Noah

Every age or culture needs its own Great Flood myth, usually of rebirth. That’s why there have been so many of them, to which tradition our Genesis version — starring the 500-year-old Noah — was rather a latecomer. 

Darren Aronofsky’s 21st Century edition has no less authority than any of the others. It’s just one fiction among others. In fact, as Aronofsky is more conversant with alternative versions and has a more sophisticated grasp upon myth making and Biblical studies, his version might have a good deal more substance. Indeed, one should no more prefer a Biblical or medieval myth over a modern version than one should prefer medieval medicine over the modern. Some, of course, benightedly do. As a moral guide, Aronofsky’s story is far superior to Genesis.

First the gestalt. Noah fits right into the modern box-office mainstream of loud, violent, action flicks. But that’s hardly an imposition on the text. The Biblical prophets’ visions abound with cataclysmic violence, fire, brimstone and guts. Aronofsky’s visuals are if anything tamer than, e.g., the 16th Century morality canvases of Hieronymous Bosch. 

Aronofsky adds a psychological dimension missing from the skimpy Genesis version. The central family suffers internal conflicts as compelling as the global destruction. As the macro reflects the micro, after the floods the pregnant Ila (Emma Watson) has her personal breaking of the waters. As Methusaleh (Anthony Hopkins) finally manages to salvage a craved berry from the arid wild, he also blessed away Ila’s barrenness.

Aronofsky also gives Noah a moral ambivalence. The film is also about Noah's arc. First he's a pantheist not averse to murdering hunters. He comes to intuit God wants him to save the animals while He eliminates the human race that has despoiled His creation. Noah coldly denies salvation to anyone outside his family. He abandons the girl that Ham (Logan Lerman) tries to bring back for the family trip. Denying Ham a wife is Noah’s first step into presuming to cold divine authority. 

Aronofsky/God gives Shem (Douglas Booth) an adopted foundling Ila to wed. That would explain how the human race managed to reproduce when only the one family survived the flood. The original audience wasn’t troubled by this mystery — or may have been more open to incest. Those were simpler times.

But the prospect of granddaughters pushes Noah’s sense of duty to madness. Noah threatens to kill any grand-daughters lest they thwart God’s intention to destroy mankind. Noah fails to read Ila’s pregnancy as a sign of God’s love, presence and approval, in the Old Testament tradition of barren births. When God’s servant turns murderous madman Aronofsky introduces the modern threat of religious extremism, whether Muslim, Haredim or any other bloody-minded righteousness. Noah shrinks from religious devotion (good) into heartlessness (bad). He is saved only by the flush of his love for the babies. In another modern upgrade of the source, when Noah’s wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and stepdaughter Ila try to dissuade him from infanticide  Aronofsky counteracts the Old Testament’s harsh patriarchy.

        Aronofsky’s most explicit imposition is his ecology. Noah teaches young Ham not to pick a flower he doesn’t need. The evil Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone) is the carnivore against Noah’s vegetarian, another contemporary inflection. The difference in diet contrasts Noah’s sense of man serving nature and Tubal-Cain’s, that nature serves man. Where Noah attests to the primacy of Nature Tubal-Cain claims the primacy of man. Guess which God prefers. Though He speaks to neither, Noah at least reads His signs — or what he thinks are. As we don’t hear or see God here, divinity is properly left in man. God is clearest in Noah’s instinctive love for the infant girls. Indeed a theist and an atheist can make equal sense of this film.  Noah and his shadow Tubal-Cain both quote the familiar reversal: God is made in man's image.

A later montage in silhouette — the perfect medium for undifferentiated human conflict — traces the historic range of human warfare, brother against brother, nation against nation, that has laid our physical world and humanity to waste. When Noah dreams he is plodding through a blood-stained earth the reference is not just to wars but to man’s destructive pollution of his world. Hence the spreading industrial cities as the cause and emblem of civilization's blight. Cain killing Abel becomes the recurring pattern for human behaviour — warfare against man and against nature. Aronofsky creates Tubal-Cain to embody the killer Cain’s lasting heritage.

  Aronofsky begins with an anti-Edenic view, that Evil is the driving force in life. His first shot is of the serpent, spitting out at us (in merciful 2-D) then the forbidden fruit. At several points Noah sees the serpent shucking off its outer skin to assail innocence. That’s also the function of Noah’s arch-enemy, Tubal-Cain, whom young Noah sees kill Noah’s father and who sneaks into the ark and is nourished back to health by the rebellious Ham. 

