32 years ago, when Darren Aronofsky was 13, he wrote a poem about Noah that reinterpreted the Bible legend of God’s petulant antediluvian hissy-fit and he shaped it into verses that were better suited to his class assignment: write about peace. Rather than buy into the flat Genesis threat that God could flush Creation down the toilet and begin again, a fresh rain-clean scent with Captain Noah as the Tidy Bowl Man, young Darren was already exploring a deeper, more meaningful way to tell the story. Here’s teenage Aronofsky’s Noah:
He knew evil would not be kept away
For evil and war could not be destroyed
But neither was it possible to destroy peace
Evil is hard to end and peace is hard to begin
But the rainbow and the dove will always live
Within every man’s heart.
13 years old. Like any smart 7th-grader, Aronofsky long ago saw that Noah’s story was full of illogical holes, drab repetition, and the kind of meaningless extraneous filler that cops and insurance investigators say is a great way to spot a pathological fake: compulsive liars don’t just lie, they lie big, and they lard on lots of trivial detail. Hitler knew it too: “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” Preachers, priests and popes have perfected this trick over the course of thousands of years.
“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up.” Right. Fascinating. But instead of taking a page from Noah’s date book, how about explaining where all the world’s 8 million species took their shits for 12 months. I can’t have been the only kid in vacation bible school who wondered why all the good stuff was left out of the flood fable and meanwhile we had to hear 4 different times on the same page how, “Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.” and again, ICYMI, ” the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark.” Yes, I got that. I got the part where they went into the ark the 2nd and 3rd and 4th time you told me. But what about the names of those wives? Not the least bit important because, you know, they’re just girls. To the ancient authors of Genesis, those wives were basically hauled along for breeding purposes. “Every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” are talked about 3 times in the same chapter in the same terms — the creeping creatures that creepeth merit a more vivid description that we ever get of the Real Housewives of the Ark.
What I mean to show with my sacrilege is what a boney little story the Bible gives us to chew on when it’s supposed to represent one of the most momentous cataclysmic events that ever shaped the planet. The task Aronofsky has taken on with Noah is to flesh out some of the Bible’s gaping holes, to try bring some narrative cohesion to this vague flaky story. At the precocious age of 13, Aronofsky already saw a better way to wring meaning out of this sodden flood myth. He could see that it was only a fable and he knew the scant visual descriptions only made sense as symbols. In 1982, his middle school teacher read Darren’s poem aloud to the class. Now, three decades later, it’s to this mentor that Aronofsky dedicates his lavish graphic novel of Noah, the book edition:
To Vera Fried my 7th grade English teacher who inspired me to write.
Since Aronofsky’s graphic novel companion to The Fountain added so much to my understanding and appreciation of that film several years ago, I wanted to have the full-length illustrated preview to Noah on day one of its release. (Not as if there would be spoilers: first there’s a storm coming, right?) The director had already said that the graphic novel he wrote (with frequent collaborator Ari Handel and art-work by Niko Henrichon) would have a few significant differences from the final movie. After all, it’s based on a first draft of their screenplay. Aronofsky says he feels the books that are published in conjunction with his films can offer a window onto his creative process. I’m glad to have the opportunity to do my homework on movies by directors I care about. In the weeks leading up to Noah’s premiere there was enough noise and disgruntled growling to drown out the cries and screams of the god-forsaken. I managed to avoid most of that silly racket. So I dove into the graphic novel with no preconceived notions.
Noah the graphic novel functions as a bound edition of storyboards. Immediately we can see parallel threads reaching from Noah and weaving the current film into many of Aronofksy’s lifelong themes and obsessions — particularly divine inspiration and the precipitous descents into madness that a quest for spiritual answers can cause.
In 2006, when Brad Pitt abruptly pulled out of The Fountain, the studio crippled Aronofsky’s mystical vision by cutting his budget in half. When the shortened and less epic version made it to the screen and failed to grab hold at the box office, the same studio was aggravated at Aronofsky for chucking their $35 mil down the drain. So they issued a bare-bones DVD. Even though Aronofsky asked to do a director’s commentary, the suits in charge said, “No. Who cares.”
So Aronofsky recorded his own homemade director’s commentary as an audio file, sitting in his living room. That mp3 file is hosted on a couple of couple of small movie blogs. Once someone went to the trouble of ripping the movie and adding the commentary track as alternate audio track and made the new bootleg “special edition” DVD available. Naturally Warner Bros squashed that effort like it was an underground worm.
