Dynamite is Divine

Oh, yes, it’s Mr Paul Schrader isn’t it, and this - First Reformed - is your latest, yes yes? Thank you, we thought, you know, we'd scout the territory! Wonderful lot of stuff you have here...

This film is rammed to the rafters: religion, politics, business, terrorism, and then he adds sex, adds love... Can anything else be shoved in? We think of a hoarder’s house, rooms turned into caves, its rocks made of papers, books, boxes, videos, black plastic bags, DVDs, tapes, ornaments, clothes...a mountain range of secondhand treasure and newly minted junk; the carpet a street of cobbled shoes. The owner crawls out, a miner squeezing through a tumbledown tunnel. You want to look inside? Are you sure you want to go in? Ok... 

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Not so much a close-up as a squeeze-against, the director, thrusting the camera right into the face, is trying, as we, seeking to defend ourselves, shudder back against our seats, to press the actors through the screen; to touch them, to feel their presence, to smell their pain-racked faces forced tight against our own, is to know their spirit, to grasp their deep inner core; he will have us close to these characters. The technique signals the limitations of a work trying too hard to be a movie. Praise the skies! Toller doesn't make it to my lap; though our relief is tinged with disappointment, for being too unreal he leaves us cold, utterly unsatisfied. Paul Schrader wants to make a film. Instead, he has written one of those “serious” think-pieces we find in the quality newspapers; the feel-good sermons that ennoble us with their moral admonition. These are ideas talking, not real people acting; and they are bad ideas into the bargain. Journalism not art. No profundity only Poshlost.

Michael the environmentalist is an evangelical who has lost his faith in humanity. The Internet has told him straight: climate damage has tipped over the point where it can be contained; this planet is doomed, and there is nothing you can do. But, committed to environmental activism, in which he has invested most of his intellectual and emotional resources, he wants, he needs to do something; he has to make a stand. So he buys a jihadi suicide vest: he will be a martyr for Planet Earth. Attracted to violence, the quickest, most radical way to galvanise opinion, Michael is yet unaware of the absurdity of his own position, for if the tipping point has been reached where actions are futile then his suicide attack is just another careless, destructive and pointless human act. Oh Michael, we don’t want to hurt you, but…yes, we must voice an unfortunate truth…bombs are pollutants too. Your violence is not an act of politics but a shriek of pain; another sad ego on yet one more selfish trip, yours to oblivion rather than to Turkey or Thailand.

Adolescents should stay out of politics. Suddenly discovering that he has no influence upon society, that his actions have no impact, are worthless, Michael is overcome with anguish, he is full of anger, of hate, for which there is no outlet, which, by necessity, he needs to be intense, aggressively expressive producing immediate, concrete results. A few years later, and a mature adult, he would know that political impotence is the normal condition of humanity; it is only the illusions of childhood - still strong in adolescence - that makes us think that the sun travels around the earth, society revolves about our ego. I can do things! I will change this place… It is life’s great fairy tale.

Politics, especially in the modern media age, with its immediacy (those close-ups) and intimacy (they are talking directly to us) creates the illusion of easy access and rapid radical change. The media, to use the current conventional phrase, are the encouragers - the circus master - of Populism, the belief that everyone has a right to be heard. The clowns enter the ring… Images are not the same as actions, a television studio not the Cabinet Office or a corporate HQ. Life is slower, change much harder (it is very hard) than the Press would have us believe. We appear on TV, phone into the Jeremy Vine show, where we chase a fluffy donkey, do silly handstands while Max, a fellow clown, throws water over Jeremy, the audience and us… We are airing our opinions, telling the British Public our one big idea which will save Britain, Europe, the World… The show ends, inflated and elated - we will definitely come again - we leave the marquee, while the circus master checks the takings, the professionals looking on, smoking and smiling with their trademark melancholia. We must understand politics. But few have the time for that. I must do something now! is the general attitude. It is kid’s stuff. And not without its dangers. The media a fantasy that feeds our self-importance, by now gargantuan (the Internet, what Will Self calls bi-directional digital media, has enormously increased our narcissism) so that in tapping a keyboard, so excited with our latest enthusiasm, the next victim to save, the latest criminal to castigate, we believe we are doing politics.1 Clowns in a Zuckerberg circus.2

