MOV I E R E V I EWAronofsky’s Noah: The Water and the FireNext Time

C athleen Falsani: Right after the passage in Genesis that describes the

destruction and the Flood, God starts again and says, Well, I won’t do

that again, even though I understand that humans have a bent toward evil. So

was God having a bad day?

Darren Aronofsky: We constructed an entire film around that deci-

sion. The moment that it grieved him in his heart to destroy creation is,

for me, the high dramatic moment in the story. Because, think about it:

It’s the fourth story in the Bible. You go from creation to original sin to

the first murder, and then time jumps to when everything is messed up.

The world is wicked. Wickedness is in all our thoughts. Violence against

man and the planet.

–www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03

The release of Darren Aronofsky’s hit movie Noah in March of 2014

was a reminder of the enduring hold the mythologem of the Flood has

on our imagination. Anthropologists have counted something like 175

versions of the story all over the world, from the Sumerians to the Hopi.

Some writers claim that this quasi-universality testifies to an actual geo-

physical event at the heart of the myth, perhaps a tsunami launched by a

collision with an asteroid. But so far no such event can be confidently

identified; and it is safe to say that no planet-wide flood has ever

occurred.

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But the idea will not go away: we can readily conceive massive

human malfeasance getting so out of hand that the Lord or the gods

decide to wipe out the sinners/criminals with a cleansing deluge. In his

freewheeling adaptation of Genesis 6–9, Aronofsky is plainly staging a

present-day ecological parable. The children of Man, especially the male

children, having arrogated to themselves the wisdom and power of God,

are busily engaged in destroying the planet on their own through a com-

bination of fire (global warming) and water (melting sea ice and glaciers):

first you burn and then you drown. Cannot anyone stop them?

Aronofsky’s Noah, the patriarchally bearded Russell Crowe, is not

simply a heartbroken nature lover and vegan (he groans at the sight of a

scaly pre-historic beast killed by cruel Cainite hunters). He sees himself

and his family not as the seedlings of a hopeful future humanity, but as

temporary caretakers of the animals. Once the ark empties out, Noah

expects, and hopes to see, his family gradually die off and disappear. Sad

in some ways, but good riddance to a plague-species. In the film’s fur-

thest divergence from the Bible, his ark’s passenger list contains no fer-

tile couples at all. Teenage Ham and pre-pubertal Japheth have no wives;

and Shem’s beloved mate Ila is sterile, thanks to a genital wound inflicted

during the non-stop slaughter and cannibalistic mayhem that human

“culture” has devolved into. Noah had originally sought out wives for his

three sons, only to give up in disgust after witnessing the internecine

orgies he rescued Ilah from.

But Noah’s plans for the extinction of his kind are thwarted by his

grandfather Methuselah, who magically cures Ila’s barrenness. She soon

becomes pregnant, whereupon Noah swears to slay her child, should it

turn out to be a girl. Worse yet, she gives birth to twin girls aboard the

ark; but upon seeing them, Noah is overcome with tenderness and lowers

his knife. After they all exit the ark and settle down on the unpeopled

earth, Noah will bless his children and grandchildren, quoting Gen. 9.1

and plagiarizing YHWH’s command, “Be fruitful and multiply and replen-

ish the earth.” (As in the Genesis account, one has to ignore the incestu-

ous havoc hanging over this tiny gene pool.)

But Noah’s change of heart is not a ringing endorsement: He has

never pretended that he and his wife (Naameh) and his brood were onto-

logically better than the drowned bloodthirsty masses. Like a proto-St.

Paul, he acknowledges the presence of the same violent passions within

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himself (and he furiously smites more than his fair share of the desperate

horde of Cainites trying to barge into the ark). Still, viewers might be for-

given for thinking that Noah & Co. are in fact a breed apart, a supremely

nurturing and loving nuclear family. In yet another creative misreading

of Genesis, we are told at the outset that after the murder of Abel (a shad-

owy depiction of which flashes regularly on the screen), all of humanity

split into two separate lines: the wicked spawn of Cain–the overwhelming

majority–and the gentle clan of Seth, now reduced to the Noahs. In Gen.

