David Dubrow

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Movie Review: Noah

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Noah was an entertaining film that had a nodding acquaintance with the source material, some decent performances, and a lack of narrative focus that turned it into a mess.  It’s not boring, but it’s not particularly good, either.  The more interesting elements were overshadowed by the thematic chaos: Aronofsky wanted to do a Biblical picture, but he wanted to give it a modern sensibility.  The result was an attractive, disappointing failure.

  • Green Day: It’s obvious that Aronofsky’s intent all along was to shoehorn environmentalism into a setting that had no place for it: the antediluvian Earth.  The Biblical version of Noah explicitly states that the whole of humanity was bent toward sin: “God saw that the people on earth were very wicked, that all the imaginings of their hearts were always of evil only. (Genesis 6:5)”  That won’t do in Hollywood.  Making judgments about other people’s behavior or mores is Simply Not Done unless those mores conflict with standard Hollywood groupthink. So Aronofsky had to come up with a real sin: pollution.  Strip-mining.  Deforestation.  That’s what would make God mad enough to drown the world.  It’s ludicrous.
  • He’s a Beauty: Ray Winstone did a great job as Tubal-cain, the main human antagonist.  Brutal, thoughtful, manipulative, and entirely useless to the story.  There was no reason to have him in the film.  He did nothing to advance the plot, change the circumstances, or affect the outcome.  He had the best lines, but there wasn’t any need for them or him.  The silliest part was him stowing away on the Ark and sitting in the hold, hidden by Noah’s son Ham, for months without anyone knowing.  At least we know what happened to the unicorns and gryphons and dinosaurs: Tubal-cain ate ’em on the long voyage.
  • Somebody’s Watchin’ Me: The Watcher angels were extremely cool, but too reminiscent of stony Ents.  According to the Bible, the Watchers were the angels who descended to Earth to sleep with human women.  The offspring of these unions were the Nephilim, half-angel, half-human hybrids who were said to be giants: “There were giants on the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6:4)”  Because Aronofsky had to change the reason for God’s anger at humanity from sin to environmental disaster, the Watchers couldn’t be human-like enough to father Nephilim: they had to be monsters.  Interestingly, Aronofsky did mine the Book of Enoch for the narrative that the Watchers taught men metalworking and other skills, which added depth.
  • Noah’s Crazy Train: Aronofsky undercuts his own environmental schtick by having Noah turn into a cross between Paul Ehrlich and Charles Manson in the second half of the film.  His extremism, self-loathing and hatred for humanity weren’t hinted at in the early stages to make his later insanity anything but jarring and out of place.  It’s unbelievable to me that his family would, over the course of several months, accept his insistence that if Shem’s wife bore a girl, he’d kill the baby right there and then.  They should have thrown him overboard as soon as they could, because he was clearly insane.
  • H.A.M.: While I understand that to build tension in a story that everyone knows the outcome of, you have to create other conflicts, having Ham’s lack of female companionship be such a sticking point seemed clumsy, even absurd.  Once again, Aronofsky had to go outside of the source material to create tension, which was unnecessary: there was already some weirdness going on in the Ark.  “And they made their father drink wine that night, and the firstborn went in and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. (Genesis 19:33)”  Why not look at that for conflict?  It certainly was…strange.  Did they just have cabin fever?  
  • Methusaleh as Gandalf: There are magic rocks in the antediluvian world called Zohar, according to Aronofsky, which produce pyrotechnic effects not unlike the light crystals in Land of the Lost.  This was also silly and unnecessary.  What made things worse was the presence of Methusaleh, who had undefined sorcerous abilities that made him seem more like Gandalf than a servant of the Creator.  He didn’t need to be there, or if he did, he should have had a stronger role.  As it was, Anthony Hopkins did the best he could with him, but the character just wasn’t written well.

I entirely understand those who take offense to Aronofsky’s altering of Scripture to advance a secular agenda in this film, but for me, the true offense was that the movie wasn’t that good.  It looked good.  The people in it acted well.  But for the most part, it was a silly, overproduced mess.  I’m not sure if it’s worth watching just to see how much Aronofsky hosed the Biblical story of Noah, but if you want a fantasy film about people and water and animals, then it wasn’t half-bad.  Three out of five stars.

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Horror’s Shifting Moral Center

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A casual observer of supernatural themes in movies, television, and literature could easily conclude that angels are simply enhanced humans with wings, and vampires are merely enhanced (if anemic) humans with fangs.  They’re superheroes.

The reasons for this are simple, but unfortunate: these characters are not part of a universe where there’s a God who intervenes in human events.  Going there in a narrative sense is icky.  It gets into religion, and who wants to get involved in that?  Too often religion is equated with judgment (as though using one’s intellect and ethics to determine what’s proper from what isn’t is a bad thing), and we can’t have judgment in our fiction.  We can’t have a supreme moral arbiter, especially when that hot angel over there is about to knock boots with the wisecracking-but-gold-hearted cambion detective protagonist.  It spoils the fantasy.
One of my most favorite parts of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep was when the scholar character talks with the vampire Molasar and learns that the crosses embedded into the eponymous keep are part of what is imprisoning him. The cross is indeed a symbol of power and that, as a Jew, the scholar has had it all wrong: Jesus Christ was the Messiah.  He found this to be deeply disturbing news, as would any Jewish person (including myself).  Later on, we learn that it’s not a cross, but the figure of a sword hilt, but the crisis was still very poignant and meaningful.