Michael will be heard! Out with the megaphone here comes the primal scream: you bastards; you don’t give a fuck about nature. You don’t care. You’ve fucked the birds and beasts and now it’s the ice caps and the oceans; you…you…you’re a fucking arsehole, serial killers, cunts; you're Nazis in plastic… It is the adolescent’s dream of politics; the ego, dressed up in the fancy clothes of idealism and self-sacrifice, runs wild, is free; and becomes overbearing as it seeks confrontation, conflating the ideal - The Party, The Nation, Nature - with itself, that will to dominate, the expansiveness of youth. The adolescent is unaware that anything can be justified for the idea. Like many such characters Michael is both smart and stupid; able to assemble facts and glue them into arguments he is yet ignorant of the complexities of society and obtuse to the politics that manages it; he has no awareness of those invisible threads of cause and effect which maintain order and instigate change; there is no historical sense. To an adolescent life is simple: you press a button and everything changes. Life is a school lesson, where you are the teacher; telling the ignorant the facts you expect them to act upon what they have been taught.3 He has overlooked one significant fact: passing exams is a millennia away from action, political or otherwise.4 Politics is all about present realities and how they are managed, the humane politician respecting the resistance from others in the society, a sign of free and vital citizens. The activist is never so liberal. He wants his idea imposed now! There will be demos, sit-ins, petitions galore, and, for a small minority, the violent act if they do not get their way. Michael does not care about the obstacles, in his mind they do not exist - at most they are errors, falsehoods, bad faith and evil deeds - for him only his actions are real, are true, are good. He has no feel for another human being, thus his insouciance about the baby; having decided its life will be terrible he is pressurising his wife to abort. His reason? He wants to protect it from pain. Really? Can we really accept this explanation? Let’s say something very obvious but devastating: he cannot know its future,5 while he is causing pain now, to Mary. Michael is showing all the authoritarian traits of the moral crusader who prefers concepts to individual human beings. He is typical of his age cohort, adolescents natural dictators, who need everyone to submit to their ideas. Overlooked is the obvious, that these concepts embody the crusader’s own prejudices and are used to justify emotions that can be extremely distasteful, too often they prettify what is little more than hate, anger, arrogance and condescension: they will save the planet; Michael will decide who lives and dies. It is all so very simple, but…suddenly he is growing up, and is beginning to see a world bigger, tougher and more resistant than he imagined. He recognises that he is outside the political centre - what! I’m a political non-entity - yet he has been taught and told that this is impossible… Not clever enough to think for himself, too emotional to analyse and appraise the political realities, he cannot accept what has become for him a brute fact. I will not grow up is the despairing reaction. I will make a stand the immediate response. Suicide an attractive option for the adolescent who refuses the strains of adulthood.

Reverend Joel Jeffers, the head of the First Reformed Church, runs his religious organisation as a business; he has little choice, forced to maintain friendly relations with the high-flyers in the town, the church’s patrons, if he is to maintain its large membership. He is especially close to Balq, the local industrialist and polluter extraordinaire, who - the marketing potential is obvious: preserving our heritage - is largely funding the restoration of the old Dutch church, more museum than place of worship (it holds a small number of services for a few attendees). Jeffers gets things done. Repairs to the organ taking too long, the contractor taking advantage of Toller’s timidity to prioritise other jobs, Jeffers intervenes to ensure the organ plays at the reconsecration ceremony. Few things are achieved by niceness. You have to act the boss! Success in society - with its administration of things, the management of people - requires very different skills to those of the mystic and thinker; it needs more than a Christian to lead a Christian church, the tension between these different types of personality difficult for a religious institution to resolve in favour of the spiritual.6 Jeffers has to concentrate on the secular side. Without his lead there would be no super-church, thus few believers, few jobs, and…not much religious spirit, which requires regular congregations of Christians. Jeffers must intervene, otherwise the reconsecration ceremony would be a failure, damaging the church’s reputation, so threatening its future. Certainly there would be strong calls on Toller to resign; a man whom Jeffers has given the gift of a second chance, the light duties as reverend-caretaker of the museum his way back to the Christian faith. Only the mystic in his cave escapes the corruptions of utility.

The seed being the soul and the husk being the body, or flesh. We are cast into this life with the trappings of our flesh, that gives us weight, whereas if we deny the flesh, we are too light, and buoyant, like a cloud of bedwine seed, and know not where we go, as a man who denies himself meat grows thin, and lassitudinous. United in the flesh, our soul grows a goodly crop of virtue, the winds and rains our sufferings, that gives us exercise and greenness, and not to be shirked. (Ulverton, by Adam Thorpe)

The inspiration for this sermon is a discussion with a farmer about the best way of sowing clover seed. 

Farmer Garrard was over this day, and averred, on surveying my new clover crop, that he might adopt this method of seeding, viz.: to sow the seed in the husk, that it might prove to crop more evenly and thicker, whereas to sow clover-seed on its own, pure, milled from the husk, perforce proves too light a cast in the March winds. I said, that it might be advantageous, then, to mix the seed with sand, or sifted coal, or wood-ash, to give the half-pecks weight, that it might fill the seeds-man’s hand, and not prove too buoyant. He stated, that this was good advice, if the seed were milled, as oatmeal is, but that effort might be spared in the first place by retaining the husk anyways.

