First Reformed is Taxi Driver for the age of Trump |
‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017.
‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened.
Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and patriarchy, or the collapse of the white working class and the decay of patriotism? The symptoms too are polarized, beyond mutual comprehension. The leading cause of young black male deaths is murder, but the leading cause of young white male deaths is suicide. The weirdness of these linked statistics has a common source. The leaders of America couldn’t have agreed more with each other when it came to neglecting their responsibilities to the voters.
In 1976, Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver traced the blowback of foreign policy failure in Vietnam. Schrader’s new film, First Reformed, does much the same for the human and environmental failures of industrial policy. Like Travis Bickle, the Reverend Ernst Toller is adrift and full of anger. Like Bickle, Toller invents a narrative of heroism; having lost his faith in prayer, Toller reads Thomas Merton and keeps a spiritual diary. And, like Bickle, Toller also sees redemption in the form of a vulnerable young blonde, plots the killing of a prominent politicians, and turns his violence first outwards and then inwards.
The difference is that Bickle is alienated, but Toller is atomised. Bickle shoots Sport the pimp, then tries to shoot himself. Failing, he is redeemed as a hero. Toller, however,........