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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I’m tempted to see NOAH again soon because the was A LOT dialogue in close-up, and you know that’s tricksy; this first time I was invested in the story so I didn’t pay much attention to how Aronofsky setup such those scenes (some were critical — as in crisis) so now I want to go back and examine that aspect, but I’ll just wait because I think this one needs time inside your head. More later.
Just came from NOAH. Very good film. Amazing execution. But why are people comparing it to THE FOUNTAIN? Because the score is similar? Bunch of simpletons –not only that, this is a much much better film. I’m trying to think of adjectives here, but always circling back to beautiful. The locales my god. Some very minor quibbles; shaky cam was used ineffectively a couple of times, but absolutely nothing to fret about. I mean, Jesus. Emma Watson, my gosh is that girl lifeless ==> Now, was she cast because of that? You know; she can’t even play off a screen pretense such as Russell Crowe’s — there’s nothing there. Douglas Booth is very very pretty, but very very dull ===> Now here’s the thing, was he cast because of that? Everyone else? amazing. Jennifer Connelly my gosh, amazing, projecting an integrity and fortitude that people as beautiful as her shouldn’t be able to convey –you know since they have so much fun. Lerman nails it. The bad guy too. Thematically I need to watch it again? This whole religion thing is irrelevant to me so I’m not commenting. I have to see it again but will wait for the DVD because I need some considerable time between viewings with this one. Preliminarily and in the heat of the moment ===> ★★★★
Oh yeah, Methuselah? Loved him, amazing with his powers.
p.s. Oh yeah there was a Connelly CGI rendition that looked very creepy.
Ryan, you’re correct. The last section of the review (Oct 31, 1977) reads:
“1900 has all of Bertolucci’s themes and motif’s; one could call it the Portable Bertolucci, though it isn’t portable. It’s like a course to be enrolled in, with a guaranteed horror every hour. 1900 is a gigantic system of defenses–human fallibility immortalized. The film is appalling, yet it has the grandeur of a classic visionary folly. Next to it, all other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”
But the really good stuff is at the beginning:
“At a certain point in their careers–generally right after an enormous popular success–most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies. They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world. Generally, they shoot this epic in what they believe is a state of super-enlightenment. They believe that with this film they’re literally going to bring mankind the word, and this euphoria conceals even their own artistic exhaustion. Afterward, in the editing rooms, when they look at the thousands upon thousands of feet of film they’ve shot, searching for ways to put it together, while the interest on the borrowed money rises and swells, and the businessmen or government representatives try to wrest control from them, their energy may flag and their confidence falter. Their euphoria had glossed over the initial compromises that now plague them–an unresolved, unfinished script, perhaps, or an international cast with no common language–and there is always the problem of excessive length. Griffith with Intolerance, von Stroheim with his ten-hour Greed, Abel Gance with his three-screen Napoleon, Eisenstein with his unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy, Bertolucci with 1900, perhaps Coppola with his Apocalypse Now still to come–no one has ever brought off one of these visionary epics so that it was a hit like the director’s preceding films that made it possible. Yet these legendary follies that break the artists’ backs are also among the great works of film history, transforming the medium, discarding dead forms, and carrying on an inspired, lunatic tradition that is quite probably integral to the nature of movies.”
Later on, she writes, “The calamity of movie history is not the follies that get made but the follies that don’t get made.”
The whole article is littered with gems (“In movies, sanity is too neat, too limiting”). I urge anyone to seek it out, and her writing in general.
@Ryan,
Oh I’m actually shocked that the racial issue was presented in the graphic novel… I can’t imagine what kind of controversy storm would be raised if that plot was kept in the movie…
Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate the responses.
I too love that Kael essay. But my major takeaway from it is the idea that filmmakers who have major commercial successes are then given the keys to the kingdom and sometimes make bloated messes. Heaven’s Gate would be another example, albeit a notorious one that was released a few years after 1900. Kael celebrates these huge works of “folly” as grand creative expressions. I haven’t seen Noah yet, but you hit the nail on the head by referring to Kael; Aronofsky’s Black Swan has allowed him the freedom to make Noah, and in so doing, it appears history has repeated itself.
JS, (or anyone), if you can find Kael’s quote I’d like to work it into the post instead of me trying to paraphrase it from cloudy memory.
(Am I wrong in remembering that this is also the review where Ms Kael says something like “next to 1900 recent American movies look like something you can hold on the end of a toothpick”? I do recall that she acknowledged Bertolucci let the movie spin a bit out of control, over the top, but I believe she respected it in spite of all its messiness, yes?)