We must ground the spirit in the flesh. The religious life is anchored to the institution, which spreads that spirit more evenly through the citizenry, all of whom the evangelical church must touch; Christianity wanting to save every soul. Though implicit in the minister’s words is the idea that the purest spirits need impurities to prosper - the milled seed can only produce a good crop if it is mixed with sand or sifted coal. The truth of these words are revealed in this film.

Only in the mind can there be purity. Outside the mind, in the street, at home, amongst friends, our thoughts jostle with a crowd of contingencies; where it indulges in habits, compromises with customs, kowtows to conventional ideas; thinking like others we accept cliché as profound truth and believe the fashionable idea a miracle that will save us; while all the time we are working, eating, sleeping, having fun… Hardly is there time to think; it is why we readily accept today’s slogan, celebrate the latest meme, twitter-follow the current academic media star. It is no bad thing. A civilised citizen is someone who instinctively accepts that ideas should not dominate their lives; keeping them in the spare bedroom, which they visit once a week, for a few hours at the most. Ideas should inform a society not monopolise it, certainly not take it over; Christianity a beneficent religion today precisely because it exists within the interstices of social life. A civilised society limits the free play of the mind, whose liberty, once set free in the public realm, can quickly become oppressive; the saintly idea, so full of life, so ready to expand, so keen to conquer, rarely likes resistance; it expects to win, and is surprised, and swiftly disgusted, when thwarted. Well, you know, they just don’t understand… Now the idea turns intolerant. It must overcome all obstinacies. I will win! it vows, and seeking to convert whole communities it employs strongmen to forcibly educate (even remove) those who disagree, have their own ideas, resist.7 We must be extremely careful of the idea, when it is proffered as the solution to social ills. Always we must judge its value against the consequences of its imposition, the hurt, anger, the violence, the dissolution it will generate.8 Ideas take on the characteristics of its advocates, are changed by resistance; the evangelical and saint different types of person - they are active and dynamic -9 to the mystic and intellectual, for whom ideas are essentially a feeling or a game. The wide, expansive and fluffy dreams of communism became, when squeezed through the narrow personality of Lenin, the bloody class war of the Bolshevik Party, a cult that wiped out an entire civilisation. Ideas. So dangerous, when let loose. Yet so many think it simple. Yesterday we had Leave. Today we have Rejoin. As if either is our salvation. Few of us - pragmatists or purists - think these things through; in fact it is an impossibility; only by acting in the political realm will we truly understand it, but that is hard work, it takes so much time, is boring.10 Instead: the quick fix: this idea now! Let’s have it! Now! Now! Now! But I am not sure… Already I have been relegated to the past, the country of the ignorant, the prejudiced, the reactionary, the backward. I’m really not certain… No new idea will tolerate that. Get out of my way, man. I told you. I said… Can’t you hear me? I said you’re standing in my way… An idea on the march the bystander is wise to leave the scene.

Balq uses his church donations to bolster his company’s image. This is cynical. It is a bad act. The First Reformed Church, though a business, does help people, it is saving Toller’s soul. How do we judge between what are essentially incommensurables? Off you go again. Looking at the skyline when you should be keeping your eyes on the pavement. Saving an old church! What’s that about, hey? I don’t care about those kids. What does it matter if they're excited about that hiding hole, they can learn about slavery elsewhere; there are picture books and DVDs, and there’s school, what are those damned teachers doing, I’ll ask you. No. It’s sentimentality, a waste of everybody’s time, and money. Let’s send it all to Africa, they need churches, and there’d be no problem about prayers and attendance then. Look at the numbers! Hardly anyone goes to the place. Spiritual refreshment! At this silly old church! It’s a joke. And anyway, they should be stronger than that. Must we always be holding up poor Christians? A good Christian will find succour even in a coal hole. Esther! I don't want to talk about Esther. Look, she’s in that pew every Sunday ogling the vicar; hardly religious would you say. I bet she has an orgasm when she takes the wafer… No! I am being serious… Yeah yeah yeah. This highfaluting stuff about the good living off the bad and trying to redeem it is what you get by going to college. You’re showing off. Being a clever clogs doesn't make you a good person.

The fanatic - the attempt making him so - tries to make the polis perfect. Inside the mind there is perfection. In art the pure is possible. Also in science. Mathematics too. The higher scholarship can sometimes achieve the unimaginable (there is Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic). In craft and technology ideas are embodied in ideal forms. The list is long, yet it is only a microscopic fraction of human activity; overwhelmingly humans accept the makeshift and make-do, while in our relations with other people the best hope is a comfortable compromise. The imperfect pervades our lives. Go wider. Consider a community, a society, the nation, the European Union, now the imperfections - the flaws - increase and the compromises become progressively disagreeable, the sharp edges of the individual increasingly shaved off in favour of the smooth surfaces of the corporate entity. The individual, that ragbag of idiosyncrasies, is always irritated by the urge to unanimity of the group, which to survive must remove all major differences amongst its members. There is one exception: the cult (religious, ideological, academic). In a cult the members lose themselves to the collective and its one big idea; man, woman and group all believing in the same concept which both transcends and erases their own identities; it is why the cult is the only social space where the ego can fully express itself, ego and group merging to become a single thing, one ideological organism.11 Inside the cult a polis can be made perfect. But the First Reformed is an old church, long gone the day it had one charismatic leader and a bunch of disciples - it is no place for fanatics.

