INTRODUCTION

Humanity's relations with nature and the environment, as well as the very existence of all living species, humans included, have been greatly challenged in the shadow of the looming threat of climate change. While “apocalyptic stories are as old as narrative itself,” they seem to have revived with a new potency today, when climate change and the general ecological decline force us to reconsider our treatment of the environment, as well as to imagine the new world that we all will inevitably live in (if surviving climate change is possible), transformed as a result of irrevocable changes that take place today. Particularly interesting are the explorations of the relationship between humans and the environment through the prism of science and religion, two perhaps radically different perspectives that, this notwithstanding, are both helpful in approaching the issue. Paul Schrader's recent film First Reformed (2017) uses scientific rationality and religious morality as tools to tackle the problem of environmental and human degradation to comment on a number of profound questions.

This chapter focuses on First Reformed to examine Schrader's stance on one of the most serious problems that humanity is currently facing: climate change. Analyzing the issue of ecological decline through the prism of religion, Schrader outlines the ideology that presumably might help humanity survive in the age of global warming. Through complex discussions of such issues as despair, anxiety, and hope, Schrader deduces the formula of survival in which preservation is the key component. First Reformed is certainly a primal scream about humanity's inaction on climate change and ecological degradation in general, and the nervous, almost hysterical desire to radically and immediately change the situation by the main character actively supports this view. Yet, even more importantly, it is the film that forces the viewer to meditate upon the issue of survival in this ecologically precarious time, suggesting that survival as such, in the form as one might picture it, continuing to exist in the world as it is, is not possible. Schrader does not sketch out a simplistic scenario of apocalypse when everything disappears within a second—painlessly and remorselessly, instead, he uses death as a tool through which to communicate ecological and environmental degradation, as well as illustrate decay and disappearance.