When the White Sheds to Purple: Masculinity and (Eco)Femininity in MASTER GARDENER
“Gardening is the manipulation of the natural world. A creation of order, where order is appropriate.”
These words ring out, in measured voiceover, during the final moments of writer/director Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener (2022). But they are more than just a verbal effigy of the film’s tortured, scrupulous lead.
Motion pictures, too, like gardens, are an exercise in manipulation. They mean to impart beauty through the careful curation of disparate elements. What is included in either medium is just as telling as what is not. Whether those choices are related to structure, scope, or color palette — they all exist as a way of eliciting the author’s desired response.
To that end, the suggestion of red lurks beneath Master Gardener as a translucent vein, threatening the viewer at all moments but rarely, if ever, showing itself. It is both embodied and withheld by the film’s protagonist, Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), whose surname literally translates to the color. Upon reading the script for the first time, Edgerton even asked himself, “When’s the violence coming?” The presence of crimson and its myriad associations are alluded to, suggested, and even briefly discussed throughout — all the while, hidden like stale tattoos under a plain, gray sweatshirt. Red, in all of its flat, primary glory is seldom a visual monopoly in the film’s two hours. While the choice may seem insignificant at first, it is key when placed alongside Schrader’s historic screenplay, Taxi Driver (1976). Lest it be forgotten, the New Hollywood masterpiece, directed by Martin Scorsese, climaxes with a blood-soaked massacre amid a soiled, prurient New York City. Thus, Gardener’s comparatively dazzling and ecstatic color palette emerges as a revealing difference.
Paul Schrader has been exploring red — carnal lust, masculine rage, and the disillusionment irrigated by those fiery concerns — for his entire filmmaking career. He has yet to cease scrutinizing it, even in his late seventies. Not unlike one of the subjects of his seminal book, Transcendental Style in Film — Yasujiro Ozu — Schrader continues to “paint the same rose over and over again” as the legendary Japanese director once put it. Yet, within this meditative and repetitious practice, new thorns of maturity naturally effloresce. The form of the proverbial rose may be unaltered, but the color pattern deepens. Such is the case with Schrader’s latest cinematic bouquet, Master Gardener.
The film follows the aforementioned Narvel Roth, an ex-neo-nazi-turned-horticulturalist who is tasked with mentoring a young, biracial drug addict named Maya Core (Quintessa Swindell). Despite Roth’s reformed lifestyle, he continues to wear the racist tattoos of his past on his skin — perhaps as penance or perhaps as a punishing reminder of who he once was. At Gracewood Gardens, the site of Roth’s work and home life, he teaches Maya in the ways of botanical order at the behest of Maya’s estranged Great Aunt, Norma (Sigourney Weaver). This is further complicated by the fact that Norma is both Narvel’s employer and lover. Almost inevitably, Narvel and Maya become infatuated with one other, forging considerable dramatic irony as a result of Roth’s distant yet tangible past.
In contrast to its doom-laden predecessors, Master Gardener posits a genuinely romantic and sincere fable, offering catharsis through a curt inquiry: what if a person could change? The seemingly facile question is provocatively rendered and complicated by the filmmaker’s white supremacist riff on Lolita, in which a former extremist falls for his older paramour’s young grandniece.
Schrader may be one of cinema’s most famous pot-stirrers, but this impulse to poke and prod in Gardener is undeniably secondary to his command of story and symbolism. His metaphor of choice in this film — ecology, nature, and Earth itself (which all have vital female connotations) — is critical to understanding the director and film’s point-of-view. As Ozu once said, “cinema is drama, not accident,” and Schrader reifies this notion through a series of bold but deliberate choices throughout.
Subsequently, the necessary vehicle for Narvel Roth’s transformation, and by extension mankind’s, becomes the integration of ecofeminism into the void where toxic masculinity once took root. Critically, where Schrader’s previous lonely men (played by Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaac, Willem Dafoe, De Niro, etc.) reject the women of their lives through pride, dishonesty, or their own rigged courtship rubric, Roth accepts them. Thus, the exaggerated nature of Gardener’s premise heightens its impact — as well as the deceptive simplicity of the earlier question. Yes, it is possible to change, but not without the rigorous self-examination, ruthless spiritual pruning, and radical vulnerability that an ecofeminist lifestyle demands.