Balq is an economic extremist (extremism, in its myriad forms, a feature of our times, the culture, the institutions, our leaders, the education system all encourage it).12 Balq refuses to recognise climate change. He’s not listening to the critics, and silences Toller when he talks about industrial pollution, whose attempt to raise the subject is quickly and effectively stopped: you let that young man die? Balq’s callous repost. This is unfair, conflating the process of counselling with the state of a person’s mental health, but it is effective, excellent politics; Balq a successful businessman and a serious local politician who competes to win, fairness and justice not part of his conceptual currency. Toller needs to understand this world. He must do better. An incompetent amateur isn't going to beat a team of committed professionals.

Toller, like Schrader his creator, is not a subtle person. Balq was right. He is a bungler. The decision to remove Michael’s suicide jacket and not wait for his return was a terrible mistake; it was the moment when the art of counselling is most needed and can work. Toller wasn’t thinking. There was never a doubt that Michael would react badly, his dream of destruction taken away, and with poor mental health and those ideological fixations, his reaction would be predictably extreme, suicide a surefire consequence. Toller didn’t think about this. He allowed Michael to make the discovery for himself; with his apocalyptic fantasies all in pieces, and left alone with his despair, what would he do? Toller never asked the question. We are not surprised. We expect this of a man who lacks the insight necessary for actually helping other people, especially those in distress.13 His sensibility crude, his mind lacklustre and unsophisticated, Toller has little grasp of the complexities of this world and the people who live in it, so that he will always make these mistakes.14  Never depend upon him! He’s damaged goods.

Mary doesn’t know what to do. Attracted to the environmentalist’s cause she is frightened by her husband’s extremism, and his depression defeating her she is undone by his demand she abort the baby she desires. Her nature is to seek help from authority, the minister of her church an obvious candidate. Alas, she has chosen a weak man who is to be destroyed by her request. Yet Mary, her feelings honest and spontaneous, there is a deep tenderness for her close intimates, has a spirit rich enough to compensate for the poverty of Toller’s talents. In a crucial scene she senses his evil intent - he has decided to blow up the church - and though not knowing what he intends to do - she doesn’t have that insight - she ignores his demand to stay away from the reconsecration ceremony. Such simplicity - it is an honest obduracy - saves both Toller and some hundred lives, and an historical monument, that vestige of older and better, more grounded values. It is the ordinary human virtues - humane concern, straightforward feeling, domestic love - that will save us. The pliant of an intellectual who, infatuated with The Idea, has none of these things. Schrader has gone sentimental.15

Toller is a mess. Brought up within the rigid disciplines of the military and religion - his father was an army chaplain - he broke down when his son, whom he encouraged to enlist, was killed in Afghanistan. His stewardship of this church is his recovery programme. It may be beyond him. He starts a journal (it is the movie’s voiceover) as an outlet for this angst and his inability to be a true Christian; the journal to last one year, the time it will take, he hopes, to resurrect himself as a man and a believer; the excrement of his soul to be evacuated onto the page, which is to wipe him clean. His sensibility being crude Toller hasn’t grasped that writing creates its own reality; these words on the page to generate new thoughts which will shape his thinking and condition his behaviour. The journal is going to intensify his psychic difficulties. His drinking gets worse. Of course it does, he is an alcoholic. This man is beyond redemption.

Toller is a practising Christian: he has a favourite theologian and can quote the Bible. But he cannot pray. It is an interesting dilemma, rarely seen today, when our religions, founded solely upon the idea, no longer require a belief beyond the idealisation of some physical reality: the State, the Market, the Internet, the European Union… Toller is very modern here; he is an intellectual whose faith in ideas cannot extend to the metaphysical presences behind them; the idea of god has replaced God. Yet Christianity requires faith in a numinous being. It is a puzzle he cannot solve. The problem becomes harder as his journal progresses. His doubts increase, and debase and harden his soul. Toller no philosopher, with the flexibility of mind to engage in contraries and play with paradoxes, he does not delight in the difficult questions, they defeat him. Needing to believe in more than the idea he is coming to enjoy the degradations of unbelief; like Baudelaire before him Toller is discovering the wonders of a private hell; giving himself up to the intoxications of spiritual self-abuse he experiences the dazzling vertigo of moral release, the mortification is sublime. The generosity of Christ replaced by the rigid asceticism of the saint Toller, in elevating the idea over ordinary human qualities, is metamorphosed into a maniac. He renounces love, companionship, sex, even though his body yearns for it; a bad move, as the senses - innocent and spontaneous - turn inward and are corrupted by the ideas of purity and cleanliness. Unable to handle the complexities of these feelings - strong desires mixed with intellectual repulsion - he acts like a wounded beast when his feelings are aroused: he is extremely nasty to Esther when she tries to revive their intimacy. Saintliness is a vice. It should be punished not worshipped. Saints are criminals who destroy the decencies of civilised life.

