This exploration of the roots of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) will contain some spoilers for the film, which I highly recommend seeing, wrestling with, and then coming back here to read more about (if you haven’t already).
I am a bit of an anomaly when it comes to modern American Christianity. I consider myself a follower of Jesus and am intimately involved in a faith community. And yet, I routinely find myself at odds with the mainstream American evangelical Christian culture.
Leading up to the film’s release, I read of Noah’s troubled production, between director Darren Aronofsky’s artistic vision being challenged by the studio chiefs of Paramount Pictures, to the reported early test screenings offered to evangelical audiences which sent the film into the “controversy” zone. The studio heads seemed nervous, and the coveted evangelical audience seemed skeptical…the deck was pretty stacked against Noah. For my part, in Aronofsky I trust… but my day to day faith doesn’t have me engaging all that much with the Noah narrative, and the marketing of the film made it look like a mish-mash of Gladiator, The Lord Of The Rings, and an incredibly ancient biblical story. I prepared for the worst.
The film that emerged from the maelstrom of heated debate, marketing challenges on all sides, and a proven visionary director’s dogged determination is actually a fascinating, messy, beautiful, and challenging theatrical experience that I cannot stop thinking about. I saw the film in an IMAX presentation and was treated to a marvel of a film from a visual perspective, and a complicated tale of faith and the nature of mankind which leaves me hungry for answers in a way few films have over the past several years.
I’m going to dig into some of the sources of inspiration Aronofsky drew upon, and discuss some of the motifs and themes of the film and how they impacted me as a viewer, and also dig into where the controversy comes from and why I recommend that folks do engage with this story here in 2014.
GENESIS
The biblical account of the story of Noah is a pretty unpleasant event, and I’m not entirely sure why it has become a staple in American Sunday school. I just now closed my Bible after having re-read the story as told in Genesis chapters 5–9, and I can assure you that Aronofsky’s Noah largely adheres to a basic outline of the biblical narrative.
Here’s a recap of what happens in the Bible. The very first verses of the narrative suggest that mankind had become wicked to a point of total depravity. There is a mention of the “Nephilim” (a race of giants) and “sons of God” who mated with human women. (Gen. 6: 1–4). And so, with humankind intermingling with what some scholars believe to be fallen angels who begat giants (while other scholars suggest all of this simply points to an intermingling of various races and tribes), God deems Noah to be righteous, and establishes a covenant with him that Noah and his family will be spared from the great flood that will ravage the planet and destroy all of mankind. God gives Noah explicit instructions as to how the ark should be built, how it should be populated with animals, and in chapter 7 of Genesis, the flood itself comes, raises the ark up, and decimates the planet. After many months the rain ceases and the family begins sending out a dove until one day that dove returns with an olive branch. Land! In Genesis chapter 9 God makes a covenant with Noah that his family should go forth and multiply and fill the nations once more, and that God will never flood the earth again. He sets the rainbow in the sky as the sign of this covenant. Soon after, in a bizarre epilogue to Chapter 9, Noah gets drunk and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth find him passed out naked. Ham calls attention to his father’s nakedness while the other two sons cover him. Upon sobering up, Noah condemns the descendants of Ham and then dies. Amen!
And so, as anyone who reads the biblical account of Noah can see… this is a bizarre tale. On the most basic levels it deals with a God who brings about a global destruction while deeming a few elect to survive this apocalypse and begin anew. This is heavy business. Sure, there are rainbows and animals and a giant boat… but this story might not be as kid-friendly as we tend to try to make it today. Then you add in some of the more bizarre details, such as the aforementioned “Nephilim” and “sons of God,” and a picture of a wholly different world than the one we know today is painted. One where creatures of heaven potentially mingled with creatures of earth. And it doesn’t seem like God was happy about that. And then we close with the tidy, tie-a-bow-around-it ending of a drunken and naked Noah cursing the children of Ham and then dying a very, very old man (Genesis suggests 950 years).
The staunchest defenders of biblical inerrancy would likely acknowledge that the account of Noah is challenging, dark, and difficult to exegete and apply to our modern understanding of the world and of faith. Those who read Noah’s tale as pure mythology and not explicit historical truth also find a vivid and fascinating tale which presents many challenges.
