A Flood Without a Rainbow: Thoughts on "Noah"

This is going to be a series of three blog posts. Two films came out recently that had a fair amount of buzz in Christian circles, for different reasons. One is Darren Aronofsky's blockbuster Noah, and the other is the "Christian" film God's Not Dead. I have subjected myself to both of them, and now I'm going to write about them. Today's post is on Noah, I'll have a second post up soon reviewing God's Not Dead, and then I plan to write a third post on the spiritual-secular divide in cinema.

Fair warning: This is a massive post. Really, it's an essay. If you just want a short summation of whether I thought the movie was worthwhile entertainment, check the first paragraph of the review. Also, I've read lots of interesting articles about this film in the last few days (along with lots of uninteresting and, quite frankly, stupid ones). A couple that I'd recommend are this interview with the film's two writers by Christianity Today, and this blog post by Brian Mattson. Just a few notes on that later one (as it's been making the rounds): I think it's really important to recognize that Aronofsky is using a lot of gnostic and kabbalistic (is that a word?) symbolism in this movie, but I don't really think that's what the movie is interested in thematically. As I'll argue below, I think this is essentially a secular humanist interpretation of the Noah story, which is why it's problematic. Anyway, with that dispensed, on to the review!

The Review

I'll start with this: as a piece of filmmaking, I think it's a misstep, but an ambitious one with much to commend it. Darren Aronofky is a tremendously talented filmmaker (I thought his last, Black Swan, bordered on brilliant), and there are moments of brilliant visual storytelling. A scene where Noah recounts the creation story is staggering. There are images here that will stick with you (in a good way). It fails in a lot of ways on the script level though. Setting aside the thematic problems that I'll address later, it's a mess tonally. There are goofy comic relief elements that feel completely at odds with what's going on around them. There are good ways to add levity to serious stories, but making Methuselah a less serious Yoda is not one of them. An even bigger problem is the lack of development of secondary characters. Everyone not named "Noah" in this movie gets the short end of the stick. There is little characterization to any of them, and they have no agency. Ham gets the worst of it. He's a mopey, despondent teenager who changes motivations on a dime. Emma Watson's Ila comes off best, but that's almost entirely due to Watson's charm. There is some very silly soap opera stuff going on here, and little of it works. On the whole, I think it's the least of Aronofsky's films (that I've seen, at least), but if you don't mind some scripting that will make you roll your eyes, you'll find plenty to enjoy in the visuals. And, as you'll see below, it's given me plenty to think about over the last few days.

But what of the theology of the film? That's what we really want to know. How badly did this atheist Hollywood director screw things up? I went to go see this the other night with some high school students, and afterwards we talked about what the movie got right, what it got wrong, and what was, shall we say, "interesting use of artistic license". I think that's a pretty good way to look at it, so I'll look at those categories.

What it Got Right

1) The Depravity of Man - There is no doubt that mankind in Noah is evil and depraved. Yes, as you may have read, a lot of that depravity is conveyed as mankind's abuse of the environment (we'll get to that later), but the film does not stop there. Man is violent and domineering, with women being sold as slaves and a mass grave running through their camp. It's an ugly picture. Moreover, the villain, Tubal-Cain, shows us the condition of man's heart (if we're paying attention). Both Noah and Tubal-Cain call out to God to answer them. However, in the case of Tubal-Cain, he comes to God not as a servant to a master or a son to a father, but as one lord challenging another. In a fascinating scene, Tubal-Cain rallies his forces to storm the ark as the rains begin to fall. As one review I read stated,

"Tubal-Cain stands before his people and delivers a speech about how men, united, cannot be defeated. It’s a speech that Aragorn might give in Lord of the Rings that would have the audience on its feet; in Noah it’s the words of the villain."

The villain stands in direct defiance of the creator, and the power of man fails. That's an important moment.

In addition to this, we also have the perspective of Noah, who is adamant in his belief that man is wicked. It's not just those outside the ark who are depraved, it's those inside as well. At one point in the film, Noah's wife implores him to realize that their children are innocent and good, and Noah will not be budged. Man, including Noah and his family, are wicked. Now, there's a shift in this at the end of the movie, and I'll argue later that it's one of the real failings of the film that it doesn't follow through on this idea.