Ecofeminism: A Brief History
Ecofeminism, the theory that the abolition of the patriarchy and the preservation of the Earth are wholly linked, was originated by author Francoise D’Eaubonne in her inciting manifesto, Feminism or Death, also known as Le FéMinisme Ou La Mort (1974). The theory, as detailed in her follow-up piece, Feminism — Ecology: Revolution or Mutation? (1999), outlines a self-managing society that could thrive as a result of reclaiming female agency, preserving natural resources, and eradicating sexism and classism. These intersectional qualities speak to the movement’s unique strength and power. Yet, they also illustrate how man’s treatment of the environment is an apt metaphor for his blanket oppression of women. Earth’s flesh is relentlessly plowed, mechanically discarded, and dispassionately replenished, all in the name of capital — with no regard for the long-term consequences of this pernicious cycle. Despite the near-fifty-year-old origin of the movement, ecofeminism — sometimes called climate feminism — accrues more meaning and urgency with each passing natural disaster.
Former politician and Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna, has plainly said that “women are disproportionately impacted by climate change.” This is an essential point that speaks to climate feminism’s necessity. Yet, it is just as important to specify that women of color are even more impacted by these same factors — a detail that informs Paul Schrader’s positioning of a young, black woman as the avatar for this movement in Master Gardener. Moreover, a key factor in McKenna’s exit from the world of politics was the pervasive ridicule she received. The climate expert was nicknamed “Climate Barbie” by her opponents which was a twee, if condescending, title compared to the 24-hour police surveillance she eventually required — not to mention the labeling of the word “cunt” on her campaign office. Climate journalist Emily Atkin acutely summarizes the overlap between women’s broader vulnerability and McKenna’s specific experience as a target: “the consequences of misogyny are not just social and economic: they’re planetary.” Atkin is wise to correlate this interconnectedness. The poisoned petals of climate inaction are, in essence, the offspring of anti-woman seedpods. If our planet was a pointillist painting, its broad strokes would be wildfires, and its granular stippling would be the undisguised hatred of women.
However, Paul Schrader is no post-Impressionist. He’s Hieronymus Bosch, rendering panels of terror and ecstasy simultaneously. Even for a film as unapologetically committed to its central metaphor as Master Gardener is, it can still be easy to dismiss any attempts to tether its content to a plainly environmentalist movement like ecofeminism. However, the film wears its gendered equity on its dirt-smeared coveralls. For example, when Narvel Roth meets his Witness Protection contact, Oscar Neruda (Esai Morales), for the first time in the film at a public diner, it is because of a favor called in by Roth. Narvel knows that he is an exemplary WITSEC, or Federal Witness Protection Program asset, with a solid record and a history of keeping to himself. Nerdua even says that Narvel is a “WITSEC poster boy” and that if he had gold star, he’d put it on Roth’s forehead. The effusive praise lends gravitas to Roth’s subsequent request: he asks Agent Neruda if he can use his government resources to scare Robbie Gomez (Jared Bankens), a drug dealer with a history of violence against Maya. Narvel’s affections for his apprentice become clear in that moment, but it’s his suggestion to Neruda that reveals a specific allergy. Roth suggests that the local law enforcement should tell Robbie they’ve “heard stories about the way he treats women.”
As confirmed by Neruda, Gomez has “been busy.” His rap sheet is extensive. Furthermore, the audience already knows he’s active in the drug world. All of which highlights the specificity of Roth’s statement. Narvel Roth didn’t have to recommend Gomez be intimidated by accusations of misogyny. His record is vivid enough as is. But he says it anyway. Schrader is economically and expertly unveiling both character and theme with this detail. One that is concurrently supported by Neruda, albeit silently, in the same exact scene. As Roth and Neruda confer, the agent casually wears an open hoodie with a t-shirt underneath. On the t-shirt, in giant black letters, reads the statement WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS. Notably, the shirt is never commented on, but it doesn’t have to be, because it operates as an almost subliminal yet blunt piece of storytelling.
Paul Schrader, aside from his filmmaking prowess, was a protegé of revered film critic Pauline Kael well before his entry into narrative screenwriting and eventually directing. He is undeniably one of the great thinkers and intellectuals of cinema. However, subtlety is not necessarily his weapon of choice. Power is.
The Radical Flank Effect: Exaggerated Characters and Settings
Perhaps no other choice illustrates this wielding of narrative force as well as Schrader’s decision to center a former white supremacist as his main character. Notably, the filmmaker readily admits on the IndieWire Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that Narvel Roth was originally conceived as an assassin. Yet, already committed to his intentional nod to the aforementioned Lolita, he chose to double down on his own gall and make the hitman a neo-nazi as well. It’s key to point out that, as iconoclastic as Schrader is, his choices to stir the pot (or aggravate the garden as it were) are part of a career-long interest. Which is his impulse to make the audience root for, or at least relate to, deeply questionable people. As the writer/director notes on First Reformed’s feature audio commentary, his protagonists maybe “don’t deserve your identification” but they’re “too interesting for you to now give up on.”