Listening again to that commentary track a couple of weeks ago, my ears perked up when I heard Aronofsky say he’s always been interested in capturing on film that eureka moment when his protagonists find a key to enlightened inspiration. That key often unlocks the door to a mental fuse box where the hero can psychologically rewire himself before setting out on the ultimate quest. Of course, this is risky. Messing around with sparks of inspiration is playing with fire. Visions and dreams have a way of veering into hallucinations and delusions. We see this happen again and again in all of Aronofsky’s films.
I bring this up because it’s been suggested that Darren Aronofsky is somehow selling out with a transparent effort to cash in by baiting the same demographic that pushed the Passion of the Christ close to a billion dollar mountian of cash. Clearly though, we have plenty of evidence to back up the director’s claim that this has been a passion project gestating in his head literally since he was a child. In an interview just last week, cinematographer and close collaborator Matthew Libatique said Aronofsky first floated the idea of Noah’s Ark over 10 years ago — which puts the concept on track to coincide with the troubled production of The Fountain.
Impossible to get into an artist’s head to see what impulses stir his creative juices. But is it unreasonable to imagine that a director might want to take a second swing at themes and dreams that once got crushed by harsh financial realities, now that he has the clout to be given free reign? Coming out of Noah on Saturday, I wisecracked that Noah serves as a prequel to The Fountain. On reflection it’s no joke. In all honesty, together the two movies interlock in ways that make both films vibrate with harmonic resonance.
Personally, I balk at pigeonholing Noah as a Christian movie, most notably because Noah is an Old Testament Jewish hero predating Christ by thousands of years. Long before virulent Southern Baptists ever existed, Noah was Muslim icon and a Jewish icon as well. Of course the original source of the first recorded flood myth extends as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, nearly 2000 years before Jesus was born.
There’s interesting substantiation that Noah was a real person. Just a delusional person with ardent convictions that his visions were messages from God, that’s all. A person whose life story and visions prophesies took on nearly superhuman proportions in the process of being passed down through generations of verbal tale-telling. (A verbal tradition made manifest when Russell Crowe lights a fire and tells his sons the story of creation handed down by their ancestors for millennia before science was able to provide the real truth).
I’ve always been fascinated by the flights of imagination on display in ancient cultures around the world. In the absence of science, it’s remarkable how the priesthood class were able to glean enough discoveries about the world so that their knowledge appeared to be magical to the uneducated masses. I’ve always felt that this is how religions first took root — when a few clever men invented stories that struck a chord and matched up neatly with the skimpy facts the common people could see in the world around them. So with that in mind, I’ve always had a tolerant attitude about ancient scriptures. Hey, Aristotle was dead wrong about many of his “science” guesses too, but nobody mocks Aristotle for teaching junk beliefs.
Of course, what’s strange about religions is how the original texts become sacred documents and when kids have “the word of God” drilled into them from birth, it’s a hard structure for many believers to break away from. All the same, especially when the subject is the belief system of people who lived 4000 years ago, I can’t find in me to be mad about wrong they those ancient authors were. I can separate them from modern-day believers who have the means and education to know better.
So the stories in Genesis to me are nothing but a charming and often poetic attempt by relatively primitive people to make sense of the world around them. I can’t get upset about that, but I can sure get quickly bored by it. In Genesis 5-9. what’s missing in Noah’s character, and utterly non-existent in his Biblical depiction, is any trace of recognizable personality or tangible humanity. By the time the churches, rabbis, monastic scribes and Muslim clergy sanitized Noah for fun and prophet, his somewhat maniacal streak of zealotry had been flattened to make him seem no more than a mere cipher of theological servitude.
But Arononsky has no qualms about reanimating Noah as a man. No hesitation about exploring the possibility that Noah’s ascetic dreams and visions might have had a scary delusional side. (Possibly even drug-induced with a spiked cup of tea? Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Methuselah as a shaman or witch doctor was one the more devious pleasures Aronofsky devised.) All this extrapolation will no doubt rub many hardcore Fundamentalists the wrong way. Religious radicals don’t ordinarily have much patience for their saints to display any grey areas. I’m now going to horrify the accountants at Paramount by suggesting that Aronofsky never even intended to cater to the extreme wing of fundamentalists.
Much had also been made of conservatives who sneer at any hint in Noah that mankind is responsible for environmental catastrophe. I think this fact first surfaced when a right-wing Christian conservative blogger wrote about how unhappy he was to see Noah had been turned into a steward of Earth’s pristine bounty — even though that’s exactly what God asks of man in the first verses of Genesis.
