the face of an evolving Japan (spoiler: he can’t and, well, you get it).
With nearly all of his films up unto the present, Schrader seemed to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of his original thesis: something fundamental about men prevented proper integration into a changing society, and the natural consequence was violence. It’s almost funny to thumb through Schrader filmography these days; how many different ways can he makes his protagonist explode?
Enter First Reformed (spoilers follow), perhaps Schrader’s most popular and acclaimed film as a director to date. In the film, we watch an Ethan Hawke-played pastor become radicalized by environmental degradation and religious hypocrisy. Think you can guess how it ends? Well, maybe not.
In the film’s final sequence, Hawke prepares a suicide vest with which he intends to kill a local polluter, the hierarchy of a soulless megachurch, and anyone else who happens to be nearby. He one-ups Jesus’s crown of thorns by wrapping his entire torso in barbed wire and attempts to chug a bit of drain cleaner when he is interrupted by a young woman from his congregation he’s been helping through personal difficulties. They embrace and make out for a bit before the film is unceremoniously over.
Every viewer of the film is left wondering what happens next, but any Paul Schrader fans in the audience are bound to ask: why was this time different? Schrader’s made a name for himself out of forcing men to blow up onscreen — why have we been denied the gratification this time around?
In Mishima, the protagonist kills himself because society has not only moved on from his values — they’ve openly mocked them as well. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle’s gunfight in the brothel (probably) ends in his “death” for the same reason—his ideal society is so far away from mid-70s New York City that death is the only true option.
The same is pretty clearly true for Hawke in First Reformed. The certainty of climate doom in the film is pretty definitive as is Hawke’s terminal illness. The world has moved past the man and his values (as Cedric the Entertainer’s monologue late in the film states rather explicitly), and death is absolutely the most reasonable option.
Hawke’s character attempts to do irreparable violence to himself before doing the same to a congregation full of people and the church to which he has devoted his adult life. What stops him isn’t a glimmer of hope that things will get better. It’s the simple, brutal acknowledgment that he loves and is loved. A wordless embrace, made all the more powerful by the film’s encircling camerawork, demonstrates the monumental power of a gesture we see every day.
The embrace at the end of First Reformed is no guarantee that violence doesn’t follow, but it’s worthy of note that no such embrace features in any of the films listed above. The kiss that ends the film replaces the violence that likely would’ve ended it otherwise. A walk through Schrader’s movies show an interest in disaffected men and an obvious distaste for a corrupted society. Such themes naturally force the question: why continue to live in a world like this?
Schrader, 73 years old, clearly had his reasons. With First Reformed, we finally understand that even through all of the torture that life entails, one moment of genuine love is enough to make it worth the trouble.