It seems clear that co-writers Aronofsky and Ari Handel based their film quite firmly around the overall arc of what happens in Genesis. In their film, God is present and speaks to Noah through visions, Noah responds in faith and builds an ark, and a flood comes and destroys the world, sparing only Noah’s family and the animals within. And finally even a drunken Noah must come to terms with the traumatic events of his life and bless his family to go forth and multiply, culminating in the closing image of a beautiful rainbow. But Noah also leans heavily on an “extra-Biblical” text which is fascinating, and which I also read significant portions of after seeing the film. Keep in mind, not just any movie inspires me to rush home and read the Bible and other ancient, non-canonical writings.
THE BOOK OF ENOCH
The Da Vinci Code phenomenon brought with it a resurgence of mainstream awareness of non-canonical ancient religious texts when it burst onto the scene in 2003. The controversial assertion of that novel was that Jesus had physical offspring with Mary Magdalene, and author Dan Brown purports to have taken the origins of this idea from various writings including an extra-biblical account called The Gospel Of Mary. I think the existence and study of these kinds of texts are fascinating. I myself have never spent any real time with them, but non-canonical texts such as these remind us that there are countless ancient writings that have survived through the ages and up to today, and many of them were closely studied by ancient scholars and Christians.
Aronofsky and Handel took much inspiration from The Book Of Enoch for their Noah screenplay. No, Christians generally do not regard this text as holy scripture. But Enoch is cited in the Bible as being Noah’s kin (great, great grandfather, in fact). And the mere existence of texts like these, which are often referenced in the Bible, while not being considered part of the Bible, is important for anyone to remember.
I think it is specifically important that Christians all remember that at one point, the books that make up the Bible were simply a disparate series of writings, not all bound together in one volume. And that there was a very clear moment in time when a group of these writings were gathered together, voted upon as the inspired Word Of God, and formed into the Holy Bible we know today.
The Book Of Enoch is not one of those books, but it is a widely known text, and it is also quite fascinating. Knowing that some of the more “out there” elements of Noah were based in this text, I decided to check it out. I didn’t read the entire thing, but rather the section of The Book Of Enoch called “The Book Of The Watchers.”
Let me digress, briefly, with a massive spoiler for the film Noah: The movie prominently features giant rock angels. What are rock angels? Well, I feel like LOTS of people watching this film would ask a very similar question since they are foisted upon viewers very quickly as the film begins. You’ve got to either accept the existence of giant, Lord Of The Rings-looking rock angels, or Aronofsky’s Noah is probably going to lose you. The film opens telling of a race of Watchers who observed the coming and goings of mankind from the start. They witnessed the fall in the garden of Eden, and the Lord’s subsequent banishment of Adam and Eve from the garden. The Watchers of Noah choose to try and help mankind, and by way of punishment they are cast down to the ground, their celestial bodies covered and coated with the rock of the earth. It is a crazy element added to an already fantastical film, and also a beautiful visual. These Watchers, early on, impart their heavenly wisdom upon Man and help them create giant, spreading, industrialized cities. Eventually Man turns against them and only a few remain. Those few come to Noah’s aide when they are convinced that his quest is of God, and through their offering of aide to Noah, they find a way to return again to the good graces of The Creator.
It turns out, the Book Of Enoch really isn’t all that far off from this “left field” addition of ancient, technologically advanced cities and rock angels to the tale of Noah. Going into much more detail than Genesis does, The Book Of Enoch tells extensively of the dalliances of angels with human women, even naming names of specific angels who banded together in defiling themselves and lusting after humans. They make babies and teach the Men their heavenly technologies and give rise to many races of sinful men who have attained knowledge that was supposed to be reserved for heaven. When archangels including Gabriel and Michael entreat before the Lord to put a stop to the fallen angels’ wickedness, God responds.