As weirdly laughable as it is to watch conservatives bristle up at any proposal that we should respect the planet that protects us, it’s been baffling to hear from others who say the environmental message in Noah is obscure or absent altogether. In the opening scenes, doesn’t Noah gently admonish Ham for plucking a single tiny flower? Because every living thing in creation has a purpose and the purpose of a flower is to drop a seed that then becomes another flower in the future? Doesn’t Noah teach his sons to “take only from the Earth what we need.” Isn’t Noah’s family saddened to see the senseless killing of creatures for no other reason that to amputate their horns? Do we not see the toxic barren landscape laid waste by the city-dwellers who mine the Earth until is has nothing left yield and then move on to new territories to plunder?
Not only can I not comprehend why a message like that would bother any human being who knows we only have one planet so we need to live gently on its surface — I have even more trouble understanding how others can’t see Aronofsky presenting that message at all.
At any rate, right-wing religious extremists might try to own the Bible with their absurd literal interpretations, but Aronofsky’s movie will confound any lazy effort to sanctify this darker reboot of Noah’s legend. This fresh interpretation seizes Noah away from the boring chains of orthodoxy. In this sense, the film flies boldly in the face of hardcore fundamentalists and it was a glorious kick for me to witness the many ways Aronofsky subverts the tidy expectations of traditional churchgoers who like their Bible readings to be literal, not literature.
Just one example: imagine a family of conservative gun-owners lured into taking their kids to see a Bible story on Sunday after church. How much will the grown-ups squirm to see how Aronofsky has God condemning to oblivion anyone in the film who carries a weapon? In fact, Old Testament scholarly tradition explicitly names Tubal-Cain as the inventor of mankind’s first tools made for murder. I’ll carry this gun-nut scolding a step further and contend that it’s not the adults who Aronfsky expects to be taught any lesson about violence and weapons. Sadly we’ve seen how narrow-minded adults are a lost cause, unteachable. No, it’s the kids in the audience who get to see the ugly similarity between the crude villains onscreen and their own fathers who own half a dozen rifles and pistols. Recall how 13-year-old Darren Aronfsky wrote a poem that transformed a tale of God’s cranky vengeance into tender verses about man’s struggle to find peace. That 7th-grade kid who already understood that the dove in the Bible was there to symbolize mankind’s hope to establish a world in harmony.
Hardcore Fundamentalists. Ugh. I wish I could ignore them but they’re a problem too noisy to avoid. That’s been another factor snarling up a lot of conversations about Noah. Why do we even care what radical Fundamentalists think or want or believe? Their opinions, needs and desires mean nothing to me. I’m pretty sure they mean nothing to Aronofsky too. He’s made the movie he wanted to make, pandering to no one, least of all the biggest pains in the ass of American society.
No, Darren Aronofsky has put a magnificent maniacal myth on screen and tried to fill in the blanks to make sense of an ancient legend. He made a movie about grotesque Old Testament cruelty, hallucinatory delusion, a voodoo Methuselah and a frighteningly psychotic Noah. In fact he’s made a movie where nearly every man behaves insanely and the only thing that saves these men from self-destruction are their amazingly grounded women. Incredibly, those women exert their power and influence on the men in their lives without jiggling their butts in spandex. (Take that, Tiffany).
Noah’s wife’s name isn’t even mentioned in the Bible. And yet Aronofsky’s film has two of the finest roles for tough resilient women that we’ve seen in movies for months. I can seriously say the only time Jennifer Connelly has ever been better was in Requiem for a Dream. Emma Watson is equally spectacular. In her climactic scenes with Russell Crowe, she broke my heart to smithereens.
Before I stop I’d like to make clear, I make great effort to differentiate between smart thoughtful caring Christians who can think for themselves and extremist Fundamentalists, the other kind of Christians who give all people of faith a bad name. I’ve tried to use the right precise terms in this piece to be sure that difference is plainly stated. While some moviegoers might feel uncomfortable liking the same movie a Christian might like, I’m glad I’m not one of them. I’m sincerely glad to see that there are many Christians who’ve seen Noah and came away feeling inspired with spirits uplifted. Here’s a fine example:
But others, like Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, are speaking out in support of the film.
“Although the film does not reflect a contextualized expository exegetical extrapolation of Genesis 8 and 9, it does capture the redemptive and reconciliatory grace-filled hope at the center of the Gospel message,” Rodriguez said after screening the film.
“The nature of God as depicted in the film is the same as the nature of God as depicted in Scripture,” he continued. “And that gives us as Christians an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and neighbors about the mighty One we serve.”
Another very lovely and graceful appreciation of Noah’s religious message can be found here. (This is in fact so good that it might warrant a post of its own.)