I sort of left my feelings dangling in that paragraph. I intended to say I prefer a big glorious ambitious mess of a movie over neat tidy safe movies that take no risks.
absolutely, that’s my own takeaway as well. I made a hash of trying to express that. And for what it’s worth, I think Heaven’s Gate is a masterpiece. A messy grandiose masterpiece.
Here’s a link that provides some Southern Baptist responses to Westboro Baptist.
http://www.bpnews.net/BPCollectionNews.asp?ID=169
Thank you, Zach. I’m glad to learn Westboro is faction of Baptists separate from the SBC.
Apologies for making you wince at my harsh attitude. I didn’t set out to make this piece revolve so much around reactions from religious groups, but that’s where the energy was flowing so I just rolled with it.
Honestly, please trust me when I say I feel no vitriol. I’m mostly just tickled whenever a filmmaker can make uptight upright people gasp. The worst criticism of Noah has come from individuals who bristle at artistic liberties taken with Biblical truth — and since I personally believe that “Biblical truth” is a dubious concept, that’s where my attention was focused.
Ryan,
Thanks for your swift response. Seriously, I do scold members of Southern Baptist churches on a weekly, if not daily basis for hatred of any kind toward anyone. I do not think Scripture warrants hatred to be returned by hatred, rather love is the proper response to hatred (seen in Jesus’ response on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing”).
Honestly, in recent years, I think the Southern Baptist church (as represented by the Southern Baptist Convention) has done a decent job of preaching love in response to hatred. Westboro Baptist is not Southern Baptist (though it’s easy to make that connection). They are actually Independent Baptist. And not very biblical, obviously, for said reasons.
I’m just trying to shine a light on something I love and believe to be of surpassing value, while hopefully giving a graceful defense of it.
Ah Ryan, thanks for the link!
So they did go there in the graphic novel, but not so in the movie. Interesting…
Dragon, I read the graphic novel about 10 days before I saw the movie, and for 10 days I was worried sick about a passage in the printed book that I was dreading to see onscreen.
In the graphic novel, Ham finds and rescues his prospective wife, Na’Eltamuk. They meet in a deep ravine and Ham offers her food the same as in the movie.
But in the illustrated comic panels, Na’Eltamuk is drawn to look distinctly tribal and exotic. That’s fine, because she’s beautiful and at first it seemed very very cool that Ham might find a mate of a different race. I liked that. Na’Eltamuk had noticeably different facial bone structure, more exotic eyes, darker skin, facial tattoos and I ring in one side of her nose. Gorgeous girl.
But here’s where it got uncomfortable. Na’Eltamuk was literally the only major character in the graphic novel who wasn’t drawn to look Indo-European/Caucasian. So it was horrible when Ham brought her back to the ark and Noah would not accept her as a suitable partner for his son.
Noah’s wife embraced Na’Eltamuk and silently offers a prayer of thanks to grandfather Methuselah for helping Ham find a wife, but Noah would not be swayed. Noah tells Ham that Na’Eltamuk is not allowed to stay on the ark and tells Ham he must choose to stay with the family or else drown with his girlfriend.
Then one of the rock-giant fallen angels carries Na’Eltamuk away. We never see here again.
So it’s bad enough that the original story had Noah taking a more active role in separating his son from his son’s lover — but it was even worse because Na’Eltamuk was the only dark-skinned exotic girl in the whole story. It all left a bad taste in my mouth and I hated the implications.
So I was greatly relieved that they changed all that for the movie, and Noah’s role in dooming Na’Eltamuk to die became more a matter of emergency negligence than outright rejection.
I’ll get a shot of Na’Eltamuk from the graphic novel to show you what I mean about her appearance that gave me the impression she was another race.
It would have really spiced things up for the movie to have a racial issue thrown into the mix, but I’m glad Aronfsky decided that such a complication would be cause too much of a stir.
I’ve visited this website for years. I am Southern Baptist. I am a preacher. I even tend towards conservative fundamentalism. I love movies and enjoy oscar predictions. Not sure why bias must be directed toward my Christian designations in a piece like this. Is there not a cordial way to present your opinions without attacking certain demographics with such vitriol?
Zach, I am not saying all Southern Baptists are hardcore fundamentalists. Just saying, in my own personal experience, the only hardcore fundamentalists I have ever encountered have been Southern Baptists.
