Noah makes a grand
impression, for its visual scope, relentless bleakness and the ideas it puts
forth to describe the protagonist’s relationship with God. Ultimately, it is a profoundly unsettling
film, one that will surprise the viewer because it locates the meaning of this relationship outside of the Bible. It works as a
myth of creation, like Peter Jackson’s visual rendering of his Middle Earth
mythology, but one twisting the original source in ways that subverts it.
At the core of this fable for the modern times about nature
– both human and the physical world – is an inversion of the Jewish/Christian
proposition about a God that creates the cosmos out of chaos (in the Greek
translation of the Hebrew “at the beginning God created Heaven and Earth”), and
man as his image and resemblance.
The sparse, yet dramatic and colorful, recounting of the
Noah story in Genesis 5-10, provides, quite literately, the backbone of the
story as reworked by Aronofsky and his longtime writer/producer Ari
Handel. Dealing with a work of imagination,
the director and writer fill in the interstices of the biblical narrative with powerful
imagery, well-developed characters, sharp and sometimes ponderous dialogue
about good, evil and the value of life, and tragic conflicts played out in an
apocalyptic world. Artistic licenses and
creative decisions make this a superb piece of filmmaking as well as special
effects ingenuity. A much discussed
example in reviews, and a subject of conversation especially among the youth
quadrant, is the rendering of the mysterious creatures the Bible calls the
Nephilim (Genesis 6-4): ‘these were the heroes of days gone by, men of
renown’. They are here lava monsters,
fallen angels trapped in bodies of stone, who help Noah build the ark. Giants reminiscent of Tolkien’s Ents as materialized
in The Lord of the Rings, they look
like Transformers brought over from a science-fiction film. The handling of the CGI menagerie – how to
get the creatures to the ark and keep them quiet on board for the duration of
the spectacularly rendered flood – is imaginatively solved. Sets, costumes and the magnificent vessel –
realistically designed to float not to sail – are conceived as part of a nitty-gritty
primitive yet post-industrial world; its natural beauty (the austere landscape
of Iceland), ravaged by wicked human race, functions as a modern alert of
ecological disaster and climate-change.
The geographical universe this Noah
inhabits in the fringes, as a family man intent on protecting it from unnecessary damage, is one unhinged as a result of physical and moral depredations. One senses that the visionary, metaphorical
worlds of Hieronymus Bosch must have inspired the production designers. The debaucherie in the woods did not need to look further than the Flemish painter's scenes of chaos, devils, half-humans, half-creatures, to graft the wickedness of mankind to the film's apocalyptic landscape.I have spent a few days thinking about the film, and reading reviews, interviews and other materials. And I have come to see that by redefining the terms of the relationship between God and Noah, the film subverts its biblical understanding. I would even argue that, in an extreme feat of interpretation, it throws overboard the canonical Judeo-Christian frame of reference, bringing in a mishmash of esoteric interpretations. I haven’t quite figured out the purpose of such a Copernican turn.
The opening and closing lines point inexorably to that puzzling
direction: “At the beginning, there was nothing”, intones the narrator; the
command to “be fruitful and multiply” in the final scene are now Noah’s words
to his children, not Yahweh’s to Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 1-28). This arc from an initial nothingness to a man
and his family alone in the closing scene has written God out of the human
equation: the Almighty is an entity, unnamed (the word “God” is never
mentioned), remote and silent, and in his requirement, through a nightmarish
dream, that Noah sacrifice his newly born grandchildren, malevolent. By
refusing to do so –the reverse of Abraham’s obedience – Noah breaks with a
deity that has driven him to a state of semi-madness by participating in the extermination
of the world, and begins his self-given mission of re-populating the earth
after the ecological cataclysm. In this final scene, the coup de grâce is given
by the serpent: surviving the expulsion from paradise by becoming a sacred
relic worn wrapped around the arm by Noah’s descendants, like sacramental
tefillin, it becomes the real divinity, tying Noah and lineage into a covenant
to last through time. 
This svolta theologica
has been discussed in terms of gnostic and Kabbalah influences shaping Aronofsky
and Handel’s re-imagining of the story, a project in the works for more than
ten years. In his blog, theologian Brian
Mattson tracks the use of these sources in a clear, straightforward manner, and
it makes for a fascinating read (drbrianmattson.com).
The film suggests to me that
while we can explore these other roots – non canonical, esoteric, fringy – what happens
in Noah is an instance of bringing a
secularizing, post-modern spirit to the Bible: the film reads the story
traditionally, as a record of a covenant between the Lord and his chosen
people, but simultaneously lays on it a mutually exclusive interpretation. Through the dialogues, the design of the characters,
the mise-en-scène, and in the subversion of the serpent’s meaning in the last
scene, the second one has pushed out the first one egregiously. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures exits
through the giftshop, an act that goes beyond the traditional Hollywood epics
specifically dealing with Noah and the flood, like Michael Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark (1928), Warner Bros. response
to MGM’s Ben-Hur (1924), or John
Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning
(1966), now kitschy beyond repair.
Perhaps one could view this film in a more sanguine way, disregard
the theological svolta, and compare Noah with the director’s other films: Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The
Fountain (2006), The Wrestler
(2008) and Black Swan (2010). They all have protagonists on quests for absolutes,
going down paths of madness and self-destruction, looking into the abyss, and
finding, somehow, the will to survive, physically or spiritually. This Jewish narrative of survival in the face of catastrophes is the thread that connects the films of Darren Aronofsky. A similar impulse animates the powerful and moving five-part documentary series The Story of the Jews, written and directed by British historian Simon Schama, just shown on PBS, in anticipation of Pesah. This first-person documentary is primarily a historical, rational, enlightened account by a Jewish intellectual bonded to his people, who have survived for their fidelity to a book and a law. On a complementing note, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’1913 Erasmus Lecture in NYC, “Creative minorities" fleshes out the same narrative survival, locating it firmly in the Jewish faith and the Covenant. The Documentary series and the lecture are an excellent way to revisit the issues brought up by Noah … but the serpent and its implications will give you the creeps.