Therein lies the rub. The viewer’s simultaneous discomfort and attraction to Narvel Roth, et al, illustrates exactly what Schrader is discussing. By giving up on a character one has already invested emotional stock in, a conundrum emerges. Are there limits to human empathy? Especially if it can’t sustain itself for a character who isn’t even real? This dilemma becomes an important intellectual tributary of the original question: can a person change? Are those most in need of this transformation even worth the effort?
If the opponents of ecofeminism can’t be swayed, they need to be defeated. In fact, nothing in the original ecofeminism manifesto signals for individual change. This doesn’t negate Master Gardener or its relationship to climate feminism, it simply reevaluates its genre. Said another way, the film is an eco-political fairy tale rather than a neo-realist meditation, and it’s certainly not a moral schematic. However, that doesn’t mean its ideas cannot be absorbed at a primordial or societal level.
Indeed, Schrader is weaving an almost impossible love story, but the point isn’t its feasibility or even believability. Rather, it purports a type of emotional “radical flank effect” as a way to render a broader comment on humanity and the condition of being alive and conscious. Not altogether dissimilar from climate feminism, the radical flank effect is a term that refers to the practical benefit of militant alternatives as they relate to moderate solutions. For example, the phrase — coined by writer Herbert H. Haines — was born of the data that showed how groups like the Black Panthers, rather than alienating the public from civil rights, actually encouraged them to make financial contributions to less radical yet comparable groups. Schrader posits a similar principal, albeit as a raconteur rather than as a political figure. In other words, by planting his protagonist’s misdeeds in the fringes of redeemable behavior, the viewer is encouraged not so much to forgive actual white nationalists, but instead to forgive themselves and those in their immediate communities. The mere consideration of an ecofeminist lifestyle, as implied by the film, creates a window of introspection for the viewer to re-assess their own philosophies. Both interpersonally and at large.
The filmmaker is using heightened archetypes, characters, and metaphors as a means of directing the viewer towards self-reflection. If movies are empathy machines, as legendary critic Roger Ebert once said, then Paul Schrader’s movies are radical empathy machines. The director doesn’t expect his audience to undergo unfathomable transformation from a two-hour film, but hopes to display that it is at least still possible. Albeit on a less mythic, everyday scale. For example, Schrader himself has become increasingly self-aware and possibly even tender. As he recalled on WTF with Marc Maron — in a sly reference to Gardener’s closing theme song, “Space and Time” — he used to be someone who didn’t “want to leave this world without saying ‘fuck you.’” Now, at 77, he doesn’t “want to leave this world without saying ‘I love you.’”
Breaking Hate: Real World De-radicalization
Despite this acquired softness, it’s abundantly clear that Schrader still traffics in extremes (Narvel Roth is of course a literal, former extremist). This is a choice that he uses to highlight the almost equally drastic measures that are required to combat hatred. It handily informs his pursuit in making audiences root for complicated people, but also shows that love, acceptance, and female agency stand as the ideal technology of the anti-hate, pro-feminist toolshed.
Notably, Paul Schrader easily could have made Narvel Roth’s apprentice a direct mirror of Roth himself, i.e. a white male youth, rather than a twenty-something black woman. A troubled, young man enacting the same path of destruction that the title character pursued would have conveyed many of the same ideas. Yet, they would have arrived at the expense of nuance, novelty, and necessarily gendered politics. Especially considering Schrader’s trinity of deceased or at-risk scions in First Reformed, the opportunity to reiterate and reignite this motif was well within grasp. All the same, real world examples of white, American de-radicalization highlight a valid branch of climate feminism’s goals and beliefs.
Belief, oddly enough, is sometimes the problem. At least when it has been fertilized under shadows or a toxic sun. Author, former neo-nazi, and current de-radicalization expert Christian Picciolini suggests that unexpected compassion and sincere empathy are the most effective tools of de-radicalizing young people seduced by white supremacy. Fittingly, Picciolini and Joel Edgerton are the exact same age, 49, in real life. This suggests that the TED talk veteran and “former” is the rough model for Narvel Roth’s criminal era. In one of the film’s fleeting flashbacks, we even see Narvel attending a concert for a racist musical act, much like the one Picciolini himself once fronted.