5.30–32, Noah is a descendant of Seth (and other virtuous forebears,

including Enoch, who “walked with God” and was taken away by him);

but he also had a number of younger siblings, the sons and daughters of

Lamech.

All those relatives have vanished here, including Lamech (pronounced

for some reason Lam�ech), who is murdered early on by the wicked Tubal-

cain. Genesis 4.22 simply reports that Tubal-cain was “an instructor of

every artificer in brass and iron”; but Aronofsky makes him the leader of

a brutal gang of miners, tearing up the bowels of the earth in their quest

for a mysterious goldlike metal called zohar. (In Paradise Lost, XI, 564–573,

it might be noted, Milton sees Tubal-cain as less invasive: all the iron and

brass he works with was found lying innocently around on the surface.)

And so, as the film ends, Noah, his wife, his sons, his daughter-in-

law, and his granddaughters are left on a sun-swept beach (the first

bright daylight we have seen), amidst a slowly recovering world. This is a

more than pleasant contrast to the ravaged antediluvian landscape, all

gravel, rocks, and tree-stumps that they have escaped from. But the alien-

ated Ham has already left the family after staring disrespectfully at his

father’s nakedness. As in Genesis, Noah is the first person to plant a vine-

yard and gets drunk on the wine; but, whereas, that shameful moment

was a cautionary tale about the dangers of a sedentary agricultural (i.e.,

Canaanite) life, Aranofsky’s Noah seems to be drinking out of blank des-

pair. He seems to know that, despite all his toil and trouble, within not

too many millennia there will be seven billion-plus mortals on the scene,

many of them no obvious improvement over the ancient Cainites.

In Genesis 6, humans have begun to “multiply on the face of the

ground,” perhaps taking “Be fruitful and multiply” too literally. The

LORD is disturbed to see that “the wickedness of man was great in the

earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only

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evil continually”; and he famously regrets having made humans in the

first place. It is not clear why he wants to blot out all the beasts and

creeping things and birds of the air as well (has human evil somehow

leaked into and vitiated the animal kingdom?); but then of course, he

makes an exception for Noah, his loved ones, and a pair of all the ani-

mals (plus, anachronistically, seven pairs of kosher animals, according to

7.2–3).

After the waters recede, and Noah offers a sacrifice of “clean” birds

and animals, the LORD has another second thought. “I will not again

curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s

heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every liv-

ing thing, as I have done” (8.21). Humans are evidently a more or less

hopeless case; and it makes no sense to expect too much of them. Hence,

God will establish the Noahide covenant, requiring only that people avoid

killing each other and (anachronistically again) koshering their meat,

because life is in the blood, and life belongs to God. He also promises

never to drown the world again, although the sign he posts in the sky is

not exactly a benign “rainbow,” but just a bow (keshet), that is, a weapon

of war, from which he launches lightning bolts, and thus not without a

slight residual menace.

Best of all, YHWH guarantees that, “While the earth remaineth, seed-

time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day

and night shall not cease” (8.22). That is, as far as he has anything to do

with it. There is no assurance that later generations of humans will not

meddle with seedtime and harvest (through genetically modified plants,

nitrogen fertilizer, monocultures, etc.), or with cold and heat (through

factory farming, fossil fuel burning, and other ways of emitting green-

house gases), and even with day and night (through myriad forms of poi-

soned air).

Nowadays it looks more and more as if the Lord gave Noah’s descen-

dants (who are still, in theory anyway, made in his own image) a second

chance; but then they blew it. After the Flood, even as he acknowledges

the “evil of man’s heart,” YHWH lowers the bar and increases humans’

power over other creatures. Having first bidden them to have dominion

over all non-human animals (1.26), he now goes a step further, and

declares: “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every

beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air; and upon all that mov-

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eth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are

they delivered” (9.2)—shades of twenty-first century animal husbandry

and commercial fishing.

