The beginning is easy, nothing more American. A simple white Dutch chapel, founded in 1767, First Reformed—neither a ruin nor a monument but a humble working church. We see a hand writing, hear a voice speak. A man of the cloth transcribes his thoughts: “I have decided to keep a journal not in a Word program or in a digital file, but in longhand, writing every word out so that every inflection of penmanship is recorded, every word chosen, scratched out, revised, to set down all my thoughts and the simple events of my day factually and without hiding anything.”
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Cut to daylight, interior, a weary face washed in winter light: Dominie Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) stands at the pulpit clad in black, finishing his homily. After communion, a congregant named Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks the Reverend to speak with her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist recently released from jail. Mary is pregnant, and Michael wants her to have an abortion.
Toller and Michael talk the next day in what seems to be Michael’s office. A poster on the wall shows the nine boundary conditions for human life on earth, four of which have been crossed (by now, six). A characteristic hockey-stick graph dominates the darkness behind the desk. The screen saver plays a NASA graphic in which the Earth goes from green to yellow to orange to red, again and again. Photos of environmental destruction decorate one wall, photos of murdered environmental activists another. Michael is a rag twisted hard and thrown into a chair, like something out of Dostoyevsky. His eyes leak anguish. His scraggly beard seems grown to be wrenched. He wears a gray fleece, gray socks, and gray-green pants.
Like Toller, I was a veteran. Like his son, I’d been to Iraq. Like Michael, I was haunted by visions of catastrophe.
The conversation begins politely enough, but things turn when Michael asks Toller his age. Toller says he’s forty-six. “Thirty-three,” Michael responds. “That’s how old our child will be in 2050…. Do you know what the world will be like in 2050?”
“Hard to imagine,” Toller responds with a chuckle.
“Yeah, you think?” Michael asks, bitter as wormwood. The question hangs in the air for a moment before he unleashes the deluge: ecological devastation, rising temperatures, “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts . . . and when scientists say stuff like that…”
“He went on like that for some time,” Toller’s voice cuts in. “By 2050 sea levels two feet higher on the East Coast. Low-lying areas underwater across the world. Bangladesh, twenty percent loss of land mass. Central Africa, fifty percent reduction in crops due to drought. The western reservoirs dried up. Climate change refugees. Epidemics. Extreme weather.” It is a familiar litany.
Then Michael comes to the real question: “How can you sanction bringing a girl…” he asks, “for argument’s sake let’s say my child is a girl… a child full of hope and naïve belief into a world…” His voice fades as he ponders the idea, then comes back raw: “When that little girl grows to be a young woman and looks you in the eyes and says, ‘You knew all along, didn’t you?’ What do you say then?”
Toller takes the question seriously, but as he and Michael struggle, he guides their discussion away from climate change and toward the deeper existential question of how to live with the knowledge of evil, the pain of loss, and uncertainty about the future. Toller admits of despair himself, recounting his own tale of woe: once an army chaplain like his father, Toller convinced his son to serve, then had to bury him when he was killed in Iraq. “Now Michael,” Toller says, “I promise you that whatever despair you feel about bringing a child into this world cannot equal the despair of taking a child from it.” Toller’s eyes shine with pain. “Courage is the solution to despair,” he tells him. “Reason provides no answers.”
I’ve taught this scene from Paul Schrader’s 2018 film First Reformed several times since I first saw it in a theater in San Francisco, near where I was staying in a cheap hotel on a street crowded with heroin addicts, four blocks from Twitter headquarters. I had been invited to speak at the Commonwealth Club, “the nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum,” where I was scheduled to appear in dialogue with Climate One founder Greg Dalton and Episcopalian priest Matthew Fox, a former Dominican friar expelled for disobedience and heresy. We would be discussing climate change, faith, and my then-most-recent book, a collection of essays titled We’re Doomed. Now What? Like Toller, I was a veteran. Like his son, I’d been to Iraq. Like Michael, I was haunted by visions of catastrophe.
“I felt like I was Jacob,” Toller reflects on his conversation with Michael, “wrestling all night long with the angel. Fighting in the grasp. Every sentence, every question, every response a mortal struggle. It was exhilarating.”