  Aronofsky accords Ham some sympathy. He chafes at his father’s hardness, especially his denial of a wife. As he wins Ham’s service Tubal-Cain becomes the false father alternative to Noah. At first Ham obeys Noah and drops the weapon Tubal-Cain gave him. At the end Ham sets Noah up for attack but uses the knife from Tubal-Cain to kill him instead. How far to serve the father is Noah's dilemma too.

Aronofsky also inflects the ending. Despite his saving instinct of love, Noah’s shame at having failed his God by letting the twin girls live implicitly drives him into alienation and drunkenness. In Genesis Ham sees his father’s nakedness and is therefore banished, an eternal curse placed upon him and his descendants (however he may beget them). As racists used that curse to justify the enslavement of Ham’s African descendants, Aronofsky plays the scene differently. Ham in his backpack comes to say goodbye to Noah, who is lying naked until Shem and Japheth — careful to look away — cover him with a blanket. This Ham departs uncursed. 

On Creation Aronofsky hedges his bets. He gives a Big Bang sequence of God creating the cosmos but then an evolutionary montage of animal life, culminating in man.

Perhaps Aronofsky’s most controversial addition are the Watchers. the plodding Golems of rock that, despite man’s earlier betrayal, now help Noah both in building the ark and in fighting off the attacking baddies. In fact, they’re a clever icon. Their rocky lumpiness makes them a hardened variation on the human’s origin and end in dust. "Adam" means "out of earth." More specifically, they are described as having originally been creatures of light, fallen angels, who helped mankind against God’s wishes and were consequently punished by conversion into this heavy materiality. Here they return to God’s grace by helping Noah on his divine mission. Thus they gain redemption. When they die in battle they explode back into light and are drawn back into the super-astronomical heavens. Again, they replay the human hope for illumination and redemption beyond our heavy material existence.

This is another key inflection of Genesis. This Noah is not an elderly sage but a generally sensitive warrior. Though a vegetarian into flower power, he slaughters great numbers of bad guys, not just through the flood but in hand-to-hand whirligig. The Watchers’ windmill killings are like Noah’s, evidence that God’s justice allows for no pacifism in the face of evil. As we don’t live in Gandhi’s political order anymore, the killings by Noah and his rocky aides suggest a contemporary realism. We have seen the effectiveness of civil disobedience in Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, Iran, much of Africa. Hence Aronofsky’s injection — and validation — of mortal combat in defence of virtue. As an efficient killer with a clouding conscience Russell Crowe is a perfect casting — despite being so much younger than the original Noah.

Grand Budapest Hotel: CALL discussion notes

          

In 2014 (presumably) we watch a young woman enter the Old Lutz Cemetery and leave a tribute at the monument to a favourite author (Tom Wilkinson), a National Treasure. In 1985 that author speaks to a documentary about where a writer finds his material. He has to watch and listen to life. He’s interrupted by a rowdy (but ultimately apologetic) brat. In 1968 the younger version of the author (Jude Law) is told the life story of the classic hotel’s mysterious guest Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). That starts in 1932, in mythical Zubrowka, i.e. Eastern Europe, between the World Wars. 

The young Zero (Tony Revolori) serves as lobby boy to the main character — and dutiful seducer — concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). When dying guest Madame D (Tilda Swinton) bequeaths to Gustav a valuable Renaissance painting, Boy with Apple, Gustav takes away the painting, to secure it from her evil son Dmitri (Adrien Brody). The faithful butler Serge X (Mathieu Amalric) slips into that package Madame D’s second copy of her second will, which leaves her entire huge estate to Gustave. 

To recover that will and the painting Dmitri and henchman Jopling (Willem Dafoe) try to pin the murder on Gustave. With the help of his bakery aide girlfriend Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) Zero helps Gustave break out of jail and flee both villain Jopling and cop Henckels (Edward Norton), whose initial affection and support of Gustave crumbles under his apparent guilt. Having killed Madame D with strychnine, Jopling kills and defingers her legal executor, Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum), beheads Serge’s sister, kills Serge in the confessor’s booth, and after a ski and sled chase to and over the Winter Games slalom course is on the verge of killing Gustave when Zero rises out of the snowbank and throws Jopling to his death. 