Christian Picciolini’s methods go well beyond autobiography though. His second book, Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism, narrativizes multiple victims of white supremacist indoctrination. The last third of Breaking Hate revolves around his actual methodology, or what he calls The Seven “L” Steps of Disengagement: Link, Listen, Learn, Leverage, Lift, Love, Live. As simple as this lists’s alliterative vocabulary might seem, it at very least helps localize the more sweeping tenets of climate feminism into granular actions. It is a mirror for gardening’s essential tools of curation and maintenance.
Especially when acknowledging that movements like ecofeminism and women’s liberation lie at the nexus of “collective behavior” and “incipient interest groups” as Jo Freeman’s The Origins of the Women’s Liberation Movement (1973) describes, organization becomes as pivotal as spontaneity. In other words, honoring one’s emotional impetus towards a cause can be as powerful as the intellectual planning that follows. And make no mistake, Schrader is putting forth affection, sensuality, relationships — indeed, a communion with one or all of these — as our primary motive for change. The cerebral, often hyper-verbal, architecture of social change (though necessary), can obscure its very catalyst: emotion.
The Arc of the Lonely: Narvel Roth and the Men in a Room
Appropriately, this tension between thought and feeling powers Paul Schrader’s loners, drifters, gigolos, and drug dealers. They are unsavory figures that attempt to think or write their way out of despair and crisis.
Moreover, Master Gardener transcends its role as the finale of the so-called “Man in a Room” trilogy that began with Schrader’s First Reformed (2017) and was succeeded by The Card Counter (2021). Roth is not only the fulfillment of a macabre hat-trick, he is the bookend to the lonely, male epicenter that Schrader himself helped invent with Taxi Driver. This mold reaches its natural endpoint with his latest work, dramatically calcifying, creating an inevitable cocoon for its protagonist to then emerge from. Actualized and in full bloom, Narvel chooses pacifism and love in the film’s final minutes.
Even the archetype of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle is the very foundation for Master Gardener’s Narvel Roth. Inversely, Roth is the culmination of Bickle. They are inseparable. Two sides of the same weathered coin that has been traveling and mutating through the American consciousness since 1976.
In a brutal aside during a recent GQ interview, Martin Scorsese himself notes that “every other person is like Travis Bickle now.” This insight lends additional credence to the cathartic fantasy of Narvel Roth’s redemption: he is not the rule but the impossible exception. If Taxi Driver is a meandering, violent inquiry, then Master Gardener is a complex but assured answer. Where Bickle is a closed loop, Roth is a breakthrough. Where the former is forever lonely, the latter is forever linked. Ennui is replaced with optimism.
Whereas Bickle is a walking contradiction stumbling through his own sordid diary in search of ideology to ground his nebulous misanthropy, the leads of the Man in a Room series possess a deeper vocation. For some it is clergy (First Reformed), for others it is military service (The Card Counter), and in Roth’s case it is organized hatred (Master Gardener). The commonality between these characters goes well beyond the device of a journal used to communicate their inner monologue — also used in Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992) — and extends well into the invisible masks they each wear to hide their subcutaneous oceans of pain.
Each man has been scorned by the false promises of their institutions and the performative garb they still wear as a result. By First Reformed’s climax, Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) wears his priestly robes over a self-immolating wrap of barbed wire — conveying a sense of profound posturing that just barely covers his intense suffering. Again, Schrader’s metaphors are not subtle. But they are indelible. “I have found a new form of prayer,” says Toller in the film’s second half, referring to the suicide bombing he intends to enact. Itself due to the corruption and inaction of his vulnerable profession. Therein, the grandiosity of religion is exchanged for the theater of extremism. Naturally, both bear the capacity to be dangerous veneers, creating distance from one’s actual source of agony.
Similarly, The Card Counter’s William Tell (Oscar Isaac) is arguably the most damaged of all as he was directly involved in the war crimes of Abu Ghraib. He swaps the stern, jingoistic machismo of the Iraq War for the stoic machismo of competitive gambling — a perfect medium for the veteran’s practiced detachment. An indifference that of course belies immense hurt and trauma. Toller is grand — literally the leader of a historic New York church — while Tell is intentionally stealth and unassuming. Yet, they share a proclivity for costumes and a keeping up of appearances. Their emotional dispositions differ, but posturing is not defined by grandiosity nor humility. It is defined by dishonesty.