A vice, you repeat in your sardonic way. A vice! You think I exaggerate? You allow me my rhetoric, but refuse to take it seriously; yes, I know what you are thinking; I see you there, smiling in that once familiar armchair - to me, at least: I faced it week on week during those years in Kensal Rise: times there were I wasn't certain whether it was you or the chair, its patched and faded velvet, the red dull as a grey Bolshevik, it was our ancient joke, that did the talking - yes, that old armchair, and that short rapid shake of the head, as you mutter, oh its Schloss on his high horse, although you are actually seeing a emaciated donkey with my feet scraping along the floor; still reading the The Flowers of Evil, oh my poor chap, you need to grow up you know, missing your maturity like others miss the Number 9 bus. Will you not allow me my seriousness? You think me too civilised for that? I thank you at least for your civility…

Obsessions that damage the mind and body are vices. Toller has atrophied his affections, brutalised his senses and warped his intellect until only drink and isolation - that fanaticism of the social sense - can satisfy him.16 The role of a pastor, by keeping him in contact with other humans, is what maintains his humanity; emptied out of Christian love he exists as a human being only through the rituals of the institution; the organisation of the Church, not his own spirit, animating his humane virtues, which are rapidly leaking away. The fusion with the movie’s symbol - that old Dutch church - is complete.

Toller is an intellectual who unable to transcend his own mind cannot escape its rationality; the rational a toxic substance for those who want more than Reason, who require a real presence, a metaphysical being, God not just the idea of god. This inability to leap into the unknown and embrace the impossible is a fundamental failure of faith. This man is not a true Christian. He knows it, his self-knowledge producing a void inside his soul. Like his museum of a church Toller has all the outward signs of religious belief without its rich spiritual core. This makes him vulnerable. A true believer like Michael is a dangerous threat; because his faith, and the fanaticism it engenders, can easily seduce the doubter and addict. After the young man’s death Toller obsesses about the environmental cause, this new religion, one modern and concrete - the Earth actually exists - segueing into his will to self-destruction; Toller reading a new Book of Revelations is getting excited over a young and sexy apocalypse. Like all egoists he will help it along…

Humiliated by Balq. Upset by Michael’s suicide. Sexually attracted to Mary. All combine to intensify the fragility of a mind already ruined by the death of his son and the divorce. Toller is to lose his head, turning towards a violent fanaticism; the one sure way out of religious doubt.17 He will be a jihadi! (A cloud of depression now fell upon the auditorium: so obvious, so dull, so fatuous the concept, how the suits must have loved it in their executive suite.) Having kept Michael’s suicide jacket he watches videos on how to use it, greedily consuming footage of Islamic terrorists blowing themselves up. Toller is going to send the church, believed polluted by Balq’s cash, together with its congregation of rich luminaries, into Hell. No resurrection of the soul for these sinners only their bloody destruction, there’ll be a heavenly explosion on reconsecration day! The apostle John, that grand old devil, peeps over the celestial balcony, he is smiling, his hands enjoying themselves on the rail.

Isn’t it a bit odd, a Christian martyr wanting to kill people… Surely it was the old saints who were the victims of the intolerant and the obtuse? How all is changed! Christian charity and Christian grace to be found today in explosives and detonators… Has Schrader, because of a downer on religion generally, mixed up Christianity and Islam? Does Schrader believe that life so corrupt it can only be redeemed by its destruction? We are more generous to Christ’s legacy. Toller has given up Christianity for a very different religion, one in which violence promises salvation. It is not Islam, though Islamic terrorists are an inspiration, but the planet who is his Jehovah, whose wrath, a hurricane or typhoon, he will simulate with TNT. This is unfair to environmentalists, I know. Toller, like so many unstable people, though attracted to the certainties of religion is using his newly minted belief - “hot”18 and raw and volatile - to act out his own insanities. Toller is a man alone. No true religion would claim him.