Dmitri’s pursuit of the will leads to a chaotic and furious gunfight in the hotel, where few know at whom they are shooting and for what reason, if any. Ultimately the key will is found, order restored, and Gustave gets his estate. He weds Zero and Agatha, who dies soon after of a minor, now easily curable disease. When Gustave is killed by soldiers he leaves everything to Zero. To appease the tyranny Zero gives up his entire fortune just to keep the hotel, where he lives in a small closet, and where he keeps his memory of Agatha alive.

Questions to consider:

What is the point of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story? What does this layering suggest?

1.How does the foreground fiction relate to the hinted backdrop history?

2. Why that particular time period?

3. In context, what’s the point of the brat interrupting the author?

4. How does Anderson develop the theme of loneliness? From the isolates in the modern hotel, how does that reflect back upon Gustave’s function and career and his relationship with Zero? And the formal — coat of arms, etc. — brotherhood of concierges?

5. Why call a central character Zero? Is it related to the war having destroyed his family?

6.What metaphors lurk in the following: the keys left on the author’s monument, the “scribe’s fever,” the 1968 hotel’s vending machines, Zero’s book dedication “From Z to A,” Gustave’s prized Eau de Panache,” the miniature humans shot against vast gates (Checkpoint 19), majestic edifices and natural wilds,  the contrasting shots of cramped quarters,

7. What themes are suggested by the film’s visual effects, its look or style?

8. How does the film reflect on our times? On our sense of what history is?

9. What’s the point of these quotes: 

      — Did he just throw my cat out of the window?

      — Keep your hands off my lobby boy!

      — I beat the living shit out of a snivelling little runt called Pinky Bandinski…. He’s actually become a dear friend.

      — The lobby boy must be completely invisible but always in sight.

      — Rudeness is an expression of fear.

      — The cheaper cuts are more flavourful. Or so they say.

      — I suppose you’d call that a draw.

      — The plot thickens, as they say. Why, by the way? Is it the soup metaphor?

      — Of course, it depends.

      — We found the butler.

      — The beginning of the end of the end of the beginning has just begun.

      — A pretty boy just on the verge of manhood.

10. What does Zubrowska connote?

11. In context, what’s the point of the animated Russian dance amid the end credits? (Hint: stay for it.)

12. What is the point of using three different aspect ratios (i.e., screen proportions)? Is there a metaphor here? The storytellers are in widescreen and the oldest stories in standard old format. Why the black and white bridge sequence?

13. Why is the history fictionalized? e.g., Nazis as Zig Zag. Zubrowka as the new Fredonia? Is that the Duck Soup metaphor?

14.. Why does Anderson aim for cartoon effects in his actors’ extreme facial expressions, the flatness of the image, the antic pace, the obvious use of models? Could artifice be one of the film’s themes?

15. Though the film pretends to be inspired by Stefan Zweig’s memoirs, how is it rather an exercise in the signature quirkiness of Wes Anderson? In reverse order he directed Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Darjeeling Limited,The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore and Bottle Rocket. 

16. How does the star-studded casting affect the narrative? How does Anderson play with or against the actors’ personae? e.g., Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, etc.

17. How does Egon Schiele’s (dare we hope fictitious?) Two Lesbians Masturbating reflect on Boy with Apple?

18. Is there any point in the characters’ names? Bill Murray’s name is Hungarian for “What’s going on?” Jeff Goldblum’s is a homage to cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Lazslo Kovacs. Zero Moustafa evokes Zero Mostel. Serge X and Madame D recall other film titles. Isn’t Henckles a knife? 

19. So. Jude Law will grow into Tom Wilkinson. Tony Revolon will grow into F. Murray Abraham. In context, what does that tell you?

20. Perhaps the plot — the innermost story — is most explicitly read in Gustave’s relief that “There are still some faint slivers of civilization in this barbaric slaughterhouse that used to be called humanity.”

21. Perhaps the narrative structure — the backward movement through time in the layering of story-telling — develops the mature Zero’s sense that the past glory that Gustave was defending had long since died before he entered. “He certainly retained the illusion with remarkable grace.”

22. What’s the point of all the verbal anachronisms? e.g., two-bit hoosegow, candyass,  the bitch legged it, shut the fuck up, what’s the meaning of this shit?

23. What’s the point of concierge Gustave’s passion and knack for poetry, which Zero and Agatha catch? 

Non-Stop

In addition to being a riveting thriller, Non-Stop has an interesting political agenda. It’s about and for paranoia. Its effectiveness as a thriller makes its political undertow all the more dangerous.

