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Has any other artist of Schrader's generation rendered so uncompromisingly the somber Calvinist vision of human depravity? His stark, in-your-face depictions of evil and suffering exude a "blackness of darkness" so intense that it prompts metaphysical reflection—like from what Underworld did this come, anyway? But Schrader has simply taken his heritage at its word on the everywhere depth of evil, out there and especially inside, and he bothers to brood on it and what harm it does, lest it be glossed over.

Almost always, though, Schrader's mature personal films conclude with stunning poignant comings of grace, moments that are all the more revelatory and jolting because of the condition of utter despair or animus to which they come. The notion is that we only really fully grasp Light—know, relish, love, and exult within it—after we have on our knees for a long time scrounged about lost in the dark wood of destruction: only after suffering descent can we fathom the wonder of ascent; brokenness, wholeness; lostness, home; and so on. In work after work, Schrader struggles to render that destination narratively and cinematically. That is the toughest of aesthetic riddles in any medium, and much to his credit, Schrader has repeatedly risked the wrestle and has sometimes wondrously triumphed.

It was not that Schrader was likely to fail in his early choice to be a film critic. In those days, fresh out of Calvin and grad school, Schrader could have made it huge as a film critic. Not only could he write like an angel, terse and feisty, winning already Atlantic Monthly's national college essay contest, but he had met up with the great lioness of American movie reviewing, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael, and became one of her proteges, along with now-eminent critics Roger Ebert and David Denby. Several early pieces, notably a dissent on Easy Rider and an M.A. thesis on religion and film style, have become classics in American film criticism, and Schrader remains the most articulate of American filmmakers.

Rather, Schrader seems to have turned to screenwriting for three good reasons. The first came in a revelation of sorts, specifically the influence of famed designer-architect Charles Eames, in whose studio Schrader hung out for a time. Eames convinced Schrader that visual images themselves could carry every bit as much intellectual heft and smack as any verbal formulation. For a young Calvinist, that was a heretical but liberating notion, one that disputed head-on the exalted privilege bestowed on words by the obdurate creedalism of an antithesis-driven Calvinism. Fearful of the lures and caprice of both sensous reality and human subjectivity, Reformed precisionism argued that only words, specifically stringent logical-verbal constructs, offered a sure enough knowledge of the transcendent inscrutable God. The tradition went for abstract distillation in words (the Word); Schrader opted for light (Light) that not only animates and illumines visual story but also penetrates into the dark recesses of ordinary life.

Then, too, Schrader seemed to doubt the capacity of words, or at least a career as a cinema wordsmith, to quell the deep personal tremors within. So considerable was Schrader's inner woe—a roiling inchoate swirl of grief, fear, guilt, rage, and yearning—that it is unlikely he would have found surcease in the secondhand creativity of film criticism. Images in stories offered the potential for distilling, picturing, making clear what oceans of words could not reach or seemed only to occlude and smother.

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