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.