The opening shot establishes the film’s subject: a close-up of a troubled, grizzled, unkempt, shaking Bill Marks (Liam Neeson). As we know from the trailer — and as the film quickly confirms — the hero is a US air marshall, i.e., the personification of post-9/11 US Security.

But instead of being in steady control this federal Bill is all victim, all marks. The bad guys have framed him to appear to be the hijacker holding the plane and passengers for a $150 million ransom. As events play out, though, for all his apparent weakness and ostensible guilt he still proves the hero. That is to say, however suspect and incompetent Homeland Security may appear to be, we have to give it our abiding trust. If we want to survive the terrorist threat we have to accept our security system whatever weakness and corruption the Snowdens and cynics may expose in it.

Bill shows a lot of sins the film teaches us to forgive. He not only drinks on the way to work but he futilely tries to cover up his weakness. When he smokes in the plane’s john he’s a federal officer breaking a federal law. A relatively minor crime but still, we’re led to accept this criminal because he’s got a badge. In the good guy we’re supposed to excuse anything. And despite everything the other passengers see him do, all his violence, dictatorial commands, beating up and even killing the wrong guys, capped by his damning exposure on the TV news, they’re supposed to keep supporting him. The film calls for blind trust in one’s security force, regardless of all they do and all the bad things you hear about them. Indeed the villains’ intention is not to get the 150 Mill but to discredit the US security system. So if any of us feel disenchanted by anything negative we hear about our real life security system, why, then we’re just playing into these bad guys’ hands.

At least Bill’s a little better than the other marshall on the flight, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), whom the bad guys have played like an organ by planting the bomb in his briefcase of smuggled cocaine. A bomb in coke is a lot of blow. Not to mention one high Jack. Indeed even Bill’s guilt is rooted in virtue. Because he was too dedicated to his cop duties he didn’t spend enough time at his dying little daughter’s bedside. He’s given another tyke to protect here, to win redemption.

To compound our paranoia the film plays against all our expectations, especially in our profiling of the suspects (the other passengers). The apparent thug is a NYC cop who first leads the mutiny against our suspicious saint but then converts. The turbaned Moslem (of course Terrorist Suspect #1) tuns out to be an urbane doctor, with a super-medical scientific speciality to boot. Why, our hero is Irish but not IRA! 

And the bad guys? The bespectacled high school teacher and the clean-cut black computer nerd. Now, when it’s our All-American schoolteachers and computer nerds who are turning terrorist our paranoia needs no limits. Nor, the film murmurs, should our faith in our security system, however weak, incompetent and even criminal it may be. 

Enemy-- CALL Discussion Notes

Enemy — director Denis Villeneuve

Actor Anthony Saint Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets a phone message that his mother (Isabella Rossellini) doesn’t like his new apartment. (Later she will say he should give up his fantasy of being a third-rate actor, presumably to join her higher class world, and that he has troubles with fidelity.) A shot of a pregnant woman turns out to be Anthony’s pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon).

Anthony leads another man down a long industrial corridor, unlocks a door, and they join a group of middle aged men watching a nude woman masturbating. Two other scantily robed then nude woman enter. One raises the lid on a silver tray, revealing a large tarantula, which one woman prepares to squash.

History prof Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal again) comes out of a depressing class. A  colleague recommends a particular “cheerful” movie. He rents the DVD and watches it after his tipsy girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) goes to bed. She storms off when he tries to make love to her. Adam dreams a scene from the film, which prompts him to rerun it back to a scene where his cleaner shaven lookalike plays a bellboy.

Adam (Jake) obsessively tracks Anthony (Jake) down. He goes to the actor’s agent where the security guard thinks he’s Anthony and gives him a personal letter. When he phones he finds Anthony’s wife Helen thinks he has her husband’s voice. Anthony at first refuses to meet the man he says might be a crazy stalker. Helen, suspicious of her unfaithful husband’s strange behaviour, goes to Scarborough campus and sees and talks to his academic double. Anthony phones Adam and arranges to meet him at the Breezeway Inn. There they find themselves identical, even down to the same chest scar. 

The academic Adam flees the scene but now the actor wants to pursue the mysterious dual unity. (They met in Room 221.) He rehearses a jealous speech (“Did you fuck my wife?”) then delivers it and proposes that to get even Adam has to make his car, clothes and girlfriend available to Anthony. Waiting for the actor’s wife to return to her apartment, Adam studies the actor’s domestic world, the posh flat and clothes, etc. 

