It is possible that First Reformed, Paul Schrader’s latest, and likely final, effort as a writer/director in film, represents the art form’s great achievement in the use of allusion to create meaning. The task of fully elucidating the movie’s extensive collection of references would easily fill the space of a book and take years to write, but in the interest of offering an example of just how densely laden with meaning every part of First Reformed is, I thought it might be expedient to examine one of the film’s most striking images. Namely that of the Pepto-Bismol bubbles in Reverend Toller’s glass of whiskey.
Many people, Paul Schrader, included, have pointed out that this image is in dialogue with Martin Scorsese’s shot in Taxi Driver of the alka-seltzer bubbles in Travis Bickle’s glass, but that is usually as far as it goes.
Amy Nicholoson in Rolling Stone Magazine commented that Schrader, “…zooms in on the Reverend pouring Pepto-Bismol into his scotch as the bubbling pink blob looks like the formation of the universe.”
Despite the poetic nature of this description, thus far, no critic has devoted serious attention to what this shot means, or why it was included in this film. This image has a much richer history and deeper meaning that most and it is worth taking the time to understand it.
Guilt
The journey to Reverend Toller’s pink bourbon begins in 1947, with a landmark masterpiece of Catholic guilt called Odd Man Out, directed by Carol Reed. The main character is a Northern Irish revolutionary named Johnny McQueen, played by James Mason. While robbing a bank to raise money for their cause, Johnny is shot in the shoulder and falls out of the getaway car. Reed uses blurred images and dissolves to allow the audience to share in Johnny’s hallucinations several times in the film. It’s one of the best formative examples of subjective cinematic experience. McQueen doesn’t speak much because he’s been shot and is dying, so Reed allows us to share in his anguished thoughts by using the camera to look through his eyes.
While leaning over a bar in a noisy pub full of people haggling over how they can profit from his death, Johnny knocks over a glass of beer. As the bubbles form on the bar, Johnny sees in them the face of the man he killed and the faces of others telling him he’s wanted by the police and probably going to die soon.
Johnny swipes the tormenting bubbles away and cries out in his guilt ridden spiritual agony disrupting the world around him that knows nothing about what he’s experiencing on the inside.
The beauty of Reed’s sequence is that the audience shares Johnny’s lonely sense of doom in a subconscious, but powerful way. It was an ingenious cinematic device that has influenced countless film makers. Roman Polanski called Odd Man Out his favorite film. Scorsese wrote essays about Reed’s films during his time at NYU. But the first filmmaker to bring Reed’s bubbles back to the big screen, was a french director named Jean-Luc Goddard.
Angst
In Goddard’s 1963 film 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a man sits in a cafe stirring his coffee and exchanging ambiguous glances with a female patron while the barista works the machines. All the while, the voice over narration of the man’s internal dialogue is whispered, like a secret, to the audience. The man considers issues of the objective and subjective self and laments the impossibility, and the necessity, of communicating with your fellow creature, your brother. In the end, he concludes that if there is any hope after death destroys all these questions, it will take the form of the pure surviving consciousness.
All of which is obviously very moody and philosophical, but nonetheless further’s the project begun by Reed. Namely, that of using the camera to render a character’s subjective experience and allow the audience to share an inner conflict. In Reed’s film, the character is wrestling with guilt over a murder as he faces his own impending death, in Goddard’s, a character is sinking into the urban ennui of existential dread, but this time he doesn’t cry out, and instead opts for a kind of internal screaming.
This sequence creates a sense in the audience of being held hostage within the confines of the image of the bubbles, the quietly brutal ideas of the narration, and the constricting nature of social order. But instead of granting the audience the relief of seeing the subject cry out in pain, Goddard simply moves on with the film. The character is tortured without relief, and the audience is forced to share his despair and cling to a sliver of hope.
Violence
When Travis drops his alka-seltzer tablets into a glass of water in a grimy New York City cabbie cafeteria in 1976, the bubbles come back. Travis has just finished telling a story about a cab driver who got cut up by, “some crazy fucker,” and the other cab drivers are trying to convince Travis to buy a gun for his own protection. The bubbles begin to rise and Scorsese takes a different direction with his camera. Slow-motion. Zoom-in. But instead of a collection of accusing memories or an angsty inner monologue, Scorsese fades out the ambient noise of the restaurant and the voices of the other drivers, and instead dials up the volume on the sizzling bubbles themselves as he cuts between extreme close-ups of them and Travis’s bleary stare.
Scorsese doesn’t tell the audience what to think, nor does he reveal what Travis is thinking, but somehow, this sequence is deeply unsettling. There is something ineffably disturbing about it. The audience can sense him moving toward violence like gravity pulling a stone down to the ground.
This sequence Scorsese created for Taxi Driver is so effective that it changed the grammar of mainstream cinema and has been reworked in countless ways, countless times, but none of the uses of this technique since then have been so significant as the one Paul Schrader composed for First Reformed.
Transcendence
Schrader, the evangelist of austere cinematic style, finally made a film with the same toolkit he so famously named, but swore he would never use. And, true to the demands of that style, when the bubbles come back, they do it with an eerie kind of quiet power.
Schrader strips everything away. There are no distractions. No noisy cafeteria. No busy cafe. No ambiguous glances. No cab drivers talking about buying guns. No existential monologue. No haunting faces. No screams.
Just a dying priest, pouring pink sludge into a glass of whiskey, watching the bubbles, and hatching a plan.
Schrader doesn’t tell us what Reverend Toller is thinking, but he doesn’t have to. There is something wrong. A priest is dying, but not seeking treatment. He’s mixing Pepto-Bismol with whiskey, medicine with poison. There’s a celebration coming, but he’s hiding a dead eco-terrorist’s bomb vest.
The bubbles rise, and burst, but they are not empty pockets of air, but complex cinematic imagery filled with the history of trying to share a vexing internal experience. Toller’s glass holds Reed’s guilt and dread of death, Goddard’s bleak musings on identity, death, and consciousness, Scorsese’s threat of impeding righteous violence, and the culmination of Schrader’s fifty year cinematic journey.
Paul Schrader’s Reverend Toller doesn’t speak for all of these filmmakers, but rather allows them to speak through him. By invoking this image, he invokes the ideas, both thematic and cinematic, that accompany it in order to make a more complete personal expression of his own.
Now, obviously, it is totally possible to watch First Reformed and appreciate it without having seen any of these movies and without a tiresome history lesson about Pepto-Bismol bubbles. But it is also obvious that a literate film goer will find in First Reformed a work of art that offers a much grander scope than meets the eye. As filmmakers become more and more prolific and less and less literate about the history of film, movies like First Reformed will probably become even rarer. It may not be the last of it’s kind exactly, but it definitely feels like the end of something.
An Inevitable and Mysterious Day
The next time the bubbles come on the screen they will be different. They won’t be continuing an eighty year visual motif, they’ll be a meaningless imitation. A parody. An empty homage. Someday when everyone has forgotten about Carol Reed and Jean-Luc Goddard, but they’re still making movies, something even sadder will happen.
One day the bubbles will come back, and they won’t mean anything in particular at all.
They’ll just be bubbles.
And everything will follow from there.
- The Murder of God: Orson Welles and The Other Side of The Wind - November 27, 2018
- American Ugly: A Dramatic Comedy of Dark Secrets - September 21, 2018
- Pepto-Bismol and Whiskey: The Allusive Imagery of Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’ - June 14, 2018