In Chapter 10 of 1 Enoch, an angel is sent to Noah to tell him the Lord’s plan. And it involves the destruction of the earth, and the banishment of the fallen angels. Soon after, Enoch is taken on an apocryphal journey much like the Book Of Revelation in which he is shown the farthest corners of God’s kingdom, where the Throne Of God dwells, all the way down to the depths where the punished angels will suffer until their final destruction and judgement. It is pretty wild stuff. But no more wild than, say… giant rock monsters seeking redemption by fighting on the side of God and his chosen.
RECONCILING THE TEXTS?
There probably is no way to entirely reconcile the events depicted in The Bible and the events depicted in The Book Of Enoch. Hence one writing being considered canon, and the other sentenced to relative obscurity. A traditional reading of Christianity really doesn’t allow for ideas like angels mating with mankind and begetting races of giants and the like (even though hints of this kind of activity remain in the Bible). But a traditional Christian belief does include the affirmation that God, at one point in history, judged the world to be forsaken, sent a supernatural flood to destroy the earth, and chose one righteous man and his family to re-seed the planet and begin again.
Genesis even indicates that God is fully aware of the depraved nature of man surviving the flood and living on through the human line of Noah, when Genesis 8:21 states, after the flood and Noah’s safe return to dry land “The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma [of Noah’s sacrifice] and said in his heart: ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.’”
And so we have a 2014 feature film written and directed by visionary filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. Paramount Pictures is looking to net the widest possible audience for their giant, Biblical epic. And groups of all stripes seem up in arms, even as the film rides its controversy to a rock solid $44 million dollars at the US box office in its opening weekend.
Aronofsky seems to have culled details for his unique vision from his own worldview and mingled them together with a strong basis in scripture and in extra-biblical text. The result is not an entirely faithful adaptation of any one source. For a perfect reading of either text, I recommend going directly to the texts themselves. The Bible isn’t going anywhere. You can read it anytime. The same is true of The Book Of Enoch.
But Noah is a film crafted here, today, for 2014. It is an international picture, being released around the world. By melding various sources, Aronofsky has created a singular vision of the Noah tale and imbued it with incredible challenges for a modern audience. What is the nature of man? Are we, in fact, debased to the core? Can we only beget destruction and death? Or does being created in the image of God offer us any kind of innate goodness from which we can steer our species and our planet closer towards goodness and wholeness?
The tale is a grim one, filled with shocking violence and destruction. Much of that seems to be a part God’s will and desire. But some of the miracles and beauty found in the film, such as the march of the animals, the appearance of the rainbow, and the incredible vision of a world before the flood that feels more spiritually in tune with God than any world we recognize today, are all examples of beauty and goodness to be found in Noah.
Aronofsky’s Noah may not offer a strict adherence to the Bible… but we’ve got the Bible. Noah doesn’t change that. I know I didn’t need a spectacular big screen extravaganza that fed me a blow-by-blow account of Genesis. What I needed was to be challenged. I needed to see Noah wrestle with a present, but cryptic, God. Much the way I wrestle, in fact. I needed to see a man struggle to bear the weight of the call this mysterious God placed on his life. I needed to see Noah’s family call his actions into question because I needed a hero I could relate to and experience this story alongside. I needed a Noah to be tired, weary, and conflicted… because when I look around, I see a whole bunch of people just like that… trying to live right, trying to live with wisdom, but getting regularly beaten down and questioning what it all means.
Atheists, Christians, and everyone in between have a new film playing in multiplexes across the world that offers them mystery, quandaries, meditations, and an opportunity to dialog about all of these things. The cultural importance of dialog cannot be overstated here in the cacophonous technological era of 2014 where televised monologues are shoved down our throats on a 24 hour cycle. Noah offers something controversial, yes. And something messy and personal. An artistic vision that will raise as many questions as it “answers.” I know I wasn’t expecting such a mysterious journey when I sat down to watch Noah, and I know I’m better for having seen it. I encourage you to see Noah with friends and to simply talk about it. Share some ideas. Ponder what the various visual motifs implied. Yeah, even talk about what you think about the origins of life and the nature of creativity. Dialog born out of visionary filmmaking is a beautiful thing, and far greater than being spoon-fed a distillation of views you already hold.
And I’m Out.