I’ve shared this discussion in bits and pieces over various social media, but Facebook and Twitter are terrible places for this kind of involved analysis, so I’m going to share here.
I see a lot of people trashing the Noah movie. Specifically, I see a lot of Christians trashing Noah for being unfaithful to the biblical flood narrative in a “the book was better than the movie” sort of way. (Sorry, Zanoti, for stealing your line.) And certain people feel the movie was spitting in the face of their religious beliefs. This perspective may be a bit hyperbolic, but let’s go with it for now.
Noah had an expectation problem. People expected it to be the story about a good God talking to a good man who takes God’s words verbatim, makes a boat, and saves some animals. If this is what you were expecting, you will be disappointed. If you think this is the narrative that *should* be made into a movie and that deviation from this narrative is a problem, then you might even be angry.
I want to reset those expectations and, in the process, explain why I love the movie, why I think it is a powerful film about God and faith, and how I think some of the theological critics are missing some of the key elements film.
This is all coming from a Christian perspective. I understand Aronofsky wrote it from a Jewish perspective (specifically in the context of Tulmudic readings of Genesis), but he couldn’t have expected his audience to be steeped in that tradition, so coming at it from a Judeo-Christian perspective is perfectly reasonable But that means I’m going to talk about speaking to God, God’s plans, righteousness, sin, salvation, redemption, all that stuff. I know I have a lot of non-Christian followers and friends. You’re welcome to keep reading, but I’m not going to engage any sort of “how do you know God is talking” or “God isn’t real and here is why” discussion. I’m assuming here that God is real, God is good, and God speaks to us in one way or another. It’s really the only way to move forward with the discussion of the movie on this level.
For those who don’t want everything spoiled for them, I’ll first give the mental space that I think is required to enjoy this movie. Then I’ll dig into the details with a spoiler-rich discussion.
Noah is a *deeply* allegorical, mythological movie, played out through a combination of a character study of Noah and actions and plot points that serve an allegorical purpose.
In terms of plot: Noah is a movie about man* and God (known in the movie as “the Creator”). There are 2 “kinds” of men, the sons of Cain and the sons of Seth, and what differentiates them is their relationship with the Creator. They both acknowledge the Creator, but they interpret the role of man very differently. Noah (son of Seth) is idealistic, prone to long for the gentle harmony that existed in the Garden of Eden. The sons of Cain are vicious and brutish, scrapping for survival, taking what they want because they can.
Both sides cite the Creator in their rationale for who they are and what they do. When the Creator speaks, He does not speak to Noah audibly, but through visions and miracles which Noah interprets.
You’ll hear people talk about the rock monsters and, while they’re a key part of the narrative, I’m going to ignore them for the sake of brevity in this spoiler-free version.
Right away, you can hopefully see where some of the complaints from Christians about this movie are coming in. If you get angry when the bad guys quote Scripture, you’ll get angry at this movie. If you assumed that Noah had a direct line to God or could flawlessly divine God’s plan, you’ll be angry at this movie. If you are going to take the actions and words of the characters at face value, you’re going to be angry at this movie.
Don’t do that. Instead, think about how God speaks to us today. We have His Word and prayer. We misinterpret Him. We confuse ourselves with our own prejudices and baggage. Take all of that and apply it to this movie.
With this mindset, view Noah as a man who seeks God’s will imperfectly and who is at danger of letting his faulty understanding take the place of God’s plan. When he does something and calls it the will of God, maybe it isn’t.
But how does that separate him from the bad guys, who also have misapplied the words of God? Because Noah is earnestly seeking God’s will above his own while the sons of Cain seek their own will and lay God’s word on top of it as an ad hoc rationale. Sin has corrupted the relationships between God and everyone in this film. But Noah can find salvation and grace while the sons of Cain don’t even want salvation and grace.
Finally, this film is about how God works through sinful and broken people. Which means God can work through me.
We meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
SPOILERS!!!