As with so many intellectuals Toller remains a teenager in thought and feeling.19 One especially iniquitous trait of the politically engaged adolescent is their inability to comprehend an opponent, who is imagined and therefore treated as an extremist.20 But people should just talk to each other… It is a familiar refrain. So naive! For the teen activist there can only ever be one person talking in a room…themselves. I will have my say! And they do, on and on and on. Such egocentricity can quickly turn into extremism, amongst the uncommon, fanatical few; though even for most of these the violence remains verbal, the terrorist is a rare individual.21 Toller, he is strange enough, fits the terrorist profile better than Michael (though despair can produce its own weird behaviours); that said, Toller’s conversion to violence feels forced and artificial. We don’t believe in it. Terrorists, even if they know very little about the ideology,22 it is the feelings the ideas engender that encourages the violent attacks and self-immolation, are nevertheless more ideological than this man: they do believe in some notion, however poorly understood. We don’t think Toller has a cause. And anyway it all happens far too quickly and without any real, inner compulsion. Mental collapse is no answer.

Blowing up a museum changes nothing; industries will continue to pump out smoke, the cars pour out carbon monoxide, people fill their bins with paper and plastic. Worse. His few minutes of fame will only disgust the indifferent viewer - they will watch it on TV - who if they do think about environmental activists will remember them as murderers and creeps. Toller is happy, though, he is doing something.23 In truth, Toller isn’t thinking at all. Attracted to apocalypse, like many intellectuals,24 he finds in it the solution to an inner conflict that he is unable to resolve, oblivion his means of removing mental pain, sensual repression, his lack of an authentic belief. Although self-destruction is never enough for the intellectual, they must legitimise their actions by giving them a purpose. What an egoist! Not only killing people, but taking away the meaning of their lives…

Mary saves him. The reconsecration ceremony about to start Toller sees her walking up the steps of the church, and being a weak man, with the sentimentalism of the weak, he doesn't have the strength of an ideological commitment to blow her up. Boom! An explosion goes off inside his head. Under enormous psychic distress he suffers a mental collapse, and returns to the Christian religion, though in a suitably warped form: turning himself into Christ, by wrapping his body in a crown of thorns - it is a roll of barbed wire - he drinks (what appears to be) engine oil, his body, we assume, to become a lighted torch, a martyr’s pyre.25 We are back on Christian territory; Toller a human sacrifice to the faith, though he is seeking not to propagate a religion but escape a disintegrating mind, one too fragile to overcome its confusions and torments. Christianity no longer the province of the knight and the visionary,26 today it is the refuge of the mad, the lost, the pathetic; Schrader’s bias predictable and lamentable.

Mary enters his house. Toller sees her, and scrambling the bottle down he runs towards her; they kiss and, in camera work reminiscent of a famous scene in Fassbinder’s Martha, we watch them fly around the room, transported into ecstasy. The film stops; leaving us bewildered…has the projector cut out? We stretch our necks and look back and…and…They’re here! someone shouts; and yes, turning frontwards again we watch the credits creeping up the screen. Oh Schrader. You too have returned to old places. Ecstasy is oblivion. Love a kind of death. The old dark Romantic themes,27 but here given a sentimental twist; Toller to be saved by a sexual passion, Christianity giving way to a very modern religion; our holy sacrament the human orgasm, made heavenly on the altar of love.28

There was an out-of-body experience earlier in the movie; it was a levitation scene reminiscent of Rumble Fish, another film about a leader without a purpose, and who (sort of) kills himself for an idea, that of liberty. The association only reinforces the impression that Schrader lacks the artistic ability to embody ideas inside living characters. A college lectureship more in his line.

It is the reference to Martha that is most appropriate; a film also concerned with the totalitarian nature of ideas, though Fassbinder is a genius, able to dramatise his themes, not merely state them (shows not tells, to quote a friend who also came along). Toller - Schrader in two dimensions - is someone who cannot get beyond the idea; his unilluminating journal, its thoughts banal and crude, a synecdoche for the whole movie. The complexities of the world elude Toller; like Schrader, he prefers the simple idea to the subtleties of human beings and the intricacies of human society. There are times watching this film that we think Toller’s creator believes we are merely concepts who converse. People are ideas you wipe from the page, seems to be the reverend’s view. We do not like this man. More importantly: we do not believe in him. Schrader has created a bunch of stereotypes who he compels to act in clumsy mechanical ways; we see the wires hanging down the screen…Yes, they are robots who, it tires us to say so, espouse extremely conventional ideas in very obvious ways; the sort of thing we find in the op-eds, those pep talks to the unwise. A typical intellectual, a weekend farmer, a Sunday painter, Schrader plays with popular concepts he doesn't properly understand; a dilettante who thinks himself Dostoevsky.

(Review: First Reformed) 

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1.  Even amongst the most sophisticated there is a confusion between the private and public realms; consider Mary Beard in The Temperate Zone.