Today’s vampires aren’t forced back by crosses and holy water; to have that, you’d have to include the whole raft of Judeo-Christian mythology.  Because we’ve lost our sense of proportion, it would be considered proselytizing, and that’s just evil.  It wasn’t long ago that Fright Night came out, and with it a vampire that suffered injury from symbols of holiness (the way vampires used to).  Before that, we had The Exorcist, where Catholic priests were the good guys who used the power of God to exorcize a demon.  Try to find a sympathetic portrayal of a priest in mainstream television, literature, or cinema these days, where it’s still considered brave to create a priest character who molests children or does something equally horrible.

In Supernatural, mumbled pseudo-Latin and nonsense-inscribed pentagrams are sufficient to exorcize or trap most demons, and the angels, as charming as some can be, are no different morally than the inhabitants of the infernal realms.  What’s interesting in the Supernatural universe is that demonic possession can be cured through the use of sanctified blood, and holy water burns the possessed.  In an early scene in the episode Soul Survivor, we even see a Catholic priest, rosary and all, blessing bags of blood at a blood bank.  Where did he get the power to sanctify the blood?  It’s never explored.  They have to gloss over it.  If angels can’t bless things, how can priests do it?  Got me.  Ask the writers.

Modern media’s deliberate avoidance, if not outright shunning of Judeo-Christian ethics as expressed in the Bible has altered the landscape of horror, shifting its moral center to nihilism.  Torture porn like the Hostel series, ultra-violent mumblegore like You’re Next, dystopian zombie melodramas like The Walking Dead, and any of the ghost stories produced in the last fifteen years prove this out.  Ethics are derived from expediency, with no ultimate moral arbiter.

Horror’s big enough to contain all these things and still scare you, and you don’t need the God of the Bible to tell you right from wrong.  Nevertheless, what we’re seeing is the horror genre reflecting today’s cultural norms in ways that, it can be argued, dilute its unique power.  If vampires, angels, and demons are just more powerful humans, why not make them aliens instead?  Or X-Men?

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Whereupon I Give Away the Whole Store

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The difficulty of depicting angels as properly angelic and God as an all-encompassing force for good in fiction is that we do not live in a culture of moral absolutes.  Likewise, we cannot rely on an ultimate moral arbiter if we cannot or will not define evil.

Kristen Lamb’s point about the value of Dungeons & Dragons alignments in characterization is well-put, but it falls apart at the macro level, especially in dealing with the apocalypse.  It can be argued that the end of the world is always an individual situation, as each character will react to it in an individual manner according to his ethics and situation.  But when you deal with the larger issue of a God that ends the world, aided by His angels, character alignments don’t hold up for Him, and even Lawful Good characters can protest the injustice of it.  Even if it’s being done for the best of reasons, according to God.

This is the central concept behind my Armageddon trilogy: the relevance of Biblical ethics in today’s ultra-modern society.  Nowhere in it do I preach, nor is it my intent to advocate for a particular moral stance within the text.  Rather, it’s an attempt to bring prevailing Western belief systems into immediate conflict.  Mankind in the face of Armageddon is the ultimate existential crisis.  So how does one resolve it?  Is it possible?

During a rare moment of respite near the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, one character says, “We must be guided by our own ethics, not what we think God wants us to do. We must get comfortable with the idea that we can disagree with Him and still keep our integrity.”  To many of us, this is an absolute impossibility.  It can’t be done.  For others, it’s a necessity: the God of the Bible is the ultimate source of evil, oppression, and ignorance.  Both points of view cannot be correct.  But can they both be ethical?

For Hell’s point of view, there’s this: “I know what I am, but you lie to yourself every day. You’d burn the world clean of everyone who doesn’t kowtow to your…God, and call it goodness.  That’s if you win.  You wanted Armageddon. You started this war, but we’re going to fight harder. And when we win, the world gets to go on. That’s not so bad, is it?”  In a nutshell, Hell claims to be fighting for its own survival.  Despite the unspeakable ugliness of Hell’s tactics, isn’t that reasonable?  Don’t they have a right to resist God’s plan to end the world, if the alternative is an eternity of torture in the Lake of Fire, or oblivion?

Between Heaven fighting to create the Day of God (or, in the series, the New Kingdom, the merging of Heaven and Earth into one eternal paradise) and Hell fighting to maintain the status quo (or so it claims), there are those who don’t want the New Kingdom, but properly refuse to ally themselves with Hell.  As one character puts it at the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, when everything’s at stake, “We offer a better way: freedom. Freedom to strive, to progress, to no longer be subject to the whim of an angry God or a monster that feeds on torment.”  Put that way, how can you disagree?

You can, though.  You definitely can.  Especially if you’ve embraced the God of the Bible as an all-encompassing force for good.  After all, if there’s a choice between the salvation of your eternal soul and the death of your temporary physical body, why would you choose anything but God’s side?  Especially when you’ll be given a new body of spirit made flesh at the beginning of the New Kingdom, when Heaven has crushed the forces of Hell and turned the Pit into the Lake of Fire.  If Heaven wins.

There are more questions asked than answered, obviously.  And there’s no way to make every character happy (no way to make every reader happy, either).  Sometimes it’s the struggle that matters: working these things out for yourself.  If my sympathies lie anywhere, it’s there.

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