The rest of this “review” will contain spoilers in which I’ll address some of the specific complaints of the film.
Noah opens with a basic synopsis of the Genesis narrative done to Aronofski’s fast-cut style. We get an establishment of the “sides” in this narrative, which are the evil sons of Cain and the good sons of Seth. Well… the son of Seth, since Noah is the last of that line after his father is murdered in an early encounter with the leader of the Cain faction, Tubal-Cain.
Noah attempts to live in harmony with creation. This is established as he and his family gather vegetation for themselves. As they do, they run across a wounded animal being chased by Cainites. This has been misinterpreted as being “environmental” or “anti-meat”, but it is fairly well established that Noah is trying to live in line with the world as it was in the Garden of Eden, before death entered the world. To this end the “pro-vegan” nature of this film is an allegorical device to separate those who desire to live in the world God originally created and those who have embraced a world of death.
Noah’s first major contact with the Creator is when a single drop of rain falls and sprouts instantly into a flower right in front of Noah’s eyes. This combined with a rather disturbing dream convinces Noah that the Creator is telling him that the world is going to end in a flood. Seeking more information and guidance, Noah searches out his grandfather Methuselah.
On the path to Methuselah’s, Noah and his family encounter the rock monsters. According to the rock monsters, they were angels who came to earth out of pity for man, but in doing so they disobeyed the Creator and so he cursed them to wear the forms of these awkward rock creatures. Here I actually got skeptical. It seemed so petty to attribute something like this to God, a slander against Him (especially since it isn’t in Genesis). But I think this was dealt with nicely later in the movie, so we’ll get there.
One of the rock monsters leads Noah to the mountain of Methuselah, which he climbs to consult with his grandfather. Noah drinks a hallucinogenic tea from Methuselah and enters into a dream where he decides that the Creator’s intent is to start over; not to destroy the world with fire but to cleanse it with water. Noah’s role in this is to build an ark to save the creatures so that they may start over again in what will essentially be a new Eden.
Here is where, in the view of this movie, the misunderstandings begin. Noah see the fallen-ness of this world and will act to save a part of it: the animals needed to begin again. But Noah does not see that humans can be a part of this new world, he believes it to be for the animals alone. So he sets out to build the ark with his family and the fallen angel/rock creatures.
Eventually, the men of the world led by Tubal-Cain come to the ark and decide that, in a might-makes-right world, they would be right to lay claim to the ark. Tubal-Cain is an interesting character because he serves as a dark mirror to Noah. They both speak in the verbatim words of the early Genesis account when forming their worldviews and making their intent known. But Tubal-Cain holds a very selfish view and uses the language of Scripture to back up his claims.
This is where I think many people got upset. I myself am often irritated when the bad guys in a movie quote the Bible. But usually it is ONLY the bad guy who quotes the Bible and is secretly some kind of adulterous-murdering-child-abusing-library-book-not-returning psychopath while the good guy is essentially non-committal on the religious question. In Noah, BOTH the antagonist AND the protagonist make repeated references to Scriptural text. This requires us to think a little harder.
Why does Aronofsky make such a point of this? There are 2 possibilities. The first is that he wants to take Scripture and put it in the mouth of an evil character to make the point that Scripture is evil and f*** you for watching my movie, Christians (and Jews and Muslims) ha ha ha.
But then why does he put similar lines in Noah’s mouth? Perhaps his point is that Noah is driven to action by his belief while Tubal-Cain wears it as a cloak to offset his culpability for his actions. Maybe this is a parallel to when the serpent twisted the words of the Creator to deceive man in the first place. Maybe this is a motif that deserves careful consideration rather than something taken quickly at face value.
I didn’t actually start really engaging the ideas in this movie seriously until the scene where the rain begins to fall and the rock monsters protect the ark from the sons of Cain. As the rain pours down and the sons of Cain fight the rock monsters to gain access to the ark, Tubal-Cain attacks one and kills it. It explodes and the previously fallen angel is taken back (to heaven, I presume). The other rock monsters realize that the Creator has forgiven them and is taking them back as they perish.