2.  The problems of political discourse and its troubled relationship with knowledge and understanding are brilliantly analysed by Bernard Williams in Truth and Truthfulness. Any intellectual activity that requires more than just opinion has to control access to its forums, otherwise the accurate, the insightful, the true will find it almost impossible to be heard, they will be overwhelmed by the plain wrong and cranky; science a success because it puts big restrictions on entry into its scientific debates. The problem for a modern democracy is that its political legitimacy is founded on the People, it therefore has to grant full access to the People’s opinion, however foolish and ill-informed. Or to put it this way: Populism is built into the very legitimacy of our politics, one which yet requires professional politicians to make it work. The conflict between the legitimising myth, that encourages popular participation, and the actual functioning of the system, that relies on political experts, an ongoing and ultimately unresolvable tension in modern democracies. Mostly the problem is elided; the People believing at some level that they govern, when in fact they don’t do anything at all, they are happy to let the politicos get on with it (inertia and deference has its uses). It all ticks moaningly along until… Brexit - a different kind of democracy - brings this contradiction to public consciousness; Theresa May now faced with an impossible choice between exposing the myth as false or allowing the myth to replace the realities of political action.

A word about myth. A myth is not wholly wrong but neither is it really true. All societies need myths, whose success requires that the small core of truth within the myth is not erased by the very much larger untruth which actually represents the social reality. The problem with so much academic work - too often the dull literalism of the unimaginative - is that it tries to reduce myth to facts, and of course finds them wanting (empirical apriorism has seduced many an academic). In contrast, in works such as Marina Warner’s Managing Monsters the truth element tends to downplayed or overlooked - myths are treated as stories.

A word on the experts. An expert may know an enormous amount about their subject area and yet not really understand it; facts and information mistaken for knowledge and comprehension. This is clearly seen in Albert Weale’s definition of myth, which according to Jonathan Benthall’s review, defines it as a false belief; thus the idea of the Will of the People is a myth because the idea is a fiction - there is no Will of the People. Sadly, he has overlooked how a national Referendum creates this Will; those on the winning side now standing for everyone in the country (and indeed, the old critiques of democracy centred around this very problem). Here we have an expert, a political scientist, who does not understand even the most important of political concepts. We can't trust the experts. But we cannot rely on our own opinions either… Oh dear, what are we to do! 

3.  Education breeds fanaticism, for it creates a belief in the free-floating idea that can be reflexively impressed upon a society believed a tabula rasa. Citizens are conceived as pupils waiting to be taught.

4.  Bernard Williams likes to quote Goethe: in the beginning was the deed. So true! Williams that rare philosopher who actually understands politics; his work an attempt to limit the role of philosophy (and abstract reason more generally) to its own specialist fields; Kant, Bentham, Rawls et al. not good models for understanding, let alone organising, a society.

5.  As Herzen said: the future does not exist. This aphorism was directed against the activists of his day: the utopian socialists who would sacrifice everything for some idealised future (From the Other Shore).

6.  The best commentary on this is Pascal’s The Provincial Letters. Try reading this book from the viewpoint of a religious bureaucrat…

7.  The Zone.  For a sense of what it feels like to have the rich, concrete and intensely local texture of one’s life removed by the thin ideologies of a revealed idea see The Stripping of the Altars, by Eamon Duffy.

8.  The weakness in the last few marvellous chapters of Truth and Truthfulness is that this resistance isn't discussed; relying too much on the power of knowledge, and its claims to truth and accuracy, which he argues are essential to modernity (no-one, not even Bernard Williams, is entirely free from essentialism) Williams thinks that today all political systems based on false beliefs will lose their legitimacy. What he doesn’t appreciate is how much the idea of knowledge as a social good is itself a myth, and that it depends both upon the needs of the culture - technological advance - and its beliefs - knowledge’s claims to social equality legitimate our society - in order to survive.

The excitement of the idea followed by the horror of its imposition is devastatingly conveyed in Secondhand-Time, by Svetlana Alexievich (there is commentary in Mad Places). 

9.  For the dangers of the dynamic personality - described as choleric - see Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom.

10.  The texture of the political life is richly conveyed in David Caute’s The Espionage of the Saints, whose eponymous piece shows just how obdurate and messy is the mainstream reality (parliament, the law, the Guardian do not come out of it well); while the good guys and gals turn out to be compromised, and the radical - Tam Dalyell - expends an enormous amount of energy to achieve…well, after the time and the cost and the trial of two civil servants - Sarah Tisdall and Clive Ponting - he embarrasses a few ministers for a couple of days (and we sadly note that though Dalyell talked a lot about the truth he had little interest in it: he was fighting a political battle, where the facts were either friends or enemies). The second essay describes the problems of dealing with a complete outsider - Dambudzo Marechera - who cannot be accommodated within any social setting; here, there seems to be no answer at all.

11.  For the freedom that arises out of ideological servitude see two of my pieces on Effi Briest: Fictions Kill & One Smile was Enough, It was an Earthquake.

12.  Kept Alive for Thirty Days, by Stefan Collini.

13.  There is also the problem of the public persona itself, its need to simulate emotion when faced by extreme and lacerating feelings (Freezing and Thawing).

