Will God Forgive Us?

Fri, Oct 06

What do we make of the end?

In his study Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Paul Schrader argues that for a film in the transcendental style, form supersedes content. According to Schrader, “Transcendental style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism… . To the transcendental artist these conventional interpretations of reality are emotional and rational constructs devised by man to dilute or explain away the transcendental.”

Film, of course, is ineluctably linear, narrative, cast in human time. Yet the transcendent ekstasis Schrader’s art calls for is, by definition, beyond time: if there is anything by which we might define divinity, it is that it is not subject to human temporality. Representing the Transcendent is, as Schrader observes, impossible. The best that art can do is to create the formal conditions that might allow for an aesthetic experience of the divine. Not emotion, but experience. Not catharsis, but a kind of kenosis, achieved through the confrontation of an even deeper contradiction, that between a world of meaningless suffering and a world redeemed by love.

These two worlds are incommensurable. Each makes the other seem unreal, even absurd. Mary and Toller’s communion at the film’s end is one truth, the two hours preceding it are another, and the aesthetic experience offered by Schrader in First Reformed is not the linear progression from the latter to the former, or even the supersession of the latter by the former, but rather the challenge to hold both contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously.

First Reformed only seems linear, only seems narrative, only seems concerned with climate change. In truth, the subject is a pretext, while the film’s form presents an aesthetic object in stasis, concerned with the universal experience of Transcendence, only comprehensible from outside the narrative, linear, mortal frame of human life. The kenosis First Reformed offers is achieved through balancing the absolute negation each truth presents against its contradiction.

Will God forgive us? Who can say? The more pressing question is whether we can forgive ourselves.