I reserve the right to look down on the hateful behavior of hardcore fundamentalists since the worst of those people no not hesitate to tell me that I’m doomed to burn for eternity in the fires of hell because I happen to be gay.
Zach, if you’re not one of those people then I’m not talking about you.
How about I don’t try to tell you what to preach and you don’t try to tell me what to write.
Is there not a cordial way to present your opinions without attacking certain demographics with such vitriol?
Just gotta say, Zach. It would be fantastic if you could convince members of the Southern Baptist community to stop attacking with such vitriol the demographic I belong to. If you want to try, I sincerely wish you luck.
Meanwhile don’t preach to me about vitriol. I don’t hate Southern Baptists. Both my parents are Southern Baptists.
But Southern Baptists LIKE THIS disgust me, and these are the people I’m talking about, alright?
You want me to be cordial? How’s THIS for cordial? I’m sure you’re sorry that those people are a blight on Southern Baptists. But that’s how they identify themselves. They’re not going to go away unless the rest of us point them out and ostracize them.
Is anything I wrote as bad as any of those protest signs? I can take a scolding from you. I only wonder what you do to scold members of Southern Baptist congregations who behave this way.
Saw WAR HORSE for the 3rd time. I like it better every time. Why isn’t Toby Kebbell a huge star? He steals everything from anyone. Yet another Spielberg destined to an ever increasing status (e.g., A.I.)
“white guy saves creation”….. we are so beaten down by re-tellings of “white guy saves…..” that we parse the details.
good piece, Ryan. Thanks
Wow, man. What an amazing post, Ryan!
The movie opens here in Brazil tomorrow and I cannot wait to watch it. Now even more, after reading your text.
And to think that Brad Pitt left “The Fountain” for the hideous “Troy” – how lame is that?
“Now we follow each other.”
Honored. 🙂
This was an amazing read! I admit I’m glad I was only able to read the newer patched up version, from what I’ve read in the comments I may have found the earlier version vitriolic. What I did find, however, is well thought out and contemplative writing. A pleasure to read. I believe this will stick with me for some time. I’m heading straight to twitter to follow you now.
Derek 8-track, Thank You! Glad you enjoyed. It was fun to write.
(I noticed you yesterday morning on twitter. Now we follow each other.)
Ryan – I wasn’t offended; my skin is thicker than that. I was a little disappointed but your follow-up to me was thoughtful and reasonable, much more on keeping with the man whose posts I’ve often enjoyed over the last three years. No harm, no foul– I’ve been known to mess up expressing my thoughts on occasion myself. I appreciate your clarification.
Bravo Ryan! Wonderful piece…
I want to know about your thought on one thing though… I, too, noticed that they “secretly” blended evolution into the movie. With all the recent arguments going on with the new “Cosmos” series, this is so timely…
Anyway, about the evolution sequence, right before the monkey is about to turn into a human… the movie cuts away. I gave out a audible chuckle because I was sooooo waiting to see if they dare go there hahaha…
I, too, noticed that they “secretly” blended evolution into the movie.
Thanks, Dragon. That morphing evolution montage took my breath away. I haven’t got to the Cosmos episode on evolution yet but I’m hearing great things about it from Sasha and Craig and now you.
by the way, for the creation layout in the Noah graphic novel, the stages of primate evolution are made more explicit.
“I think I believe that consciousness is a form of energy that can’t be destroyed.”
I would bet every living thing has the same feeling. For some reason, people need to explain it to each other, hence religion. Ever listen to kindergartners explain things they can’t comprehend? It makes them feel better, but they’re no further ahead.
Ryan, I appreciate your clarification regarding Christians. I am not fundamentalist but rather a free thinking man of faith who probably believes in something very few do. Funny enough right before my wedding, I had a talk with my pastor that married us, the one in the news, and he and I shared our beliefs. Strangely enough they coincide so closely that for once I felt like I wasn’t alone or a bad Christian. I support everyones right to what they believe as long as they have love in their heart.
Very well written review. As The Fountain is one of my favorite films that is very clearly split down the middle, I loved seeing your (as well as others’) comparisons between that and Noah. I can’t wait to see this now.
I wanted to list several things that Noah and The Fountain have in common but this thing got way out of hand and I decided to wait to talk more about that here in the comments. But I’ll hold off to see if anybody else wants to name some parallels they noticed.
I am not fundamentalist but rather a free thinking man of faith who probably believes in something very few do.