The two sex scenes are intercut. Helen calls Adam to bed. She intuits he might be Adam (“Did you have a good day at school?”) but they make passionate love. Anthony is screwing Adam’s Mary until she notices the wedding ring tanline that Adam doesn’t have. She is livid. They tear off in Adam’s car. In frustrated anger Anthony smashes Adam’s car, apparently killing both himself and Adam’s wife.

Adam awakens blissed out the next morn and calls out to his (i.e., Anthony’s) wife. She says he has a phone message from his mother. Adam opens Anthony’s private envelop and finds a key, presumably to return to the sex-club his concierge mentioned having gone to with Anthony. Presumably out of academic interest, Adam plans to go. When Adam looks in on her in the bedroom he sees instead a monstrous tarantula.

Questions to Consider

1.What does this film share with Villeneuve’s most recent successes, Incendies and Prisoners (the latter which he made at roughly the same time, also with Gyllenhaal)? Is Adam here an extension of the contemplative detective Gyllenhaal played in Prisoners and the wilder actor Anthony perhaps a version of the kidnapped girl’s violently vengeful father? 

2. How do those films also treat the theme of discovering one’s double? The Double (aka O Homem Duplicado) is the title of the Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s source novel.

3. Is the tarantula maybe a symbol? Aha, but of what? Adam dreams an inverted spider woman coming down that hallway. Another fantasy shot has a spider over the Toronto skyline. Anthony wears a spidery helmet. After the car crash the broken window is a spider web. So? Is the ultimate spider Adam’s interpretation of Helen (and the snare of domesticity) or perhaps an emblem of the dangers of eroticism? Something else?

4. Why is Adam specifically a History prof? Why is Anthony an actor? One possibility: A historian studies past/others’ actions. An actor plays other characters and makes them present. And why not a lead actor? 

5. Who or what is the enemy?

6. Saramago: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” What is the chaos here? What is the underlying order discovered by the end?

7. What’s the point of Adam being family-named Bell? And Anthony Claire? Why does Adam’s hallway walk in front of Anthony’s concierge parallel Anthony’s early scene with him? 

8. The first Jake we connect with is Adam, whom we see lecturing, then eventually discovering his lookalike. But the film opens on the actor Anthony, both through his mother and the sex club scene (where we see his wedding ring). Why does Villeneuve play this structural trick on us? Does it prevent or encourage our reading the film as either Adam or Anthony dreaming the other? 

9. How is Toronto depicted? What atmosphere or themes are in the city shots? Is there any relevance in "tarantula" being etymologically derived from the Italian town Taranto?

10. What’s the point of the two Jakes’ characterization? Adam doesn’t go out much, is all work, doesn’t go to movies, and asks for a “cheerful” one. Anthony eschews the establishment life for the liberties of motorcycle, affairs, etc.

11. How is Anthony’s character redefined by what we see of his mother? Why does the Canadian actor have so much nicer a flat than the U of T Prof? Huh? Where’s the justice? I mean, what’s the point?

12. Why are Helen and Mary such lookalikes in hair, face and legs? What do their differences signify?

13. How do Adam’s lectures resonate in the film? e.g., his thrice repeated lecture on dictatorships being “all about control” and Hegel’s remark that everything important happens twice, to which Marx added first as tragedy, then as farce.

14. How does the film’s disturbing elements exempt it from the “bread and circuses” by which Adam says dictatorships control their subjects?

15. What is the function of the early scene of erotic spectatorship? Does the confusion between Adam and Anthony establish us as the voyeuristic presence?

16. Why is the rented film titled Where There’s a Will There’s a Way? And Anthony’s other credit, Passenger Without a Ticket? How do they relate to the sex club scene? Why does the actor have a book titled History in Reverse on his shelf? 

17. What’s the point of the end-credit lyrics: “After the lights go out, What will I do? After the lights go out, Facing the night without you.”

18. Why does Adam buy a pair of flashy shades before setting out to find Anthony?

19. What resonates in the concierge’s lines: “You actors are something else.” “Don’t be a stranger.” Why is Anthony given a stage name, Daniel Saint Clair? Note it’s not the usual St (as in the Toronto street) but the spelled out Saint.

20. What do the dreams mean here? Is there a dream-like element in the city shots? Who’s dreaming?

21. How does “Breezeway” read as a metaphor? 

22. How does the film assume additional meaning from the fact that it’s directed by arguably Quebec’s foremost director? Consider its characterization of Toronto and Villeneuve’s return from making the Hollywood thriller Prisoners.