I felt similarly exhilarated the first time I watched my thoughts play out on screen. I too had felt the thrill of grappling with the philosophical and spiritual implications of catastrophic ecological transformation, the desperate battle against despair, the “fighting in the grasp” to make sense of senseless suffering, failure, and the end of life as we know it. My first true intimation of what climate change meant came in the summer of 2013, and, like Toller, I found myself transformed by the encounter.
Toller and Michael wrestle to a stalemate: a victory for the minister, but fleeting. Michael commits suicide a few days later. After that, we see Toller take up Michael’s cause, growing more fervent as he struggles with stomach cancer and his growing yet ambivalent intimacy with Mary. We watch him don an explosive vest Mary had found among Michael’s things.
There are many ways First Reformed resembles writer and director Paul Schrader’s best-known screenplay, Taxi Driver, not least in its basic structure: the story of an isolated hero plunging toward existential violence. Yet whereas Taxi Driver ends in a sequence of redemptive carnage, First Reformed swerves in its last moments into a scene so ostentatiously at odds with everything coming before that accepting it at face value would seem to mean denying the film up to that point had anything serious to say.
Film, like writing, is ineluctably linear, an experience cast in time.
The setting is the church’s 250th re-consecration. Community luminaries have gathered, the church’s repaired organ resounds through the sanctuary, and the local megachurch’s choir director Esther (Victoria Hill) sings the 1887 gospel hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” In his rectory, Toller has donned and armed Michael’s explosive vest, then covered it with a black Genevan gown and white stole, preparing to sacrifice himself, the attendant luminaries, and First Reformed itself in an act of environmental protest. He writes a last reflection in his notebook, puts his pen down next to an untouched tumbler of scotch, then gets up to go into the church.
As Toller’s hand reaches to open the rectory door, he sees Mary going up the steps to the chapel. The sight shocks him out of his reverie. Stricken, distraught, screaming into his fist, he disarms the bomb, tears off the vest, and scourges his naked torso with rusted barbed wire before donning a snow-white alb, which then blossoms with red flowers. Toller returns to his desk, dumps the scotch from its tumbler, and fills the glass with Drano.
He is about to drink when Mary bursts in. He turns, drops the glass, and walks toward her. She calls him by his first name, “Ernst,” and the two clasp, eyes shut, and kiss greedily, while the camera spins and spins and spins and—nothing. Roll credits.
In his book-length study, Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader argues that for a film in the transcendental style, form supersedes content. He quotes Robert Bresson: “The subject of a film is only a pretext. Form much more than content touches a viewer and elevates him.” He writes, “In transcendental style the form must be the operative element, and for a very simple reason: form is the universal element whereas the subject matter is necessarily parochial, having been determined by the particular culture from which it springs.” According to Schrader, “Transcendental style is simply this: a general representative filmic form which expresses the Transcendent.” By Transcendent, Schrader means that which “is beyond normal sense experience.” He writes:
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.
The transcendental is, for Schrader, expressible only through contradiction: neither the implausible redemption at the end of First Reformed nor the relentlessly pessimistic two hours preceding it but the very juxtaposition of these incommensurable ontological frames.
Film, like writing, is ineluctably linear, an experience cast in time. Yet the transcendent ekstasis Schrader’s art calls for is, by definition, beyond time: if there is any single characteristic by which we may characterize the divine, it is that it is not subject to human temporality. Representing the transcendent is therefore, Schrader argues, impossible. The best art can do is to create formal conditions that might inspire a genuine sense of mystery, not as emotion but as experience, not as catharsis but as kenosis, achieved not through simultaneous identification with contradictory ethical worlds, as in the Hegelian understanding of tragedy, but through confronting an even deeper contradiction: the incommensurability of a world of meaningless suffering and a world redeemed by love.
Neither can touch the other. They cannot be synthesized or sublated. Each makes its contrary unreal, even absurd. Mary and Toller’s communion at the film’s end is one truth, the two hours preceding it another, and the aesthetic experience offered by First Reformed is not a linear progression from the latter to the former, nor the supersession of the latter by the former, but rather the challenge to hold both truths in our mind simultaneously. As Toller himself tells Michael, early in the film, “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind…. Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.”
First Reformed only seems linear, only seems narrative, only seems concerned with climate change. Ultimately, the subject is a pretext, and the film paradoxically presents in linear narrative an aesthetic experience of ek-stasis, achieved through the breaking of its narrative frame.