14.  Apropos the Catholic Church Alexander Stille argues that the quality of the clergy has declined because of the Church’s refusal to relax its views on sex. The Catholic Church another institution suffering from the extremism of the modern age; its insistence on sexual repression - in the face of sexual licence - encouraging an infantilism.

15.  He lacks the genius of Lars von Trier who, with almost virtuosic ease, explores both the subtleties of feeling and the coarseness of the idea, its temptations, its brilliant achievements and even worse results. Nothing is ever simple in von Trier, even though he often frames his masterpieces within the crudest of genres; Nymphomaniac an acute psychological study of addiction dressed up as a sex film.

16.  Again compare with Nymphomaniac. What feels stagey here, despite the realism of the mise en scène, feels viscerally true in von Trier’s masterpiece, despite the highly artificial framing device of a fairy tale narration. Von Trier has a genius for uncovering the truths of cinema itself, these truths used to explore what are often complex moral and epistemological ideas. Clunk clunk Schrader, in contrast, plonks his ideas down on the screen and expects them to do all the work for him.

17.  Sprezzatura.

18.  Contrast with a “cool” religion like mainstream Catholicism or a “cold” one such as The Church of England.

19.  An extreme depiction is Kim in The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, by Italo Calvino. The outstanding portrait of an intellectual can be found in Elsa Morante's History: A Novel.

20.  Modern academia appears to encourage this trait, thus Jonathan Benthall’s comments on the narrow moral range of a specialist unable to grant humanity to an ideological adversary, in this case the Muslim Brotherhood (note the erasure of this organisation’s large-scale humanitarian acts in what is billed as a major work of scholarship). An alternative explanation is that the university embeds precocious teenagers into institutions where they never have to grow up… lucky for the rest of us, perhaps.

21.  I stress the oddness of the character. There is no elevator that effortlessly takes the political virgin at the bottom of the stairs and delivers him to terrorism at the top, though this appears to be present government thinking (PREVENT). The person who becomes a terrorist will have some unique traits, the outcome of biology and his environment, that will make them uniquely susceptible to violence and extremism, particularly in an ideological surrounding. The terrorist is a strange person, though this may not be apparent on the surface. For the distinction between radicals and terrorists, both of whom swim in the same political pool, see the biography of Andreas Baader (and Gudrun Ensslin) in Baader und Herold: Beschreibung eines Kampfes, by Dorothea Hauser.

22.  See Diana Darke’s review How to be a militant. Though the review doesn't make a clear enough distinction between jihadis and terrorists: foreign fighters in Syria and in ISIS are no more terrorist than were the international volunteers in Civil War Spain.

23.  Bernard Williams has an excellent phrase for this: “moral self-indulgence” (Moral Luck).

24.  The classic work is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. And by a wonderful synchronicity that makes the realm of ideas so fascinating, so exciting - we create our references, we do not find them - here is Pauline Kael on Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here:

I’ve sometimes had the feeling that audiences respond so intensely and with such satisfaction to paranoid visions because they believe that America is collapsing and that they can’t stop the apocalypse, so they might as well get it to happen sooner and get their fears confirmed and have it over with. They’re on the side of apocalypse: since they feel it’s all going down anyway, it seems to make them feel better to see these movies saying that it should go down, that that’s right. (Deeper Into Movies)

Wow! Although I think Kael is here mixing up audience, creator and the zeitgeist. The movie she describes sounds very much like First Reformed - though about race rather than religion - a secular sermon preached not by a minister from the pulpit but by an intellectual from the movie screen. In the late 1960s intellectuals believing in America’s imminent collapse created an ideological climate from out of which particular kinds of paranoid or apocalyptical cultural product emerged; counter-cultural ideas thus being ubiquitous - as Kael’s collection attests - the studios thought them commercial, and so produced counter-culture films, usually diluted to suit popular taste - Kael is very good on this - in the expectation of profitable success; while the audience…well…in truth we know nothing at all about them, but we suspect they are far more passive, mere receivers of the message, than Kael imagines; she the original in a cinema seat.

25.  A vague memory of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, perhaps…: We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out.

26.  What Nietzsche may overlook in his mythic account of Christianity - in On the Genealogy of Morals - is that leaders of the early church would have been vital and strong characters - a kind of warrior in fact - for only such could have established Christianity as a state religion. In organised religions we must distinguish between the idea itself and the people who first propagated it; later, of course, when the idea is established across the society, it will do its ideological work, perform the cultural conditioning, remove the very kinds of character that first created the church. Idea. Individual personality. Culture. Social structure. Event. We must comprehend all of these if we are to grasp ideological change.

27.  Remember Schrader’s Mishima?

28.  It is B’s revelation to Joe in Nymphomaniac: love is the secret of the best fuck.