2) The Violence of the Flood - This might be the biggest one for me. We think of Noah and the flood, and we picture the story we heard in Sunday School, with pictures like this:

It's a bright sunny picture of the surviving people and the happy animals. Now, I don't think that's necessarily wrong for a little kid's story, but often we fail to move past that initial image. The truth is that the flood was God's righteous wrath against wicked humanity, and everyone on Earth was violently wiped out. Aronofsky's movie makes you confront that fact. There is a scene where we see an exterior shot of the ark floating on the water, and a few feet away we see a mass of people desperately clinging to a rock as the water rises and waves pummel them. It's harrowing, and it's an image that has stuck with me. We see Noah and his family inside the ark, and they can hear the screaming voices of people dying outside. That's the part of the flood that we don't like to think about, and it's the part that we really need to wrestle with.

3) The Humanity of Noah - Just like with the flood, it is easy for us to paint a rosy picture of Noah. After all, he was "a righteous man, blameless in his generation," (Gen 6) right? Well, yes, but that doesn't mean he's perfect. The Bible doesn't tell us a whole lot about Noah, so it's easier for us to just think of him as a saintly, mythological figure. What this movie did extremely well is make Noah an actual human being. I'd honestly never given much thought to the psychological trauma that whole experience must have been. Noah spends years and years building the ark, all the time knowing that everyone else in the world is going to die while he lives. Then he spends 40 days in the darkness of the ark, hearing the rain and the floods and the people screaming and dying outside. You think that might mess you up a bit? That's some wicked survivor's guilt right there. I told some people afterwards, the episode with Noah getting drunk in a cave makes a lot more sense now. I do think there are some problems with his characterization, but I think there is tremendous value in making us consider Noah as an actual person, and not just as a heroic figure.

"Interesting Use of Artistic License"

1) The Watchers - Likely the thing that made you go "What!?" the most in Noah, the Watchers are the fallen angel/rock giants that help Noah build the ark and defend it in the film. Now, this is certainly not in the Biblical story. However, as mentioned in the articles I linked to above, Aronofsky isn't just drawing from the biblical story. He's drawing from various extra-biblical texts and Jewish midrash tradition to flesh out the story. The Watchers are extrapolated from the "nephilim" in Gen 6, and while it's a silly interpretation, that passage is, admittedly, an odd one. I'm okay with using them to add some big blockbuster action to this, and while they're silly, they don't really change anything as far as the theological thrust of the film.

2) The Creation Sequence - Above, I called this sequence "staggering", and I absolutely mean that. On a purely cinematic level, it's one of the best scenes I've seen in a long time. It also portrays a version of creation that is definitely theistic evolution. Now, theistic evolution is not a view I hold. I think it has some serious problems, and that even a non-literal interpretation of Genesis doesn't really support it. However, I found it extremely interesting that Aronofsky chooses to show theistic evolution up until the creation of man. At that point, he doesn't show a continuing chain of evolution, but cuts to "and God created man" and shows Adam and Eve in the garden. Since theistic evolution usually also involves a non-historic Adam and Eve, I found that particularly interesting. While it isn't an interpretation I agree with, it's also not a hill I'm going to die on. And if you're going to go with that interpretation, you could hardly do it better than Aronofsky does it here.

3) Noah's Visions - I'm a little bit torn on this. On the one hand, we don't really know exactly how God conveyed his message to Noah. I think we picture a booming voice from the heavens, but we don't really know. There's a lot of room for interpretation there. On the other hand, we definitely do know that God gave Noah much more specific commands than the vague visions we see in the movie. Honestly, I think having God convey his message to Noah simply through visions is absolutely the right decision for a movie. The visions in Noah are visually striking, they work like gangbusters cinematically. The problem I have is that, when combined with the rest of the film, they contribute to a picture of a highly impersonal, distant God.

4) Environmentalism - There's been a lot of talk about how Noah is a big piece of environmental propaganda, which is not entirely wrong, but it's overly simplistic. There are actually some environmental aspects intrinsic to the Noah story. Noah and his family are vegetarians, he does save all the animals, and God does call us to be good stewards of creation. Environmental stewardship is something that we tend to underemphasize in conservative Christianity, so there's a real value in being reminded of our responsibility to treat God's creation well. However, Aronofsky goes a step further than good stewardship. One of the primary examples of man's depravity in this film is that Cain's descendents are ravenous carnivores. Given that the biblical Noah story includes God's recommendation to eat meat (Gen 9:2-4), that's a misguided point of emphasis. Part of Tubal-Cain's villainy is that he takes "dominion" of nature too far, but that view has aspects of truth too. The biblical truth lies somewhere between Noah and Tubal-Cain in this movie.