Now… on the one hand this is fairly poor theology. Christians (or at least traditional orthodox Christians) believe that the gift of salvation is for mankind alone and not for angels. On the other hand, I’m a huge sucker for forgiveness in movies. Show me a scene of genuine forgiveness in a movie and watch the waterworks turn on. But this jolted me into thinking: the petty, vengeful Creator we thought we had from the cursing of the angels is not the one we’re seeing now. From the point of view of the movie, maybe the Creator allowed the angels to fall so that they might help Noah and ultimately find salvation. Or… how do we know the angels account of themselves and their fall was accurate? We did hear the story from them and not from the Creator. What if they have sugar-coated their fall to earth? What if they came down with a less than altruistic intent and this was the reason for their curse. This is a classic “reliable narrator” question and it’s one we should entertain. If, in fact, they were less than forthright about their fall, then we’re looking at a different Creator. He could be a Creator that punished malicious disobedience and yet ultimately delivered grace.
Once upon the ark, the mass of humanity dead or dying (and there are some fairly gruesome scenes depicting this), the story turns to Noah and his family. Noah is firm in his conviction that the Creator does not want humanity to survive and that Noah and his family are a tool for the survival of the “innocents”, the animals. Noah and his wife will have no more children, they have 3 sons and Ila, the wife of their eldest son, is barren. Humanity ends here.
Except that Japheth’s wife is not barren, as we had thought. In fact, she is pregnant. Noah struggles with this for a short time and lays down an ultimatum: If it is a boy, no harm no foul. If it is a girl, she represents the continuation of humanity and is therefore a threat to the Creator’s will. Any daughter must die.
At this point, I’m thinking that this is a “religious lunatic” theme coming out. It doesn’t even strike me that this might be an extension of the theme of (for lack of a better term) an “Old Testament” God. Change Noah’s name to Abraham for a moment here. See his terror and conviction as the Creator tells him to kill his own son (or granddaughter). Watch closely because you’ll never see a major movie explore this theme again. It’s too uncomfortable, too gruesome. But that doesn’t mean that believers of the Bible get to avoid it or shy away from it.
Ultimately, and with great drama, Noah cannot bring himself to go through with it. Ila gives birth to two daughters and Noah holds a knife to the newborns before he breaks down and kisses them both.
Upon landfall, Noah separates himself from his family and goes to live alone and drunk in a cave by the waters. Perhaps he feels he cannot live with them as they reject the will of the Creator and he does not have the strength to enforce that will. Ila eventually meets him and asks him why he didn’t carry out his plan. He states that he saw the two baby girls and had nothing in his heart but love for them. She replies that it was the Creator that put that love in his heart.
This puts another layer of interpretation in play from our previous story: Noah hears from the Creator who speaks, not audibly but in dreams and visions. Through Noah’s interpretation, he believes that means something more. But then the Creator speaks to him again, not audibly but in the yearnings of his own heart. The Creator used both the visions and the heart of Noah to drive Noah to exactly the ends that He required. Or we could go back to our Abraham parallel and suggest that part of the Creator’s message to Noah included the sacrifice of his offspring and that that angel that stayed his hand was the Creator speaking through Noah’s love.
I’ve proposed a lot of possibilities for the interpretation of this movie. My interpretation is coming from a very Christian point of view and I believe Aronofsky wrote and directed the movie from a very Jewish point of view, so maybe I’ve missed or misinterpreted some themes here. But I hope I’ve convinced a few people that taking this film at face value is a disservice to the film and to our own understanding and enjoyment. It is a beautiful film and well worth serious thought, consideration and discussion.
* I’m using “men” and “sons” instead of “people” and “children” because that is the rhetorical method employed by the film and it has a very “Old Testament” vibe to it. This is helpful in getting in the right frame of mind for the movie.