According to the best empirical evidence we have, observed present trends indicate that the future we face is one of accelerating planetary transformation, with catastrophic consequences for human society. At the same time, this future is radically unknowable. The massive, rapid perturbations in the carbon cycle and global climate we’re currently experiencing are unprecedented in the geological record of the planet, and we cannot predict how they will unfold or how human society will respond. Neither the Myth of Progress nor human reason can meaningfully make sense of what’s happening.
The world of tomorrow will be unrecognizable to those of us alive today, just as the world we live in today would have been unrecognizable to our ancestors.
I’ve approached the problem through years of research and reflection, as well as critical discussion, painstakingly concerned with evidence and argument, and presented my work as a hybrid of practical philosophy and environmental humanities scholarship, as if I could make the incoherence of our world cohere. There is a “complexity and a sense of failure” behind this intentionally anti-systematic meditation on a stubbornly intractable set of problems, which ultimately offers no more than the pretense of a solution for what is in truth an irresolvable impasse.
Fiction is inescapable. Myth inescapable. We cannot live without imposing order on the chaos of experience. And while some fictions may be more accurate than others, none offer unmediated access to reality. The best we can hope for is to better understand the dynamic between reality and the fictions that give it shape, with due respect for the perspectival, aporetic, contradictory, and paradoxical character of the attempt: to grow a little wiser in our failure. We may never experience the transcendent totality of being, though we may sense it. We may never close the gap between consciousness and the universe, but by the multiplication of perspectives, we might be able to triangulate our position and direction a little more accurately. Climate change may be transforming reality in ways we can neither avoid nor comprehend, but we might yet find ways to live through it.
“The chief danger to philosophy,” writes Alfred North Whitehead, “is narrowness in the selection of evidence. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.” The ultimate virtue in criticism, then, may be just what Toller suggests, simultaneously holding multiple contradictory truths in our mind, or what Keats called “negative capability”: the willing embrace of existence lived “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” As T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility.” Thus the question of whether to commit to the Myth of Progress, the Myth of Renewal, the Myth of Marxism, the Myth of Managed Simplification, the Myth of the Multiverse, the Myth of the Anthropocene, or whatever myth you choose, may not be the right question at all.
The situation we face is unprecedented, but the truly revelatory content of our apocalyptic fictions is that the world has always been ending. The question we face is how to embrace our impasse: how to abjure the imposition of narrative on a rapidly changing reality, acknowledge the transience of the present, and see in the death of what is the birth of what shall be.
Plotinus called the path of unknowing apophasis; Zen Buddhists call it kenshō or satori; Jonathan Lear calls it “radical hope.” Schrader’s transcendental aesthetic, Kermode’s “sense of an ending,” and Wilderson’s Afropessimism may be versions as well. In our case, facing a global ecological transformation beyond the scope of anything human civilization has ever confronted, I call it ethical pessimism: a commitment to future existence that by definition cannot be imagined.
Ethical pessimism recognizes that we cannot know how climate change and ecological catastrophe are going to transform our world, how human societies will respond, how human beings will adapt, or who we will become in consequence. Ethical pessimism rejects the claim that we can talk or think our way out of the situation. Yet ethical pessimism remains committed to some future human existence, no matter what form that existence takes, no matter who that human is. Whoever they may be, they will suffer. Whoever they may be, they will love. Whoever they may be, they will live as we do, in the middest, making it up as we go.
What do we make of our end? “The question is no longer to know how to live life while awaiting it,” writes Achille Mbembe. “Instead it is to know how living will be possible the day after.”
Yet this question is precisely the one we cannot answer. The world of tomorrow will be unrecognizable to those of us alive today, just as the world we live in today would have been unrecognizable to our ancestors. We have no more power to decide what the present means to the future than our ancestors had over what they mean to us. The past is an ambiguous inheritance, unconditioned by the benefactor. What our wondrous, astonishingly destructive civilization ultimately means is not something to be decided by those who caused it or even those doomed to live through its end, but only by those who come after: the children of our ruin.
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Excerpted from Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton, published by Stanford University Press, © 2025 by Roy Scranton. All Rights Reserved.