Then, in a further concession, the LORD decrees that, “Every moving

thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants,

I give you everything” (9.3). Up till now, we are led to believe that all

humans were vegetarians. Now the carnivores will have their day (though

one imagines Aronofsky’s Noah declining the offer of meat). This shift is

not explained; but there was doubtless no point in forbidding greedy

humans to eat whatever they felt like. In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter

will be inspired to permit the killing and consumption of “all manner of

four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and

fowls of the air” (10.12), a concession Christians would enthusiastically

avail themselves of.

The biblical authors could not foresee the runaway spread of overpop-

ulation (they celebrated the leap from Abraham and Sarah to the millions

of Exodus), much less the devastation unleashed by people, religious or

otherwise, who liked to think of themselves as quasi-divine. But Aronof-

sky, like any honest contemporary person, simply had to read the news

and look out the window to see the big picture. And so his Noah is a dar-

ker figure than the Bible’s, who “found grace in the eyes of God” (6.8).

How not, since “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation,

and Noah walked with God” (6.9). As a literary character, Noah is a

cipher. He follows God’s orders to the letter, and never says a word

throughout the entire episode of the Flood, opening his mouth only once

afterward, to curse Canaan (not Ham), in a compact etiological myth

explaining why the original inhabitants of Canaan had to “serve” the

invading Israelites.

Russell Crowe, by contrast, knows the odds against him are over-

whelming. For one thing, God never talks to him directly, and he does

not talk to God. A drop of rain falls on the desiccated soil, which

instantly blooms; he has obscure visions of being trapped under water

with a host of desperately flailing folk, but he has to interpret such

things for himself. He is surrounded by evil at every turn; and he is not

safe even aboard the ark. His arch-enemy Tubal-cain has crawled in at the

last moment and plots to kill him, aided by Ham, still furious at his

father for making him leave his newfound beloved Na’el behind to be

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trampled by the berserk crowd storming the ark. At the last moment,

Ham relents and saves Noah’s life by stabbing Tubal-cain; but that hardly

solves the problem.

They have scorched the snake, not killed it. And, speaking of snakes,

what is one to make of the glowing, jewel-like snakeskin that keeps pop-

ping up in Noah? It must have first been deposited in the grass of Eden

by the Serpent himself, who must still be lurking somewhere (every-

where?); but now it’s a family talisman, reverently passed down from

father to son (Aronofsky does not challenge the androcentrism of Sacred

Scripture). Is this a variation on the old macho boast that whatever does

not kill me makes me stronger? Is the experience of sin a badge of

honor? Are humans celebrating the truthful part of the Serpent’s offer,

that they would acquire godlike knowledge of good and evil?

There is no telling; but in any case Aronofsky’s Noah never gets to

hear anything remotely like the kindness in the soothing serenity of Gen-

esis 9, where God announces his covenant with humanity: “Neither shall

all flesh be cut off any more by the waves of a flood; neither shall there

be any more a flood to destroy the earth. . . . This is the token of the cove-

nant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is

with you for perpetual generations: . . . And the bow shall be in the cloud;

and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant

between me and all flesh that is upon the earth” (11-12, 16). It is one of

the happiest moments in Holy Writ.

But that was then, and this is now. The Bible’s Noah can bask in the

glow of a restored world—although his sacrifices “of every clean beast

and of every clean fowl” (8.20), which are omitted from Noah, sound like

a falling away from the Peaceable Kingdom days, when man and beast

floated happily together on the deep. Aronofsky’s Noah has no such lux-

ury. “We broke the world,” he says, and his offspring will do it again.

(Three days after Noah debuted, the New York Times ran a front-page arti-

cle entitled, “[U.N.] Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worse Yet to

Come.”)