No surprise that reactions we’ve been seeing to Noah this weekend cover the full spectrum. We see many attempts to write it off as a vanity project, or an arrogant narcissist’s folly — but happily there’s just as much effort by other moviegoers who want to work through what Aronofsky means to say. (Whether or not he conveys his message coherently seems to be another hot topic for debate, but it’s one than bewilders me because I see the meanings laid out so clearly).
Regardless, can I just say how deeply grateful I am that Paramount had the guts to finance Aronofsky’s attempt to make an intelligent statement of any kind on such an epic scale? It’s easy to scoff at $125 million spent to spark adult conversation on spiritual, mythological and touchy cultural topics. Especially when giant fallen angels covered in jagged clumps of lava are involved. But where are those people griping when even bigger budgets get blown on mindless bloated jackoffs like After Earth, Oblivion, Elysium, Wolverine, 47 Ronin and Fast & Furious 6? Not that all those movie are worthless. But do any of them get vehemently attacked for not conveying an “important message”? Of course they don’t. Because those movies don’t even try.
Another complaint is that Noah doesn’t teach us anything we don’t already know. But how many Oscar Best Picture nominees ever manage to say anything new? Maybe one or two a year. Since when does a movie have to teach people a brand new lesson before it’s worth the money to do it right? Shouldn’t we all be thrilled to see a respected director get the same cash lavished on his vision for a bargain price that amounts to half the budget of Man of Steel?
I’ll stop soon, really. But I want to touch on more of Aronofsky’s subtext subversion: I mean, my god, while reworking Noah’s story to give it updated modern relevance, almost as a casual bonus magic trick, Aronofsky frames a gorgeously mounted montage merging creation and evolution right in the middle of the raging storm. How fantastic was that?
And this: has any biblical epic in cinema history dared to expose the seething misogyny and fickle divine violence that infests the Old Testament? Attitudes we’re meant to regard as embarrassing relics, dogmatic preachings by authors who come off as barely evolved past the stage of grunting hot-tempered Neanderthals? The first book of the Old Testament is populated by greasy mobs of wild-eyed rapists and murderers, and all we get for an ostensible hero is a conflicted prophet who comes thisclose to stabbing newborn baby girls with a dagger in their eyeballs. Because why? Because “God’s Will,” of course.
if nothing else, the unrepentant hardcore Fundamentalists who stumble out of Noah will have learned something useful about themselves: It’ll come in handy on Judgement Day when the Lord debriefs applicants at Heaven’s gate. The Creator will look down from his golden throne and ask each saved soul where on Earth they ever learned to be so intolerant, combative, vengeful and filled with hair-trigger brutality. Everyone standing in line will be able to look The Lord straight in the eye and say, “From you, alright? I learned it from watching you!”
I’ve looked all over the place today for my beat-up edition of Pauline Kael’s review collection, When the Lights Go Down. Can’t find it, so I’ll have to paraphrase a great point she makes. In Kael’s review of Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novocento) she talks about the directors throughout history who get carte blanche after a popular smash hit and then with the cred they’ve earned they reach for extravagant heights that may be just beyond their grasp. It’s a review called “Hail Folly” and in it Kael compares Bertolucci’s 5-hour epic feast of Italian Marxist history to D.W. Griffiths’s Intolerance, Von Stroheim’s Greed, Abel Gance’s Napolean. She notes how all these grandiose creations were considered failures on their initial release — and almost all of them suffered the indignity of being cut up and butchered by various tampering hands in an effort to carve them down to a size audiences could bite into, chew up and swallow.
I’d never compare Aronofsky’s Noah to any of those films, but kudos to Paramount for carefully trying a few different cuts to appease various focus groups — and then realizing they were making things worse and not better. So from all reports the studio gave Noah’s final cut back to its director. We’ll never have to wonder what the artist intended to do. Like it not (gulp) what we see on onscreen is exactly what Aronofsky wanted to show us, and for better or worse (gulp) isn’t that something we should all be happy about?
I believe Aronofsy has waited a over decade for the opportunity to make the movie that The Fountain might have been before Warners slashed his budget. Now he’s done it, and now that this epic urge is out of his system he’s already said he’s ready to go back to more intimate projects again. I hope he enjoyed making Noah half as much as I enjoyed watching it. He’s wanted to make this movie for the past 12 years — in fact it’s been kicking around in his head since he was 13 years old. At last he’s climbed the ladder of prestige high enough to bring his childhood poem to life. It’s a gift for those of us who like to see what can happen when a lifelong dream is made real.
Against all odds, wrestling with his creative process to reshape five vague, repetitive, and patently ridiculous chapters in Genesis to give them cohesive meaning for modern audiences, Darren Aronofsky has achieved the goal to which every filmmaker and screenwriter aspires. He’s made a movie that’s better than the book.
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