Kane, like you, I will not deny that I have spiritual aspirations. I’m glad that I’ve steered clear of letting any church get hold of me before I work things out to my own satisfaction. I’ll probably never be able to define or describe what I believe but I do know that I believe there’s a power or energy that’s beyond my comprehension. I believe in something that endures and I do not think there’s only nothingness after death.
Whatever it is, it’s all around me and inside me but I do not feel it’s an omniscient entity. I think I believe that consciousness is a form of energy that can’t be destroyed. It might be nothing more than positive or negative ionic charges or whatnot, but whatever it is I hope that it becomes part of something in another manifestation beyond our fragile mortal form.
If anybody has any clue what religious belief this sounds like, let me know and I’ll read a book about it. Or maybe pray for me :-/
EXCELLENT READ. saw it this past weekend and must admit aronofsky is my favorite working director. Was shocked at how moved I was by some sequences here. Compassion is the word that still sticks. He is truly a genius
Thanks Jeremy. I was in a rush to get this posted and I didn’t realize how disjointed and sprawling it had become. I’ve gone back over it more carefully now, rewrote some rough spots, and I hope improved some of the connecting tissue.
Funnily enough, last night Sasha and I teased about the irony of a movie with a message warning against wretched excess, when the movie itself is seen by many as an example of the same excess. Without thinking what I was doing, I’ve now posted an overblown essay that risks being an excessive mess in itself.
Ryan, your interpretation of Noah interesting, to say the least. I haven’t yet seen the film, but I definitely will before it leaves the theaters.
However, you really miss the mark on Fundamentalist Christians. We aren’t those people who protest at military funerals or bomb abortion clinics. Those people are truly disturbed and there’s nothing Christian about such behavior. But I’ve never really encountered those people, and never want to. I support your right to your point of view, but there are words that you used that seemed to me to be every bit as vitriolic as we Christians are far too often portrayed as being.
The many Christians that I’ve encountered in my life are good, albeit flawed people. Sounds like Aronofsky’s Noah to me.
Movieram… I really need to go back and revise this messy rambling post and when I do I’ll try to make clear that I mean radical hardcore Fundamentalists whenever I say Fundamentalists.
I have really tried to distinguish the difference in this piece the same way I do in real life. I do NOT see Episcopalians or Presbyterians or Catholics as extremist Fundamentalists.
To me, Fundamentalist simply means those people who believe every word of the Bible as literal factual inarguable Truth. At least the parts that suit their crude agendas.
Famously, the same people who condemn gay people as god-forsaken “abominations” are able to overlook the fact that anyone who eats shrimp or lobster or wears clothing made of blended fabric are also an abomination, according to adjoining verses in that weird chapter of Leviticus.
So if you’re wearing a cotton/polyester blend shirt, God thinks you might as well be licking a dick. It’s all the same category of abomination if Fundamentalists adhered to the same literal reading.
Of course they don’t.
Honestly the only fundamentalists I’ve even encountered face to face are rural Southern Baptists, and they’re backward about so many things it’s almost as if their hateful religious beliefs are an afterthought.
I know there are variations of Fundamentalists in every denomination but I’ve never met any of them so I think they must be rare or at least not loud about it.
Sorry if I’ve offended you though. I really will go back through this piece and patch it up, alright?
The many Christians that I’ve encountered in my life are good, albeit flawed people.
Movieram. I agree. My parents happen to be Christians and they hardly ever throw rocks at me for being gay.
Woah, nice. Two lengthy from Sasha and Ryan on NOAH. I’ll be sure to come read them and offer my verdict on the film once I see it on Thursday just before it leaves my local IMAX screen. Whoever could doubt Aronofsky? Few from his generation have a 4-for-5 record to show for themselves, or something comparable.
Ryan, delighted that you see the connections between Noah and The Fountain. Saw Noah Sunday afternoon in Tuscaloosa with an audience more respectful than not(at least no walkouts or boos). I was quite taken with it, as you can see here, if you are interested:
http://www.hollowsquarepress.com/4/post/2014/03/noah-an-odd-duck-indeed.html
Some of my more intellectual friends refuse to see the movie because “it is a Bible movie.” Well, as you suggest, it is so much more than that. I hope Paramount’s efforts to woo in the Christian right does not backfire and keep out its true audience. – Jonathan
“We 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?”
Outstanding, Ryan!
Since it sounds like Aronofsky has managed what I had hoped he would without compromising his style or POV, now I will see it. Never should have doubted him (or should I say Him).