The Bible’s Noah was a wholly positive character (see Ezk 14.14,20; 2

Pet 2.5), at least until his unfortunate inebriation (but how could he have

known the dangers of alcohol?) In Gen. 5.29, his father Lamech welcomes

him into the world with a folk etymology of his name: “This name shall

comfort us” (linking “Noah” to the verbal root nhm, to comfort or con-

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sole) “concerning the work and toil of our hands, because of the ground

which the LORD hath cursed.” Hm, cursed already? There’s a bit of irony

in the fact that Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, the U.A.E.,

Qatar, etc. banned the showing of Noah because Islam forbids the depic-

tion of prophets, since by the end of the film Russell Crowe looks noth-

ing like a prophet. He is an exhausted survivor with no message, just lots

of foreboding.

Noah, of course, is popular entertainment, not midrash or scholarly

exegesis. There are plenty of amusing mindless special effects, like the

huge stream of creatures spontaneously pouring into the ark (where they

get tranquilized to insure a quiet trip) or the weird fallen angels called

Watchers, who resemble giant robots made of coal chunks and who build

the ark and defend it with their lives. But, such video-game touches aside,

Noah has a serious story to tell. (It is no surprise that a handful of conser-

vative reviewers have indignantly mocked the movie’s theme of ecologi-

cal guilt.) It does not so much alter or reject the text of Genesis as it

borrows and extrapolates from it.

And it is fitting that the voice of God should fall silent in Noah, tuned

out by the bellowing of the Cainites. Cain, we recall, built the first city,

and named it after his son Enoch (4.17, not the Enoch who walked with

God), thereby becoming the father of civilization, the force that would

eventually blunder its way to what Bill McKibben called the end of nat-

ure. The Bible has none of this; but it does sound an ominous note by

bringing to an abrupt end the fabulously long lives of the Patriarchs.

Noah dies aged 950 (9.29); but after the Flood lifespans will be limited to

120 years (whence the Yiddish expression biz hundert un tsvantsik). Job, by

exception, will make it to 140, but everyone else will remain bound, at

best, to the Psalmist’s range of 70 to 80 (90.11).

In other words, after the Flood, it is all a downhill spiral, later

summed up in the familiar Ehrlich-Holdren formula, I (environmental

impact) =P (population, as in men multiplying on the face of the earth

[6.1]) x Activity (as in the weary admission that “the imagination of man’s

heart is evil from his youth” [8.21]) x Technology (think Tubal-cain, Inc.)

So Aronofsky’s Noah may be a prophet after all, a warner of coming

doom. But the fate of most Old Testament prophets was to be ignored,

despised, or actively persecuted. After Isaiah’s lips are cleansed with a

burning coal, he learns that his sacred mission is going to fail: “Go and

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tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed,

but perceive not. Make the heart of the people fat, and make their ears

heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with

their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed”

(6, 9–10). When Isaiah asks how long this will last, he gets the grim

answer, “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses

without man, and the land be utterly desolate” (6.1), which sounds like

the worst possible prognosis for a warming world. It’s enough to make a

prophet manic-depressive (cf. Jeremiah), if he was not already.

The logical last step in this process of unheeded calls for repentance

is apocalypse, for example, in Isaiah 24–27. Here history implodes, and

God intervenes in spectacular fashion to write finis to the whole

wretched scene and replace it with something altogether different, as in

the Book of Revelation. The slow-moving (to our blinkered eyes) apoca-

lypse now under way is not coming down from heaven, but being relent-

lessly generated by the laws of nature (or Creation, if you wish). It has

not yet taken on the ultra-dramatic appearance of an annihilating Deluge,

though that may be in the cards. Whether or not there is still time to

avert the coming cataclysm(s) remains to be seen; but the vivid images in

Noah can provide a thought-provoking jolt. Of course, we do not know

what specific features the man-made catastrophe will take on. But we do

know that whatever equivalent of the Flood strikes the earth, most

humans are likely to die as miserably as Aronofsky’s Cainites do. And we

cannot say we have not been warned.

—Peter Heinegg

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