What It Got Wrong

1) Noah's Family - So, in order to take the movie in the direction he wanted to go, Aronofsky had to take a lot of liberties with Noah's family, and it just doesn't work. In the Biblical account, all of Noah's sons have wives. In the film, only Shem has a wife, and she is barren (until she's healed by Methuselah...we'll get to that in a second). The change makes Ham into a mopey teenager pining for a wife, and it adds all the dumb soap opera drama I talked about above. It's not an ambiguity in the text that the movie is fleshing out, it's a direct contradiction, and not only does it lead to a misguided message in the end, it also doesn't work dramatically.

2) Methuselah is Magic - In the film, Methuselah is a weird kind of hippie shaman with vague magical powers. He puts Shem to sleep by touching his forehead. He gives Noah a seed from the garden of Eden to grow the wood to build the ark. He heals Ila's womb to allow her to give birth. It's all very strange. The primary problem isn't that he's doing some weird sort of magic though. Aronofsky is merging biblical epic with fantasy epic, and this character fits in that. The problem is that there's no connection between what Methuselah is doing and God. He isn't a prophet working miracles by God's power, he's a weird hermit who just so happens to have mystical powers. It's weird, and just like the visions I mentioned above, it serves to make God feel more distant and impersonal.

3) There's no Grace - This is the big one. For all the weird touches and all the things it gets right, the film fails because it drastically misunderstands the point of the Noah story. As I mentioned earlier, their is a strong emphasis on the depravity of man throughout the beginning and middle of the film. Man is wicked. Noah is not ambiguous on this. The big climax of the film is that Noah feels like God wants him to kill his newborn granddaughters because they will allow humanity to continue to survive. He knows that man corrupted the world once, and will do so again, so it must be God's plan for them to perish. If you look at that interview I posted above, you can see the two writers wrestling with this:

"you finish reading Noah and all the wicked people have been wiped out, and one family survived, and you flip the page and it's Babel. So it immediately raises the question, what does that mean? If you look at the context of the story within the Bible, what is that trying to say about the sinfulness and wickedness within us? That was what we had to explore, not the good guys and the bad guys, but both the good and the bad within us."

So here's the problem: the film has set up a situation where man is thoroughly evil and corrupted. If man continues after the flood, there will certainly be more wickedness. So the film must answer why humanity should carry on. And it's here that the filmmakers cave. Aronofsky is a secular humanist, so he has to find his answer in the goodness of humanity. Despite the evidence we've seen to the contrary, the film ultimately says that mankind is worth saving. At the end, Ila says just this in her speech to Noah:

"He chose you for a reason. He showed you the wickedness of man, and knew you would not look away. But you saw goodness too. He asked you to decide if we were worth saving. And you chose mercy, you chose love."

The film pulls a 180. Noah chooses to save mankind because there is goodness mixed in with the evil. Man is worth saving. If man is intrinsically worth saving, then there is no need for grace ("unmerited favor"). So we are left with a God who is only vengeance and wrath, who is distant and uncaring towards his creation. Mankind survives not because God is gracious, but because one man is good enough and wise enough to see the goodness and love in other men. It's explicitly humanist.

Ultimately, Noah completely misses the point of the biblical story. It's often been pointed out that yes, Noah is "a righteous man", but not until after "Noah found favor (grace) in the eyes of the Lord" (Gen 6:8). God does not choose Noah because he is righteous, Noah is righteous because of God's grace towards him. And look at the end of the flood account, in Gen 8:21. God says "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth." He does not say that he preserves man because of man's goodness. In fact, he says the opposite. The biblical account says that man is still evil to the core, and yet God saves them anyway because of his great mercy. The point of the flood story isn't that mankind is worth saving, it's that they aren't worth saving, and yet God still shows grace to them. That's the whole reason for the rainbow. It's God's promise that no matter how bad mankind is in the future, he will never wipe the Earth clean like this again. If man is good enough to be worth saving, then the promise is unnecessary.

More than any liberty taken with the text (small or large), this is the problem with Noah. It's all wrath and no grace. It's all man and no God. It's a flood without a rainbow.