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Aronofsky's Noah : The Water and the Fire Next Time

2014; Wiley; Volume: 64; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cro.2014.a783387

1939-3881

Peter Heinegg,

Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies

Aronofsky's Noah: The Water and the Fire Next Time Peter Heinegg Cathleen 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 decision. 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. –http://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 geophysical 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. 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 combination 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 furthest divergence from the Bible, his ark's passenger list contains no fertile 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 replenish the earth.” (As in the Genesis account, one has to ignore the incestuous 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 ontologically better than the drowned bloodthirsty masses. Like a proto‐St. Paul, he acknowledges the presence of the same violent passions within himself (and he furiously smites more than his fair share of the desperate...