Indeed, Narvel Roth’s performance of white supremacy — itself, a poisonous strain of unexamined masculinity — is perhaps the most grandiose and inauthentic of all. Crucially, Roth’s predilection for performance does not cease just because he has sold out his former colleagues, is permanently separated from his family, and has assumed a quiet life as a horticulturalist. On the contrary, he has simply developed a new persona — even if it is one that is significantly less destructive. Travis Bickle may have pontificated within a claustrophobic, yellow coffin while Narvel Roth struts about a spacious garden, but both characters are thoroughly experienced in the act of hyper-masculine rot. Though we only see Narvel’s days as a white supremacist in concise stabs of flashback, it is more than enough to identify the difference between his old and new selves. His days as a shaggy, bearded assassin stand in immediate contrast to his clean-cut, overall-clad appearance in the present day. Critically, both selves occur as a stage.
When the film introduces Oscar Neruda, Roth’s WITSEC contact, we even discover Narvel’s birth name — Norton Rupplea — which quickly illustrates that he is a man of profound reinvention. Which also makes him a prime vessel for the ethical rebirth that ecofeminism provides (and Mother Earth’s cyclical seasons emphasize). Yet, as much as these performative acts of masculinity succeed in papering over neuroses, wounds, and traumas, they are also the symptoms of a desperate need for human connection and feminine integration.
Cleome Señorita Rosalitas
Not long into Master Gardener, Roth’s voiceover reads from his handwritten journal, stating “I’m not sure what it is [about Maya and Norma]…I’m not sure I want to know.” Narvel’s incuriousness about the nature of Norma, his transactional lover, and Maya, the object of his affections, reflects his instinct to preserve his identity. It reflects the necessary transformation that truly “knowing” them would entail. In blissful ignorance, he can remain comfortable on the grounds of Gracewood Gardens, living a simple but static existence in his cabin. Conversely, understanding them means understanding himself which, given his dark past, is not exactly an appealing or attractive venture. To paraphrase James Baldwin, the absence of our hate begets the confronting of our pain.
In Master Gardener’s first half, during Norma and Maya’s overdue reunion, the former remarks on the transformative beauty of cleome señorita rosalitas. Specifically, how beautiful they are when their white petals make way for purple ones. Maya, a quick study, replies that deadheading the rosalitas “channels the energy to the flowers instead of the seeds.” The response stands as a metaphysical answer, not to Norma, but to Narvel and one of his intimate diary entries. Namely, his earlier observation that “given the right conditions, seeds can last indefinitely. I wear mine on my skin every day.” The dialogue may be staggered, but the theme itself is foregrounded: one must direct their energy — their anger, their disenchantment, their trauma — towards what they can be, and not whatever identity they have long since outgrown. As Christian Picciolini notes in the Breaking Hate prologue, “running from my past was the wrong thing to do.” Not unlike the intersection of spontaneity and organization within women’s liberation and ecofeminism, the sum of our inciting emotions and pragmatic intellect facilitates our action. The center of the Venn diagram between faith and works is Eden. Narvel’s earliest lines make this clear. “Gardening is a belief in the future…that change will come.” Imminently, he offers a caveat: “In its due time.”
Time as the essential tool of filmmaking is a notion Schrader is acutely aware of, and has been since he was a graduate student writing Transcendental Style in Film. The same way it inspired his influences, it, too, has lubricated the expansion of his literal-proverbial color palette. Where once there was pure red — war, lust, and lechery — red still remains. But it is now balanced by shades of un-ironic love. It is informed by the awareness of an asymmetrical climate crisis. The ill-tempered blood of the Man in a Room trilogy — more accurately, the Man in a Room saga — has mixed with the fragile blue of the interstellar marble we occupy. The profane and the sacred unite, if ever they were separate. As Maya snarls to Narvel in one of the film’s many highlights, “I have enough hate for the both of us.” Her reaction highlights the fact that it is not the absence of fear, malice, or violence that makes us good. Instead, it is the simultaneous presence of love, awareness, and compassion — as a way to interrogate those unsavory impulses — that may lead us there. Maya can impart this with authority because she is someone more vulnerable to climate change’s alarming terror than any other group, and the message is clear:
When men shed the dead, colorless petals of hatred, they create space for the resplendent violets of empathy and change. Deadheading that which does not serve us creates a clearing for what does. Should the seeds of our worst traits bring forth new, invasive hydras, they will simply be pruned once more. After all, gardens — like films — are not nature. They are the manipulation of it. Their beauty, and ours, is the careful product of curation and maintenance.
A creation of order, where order is appropriate.
