First Reformed (2017) and the Tragic Eco-Hero

In First Reformed (2017), Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) serves as a solitary, middle-aged parish pastor at a small Dutch Reform church in upstate New York on the cusp of celebrating its 250th anniversary. During the course of the film, Toller struggles with personal torment and eco-trauma, moving from tragic hero to something more ambivalent.

Once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church is now a tourist attraction catering to a dwindling congregation, eclipsed by its nearby parent church, Abundant Life, with its state-of-the-art facilities, 5,000-strong flock, and charismatic minister, Jeffers (Cedric the Entertainer). When pregnant parishioner Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks Reverend Toller to counsel her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a radical environmentalist, the clergyman finds himself plunged into his own tormented past, and equally despairing future. With an ending that begins with something out of Omega Man (1971) and ends with something closer to Mother! (2017), however, First Reformed left this audience member feeling like any environmental message gets lost in the folds of Toller’s bloodied robe, with Mary’s innocent embrace offering the sole redemption for Toller’s sins.

Toller at first seems like a a tragic eco-hero like that described by Joseph W. Meeker. According to Meeker:

literary tragedy and environmental exploitation in Western culture share many of the same philosophical presuppositions ….Three such ideas will illustrate the point: the assumption that nature exists for the benefit of humanity; the belief that human morality transcends natural limitations; and humanism’s insistence upon the supreme importance of the individual personality. (The Comedy of Survival 24)

In his earlier essay, “The Comic Mode,” Meeker defines the tragic hero in relation to biology: “Pioneer species are the loners of the natural world, the tragic heroes who sacrifice themselves in satisfaction of mysterious inner commands which they alone can hear” (161). Toller more than fulfills Meeker’s criteria for a tragic hero, gaining force as an eco-hero who both strives to save humanity and to remind them of their pristine past.  Toller is a pioneer, a tragic hero willing to speak up and resist homogenizing forces as an individual whose morality transcends all those around him. Drawing on Meeker, Toller is one of the pioneering outsiders “whose life styles resemble behavior that men have admired most when they have seen it in other men. We celebrate the qualities in human pioneers that we despise in the pioneers of other plant and animal species” (“The Comic Mode” 161).

Toller’s attempts to sway Jeffers and resist the wealthy industrialist Balq (Michael Gaston), who is financing the 250^th Anniversary celebration, highlights Toller’s tragic eco-heroic strategies. “Will God forgive us for what we're doing to his creation?” he asks Jeffers. And his resolution to the environmental disasters Michael shares with him also highlights a tragic eco-heroic approach. As he writes in his journal and we hear in voiceover, “Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.”

Yet two dynamic scenes interfere with this tragic environmental narrative. The first occurs as a climax in the film, when Mary visits Toller and shares an odd connective out-of-body experience with him that serves as the most powerful revelation of environmental disaster. During Mary and Toller’s laying on of bodies, the pair seem to levitate and float over multiple horrific eco-disasters serving as evidence of industrialists’ (like Balq’s) culpability in Earth’s demise. The revelation seems at first to move Toller toward the martyrdom we see in Omega Man, with Charlton Heston’s actual death on a cross. Yet a second final scene veers the film off in what some reviewers exalt as an ecstatic resurrection. Instead, I can’t help but view this cli-fi film through the lens of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! I did find some commentary on climate change in First Reformed. But I primarily found visually appealing homages to independent cinema that presents women and their bodies as muse and source of redemption rather than equal partners in a (nonviolent) battle for our World.