Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’

Like most things to hit the media these days, it took Noah approximately four seconds to offend and/or galvanize wide swaths of the population intent on their own agendas. Chief among those are America’s intrepid Biblical fundamentalists, many of whom object to the many notable liberties writers Aronofsky and Ari Handel take with the sacred tale, including a bunch of bad-ass chain-wielding rock monsters (don’t ask), a Noah who kinda loses his marbles, and a cautionary environmental fable whose liberal cred can be seen from space. (Noah and his family, apparently surviving off of lichen, tea, and the occasional berry, seem like the kind of people who Instagram all their #vegan brunches in case there’s still some corner of the world that doesn’t know they’re vegan and loving it.)

True to the book?

But some Biblical apps, websites, and societies are happily reporting a massive jump in visitors interested in reading Genesis. Apparently, unlike with Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, we’re all watching the movie and then deciding, hell, why not read the book. One website reporting this surge in Old Testament readers cannily runs ads hawking a 15-month stash of meals for just $1,495.95 (sold by My Patriot Supply, with a somber Glenn Beck standing by the food tins) — plenty of grub to survive a 40-day flood and then repopulate the Earth, at least by the Young Earth creationist concept of time.

Though the Answers in Genesis website lambastes Noah for its “shocking unbiblical” story and “attacks on Scripture,” it sees the perfect opportunity for a major ad campaign promoting the Noah exhibit at Kentucky’s Creation Museum, where everyone can learn the truth about Noah, the ark, the Flood, and how the Flood formed the Grand Canyon and Mount St. Helens (no word yet on who or what is responsible for the San Andreas Fault, the Rockies, the Sahara, or South America’s weird geological puzzle-piece relationship to Africa).

The filmmakers are also in hot water for making a movie with wall-to-wall (or ark-to-mountain) white people. This Indiewire story rips into an interview with Handel, who says that the filmmakers decided to cast only white actors in the movie because the story operates on a “mythical plane” which needed a universally relatable “everyman,” and people of color would have distracted the audience too much to be able to portray that myth. (21st-century white supremacy certainly is creative when it tries to justify itself.)

But as an avid student of Genesis in my youth, I have to admit that I’m almost as upset by the short shrift that Aronofsky gives to the animals. Because really, people, what was the best thing about Noah and the ark? The animals two by two, of course! The elephants and giraffes taking the air on the deck in our Noah’s ark books were the best part, at least for me. But in Aronofsky’s Noah, the briefest of CGI animal parades quickly ends when Noah’s family anesthetizes all the creatures, from lizards to grizzly bears, with some kind of long-acting homegrown incense drug that has no effect on humans.

So they lie snoring in hairy, scaly piles for the rest of the voyage, a mere backdrop for what turns out to be a long, turgid, and surprisingly violent family drama hinting at more incest, infanticide, alcoholism, betrayal, and overall disillusionment than a Sam Shepard living room.

A need-to-know basis?

So after seeing Noah, all I’m left with is a bunch of questions.

Were creationists upset with a beautiful montage that paints the first seven days as rather allegorical, since it shows one-celled organisms morphing into fish morphing into reptiles morphing into mammals?

Why are Aronofsky’s Adam and Eve almost as shiny as the extraterrestrials in Cocoon? Do we really need more fodder for those Ancient Aliens shows on the History Channel?

Doesn’t the Creator have any concept of genetic diversity? Really, how can a single pair of animals effectively cover the Earth with their offspring? If we’re not allowed to marry our cousins in many U.S. states, are you telling me those gazelles who made it off the ark aren’t going to lose a little of the spring in their step when they’re repeatedly forced to couple with their own offspring or siblings?

When Crowe’s Noah gets the idea that God wants the human species to expire when his own family dies, he becomes obsessed with his children’s reproductive prospects and flies into a homicidal rage when he finds out his son Shem (Douglas Booth) and daughter-in-law Ila (Emma Watson) are expecting. But Noah’s wife (the raven-haired Jennifer Connelly), while she may have a few wrinkles visible in the IMAX 3D version of the film, hardly looks menopausal. While obsessing over the marriage bed of his son, has Noah himself become celibate?

Once all those animals have marched off the ark and mated upon on the verdant postdiluvian mountainside, how did the lions and wolves survive long enough to give birth without killing off a few of God’s precious ungulates? Or do the rules of an ecosystem, like non-Caucasian people, have yet to evolve?

God punishes Adam and Eve to live by the sweat of their brows after the serpent tempts them to eat the forbidden fruit — yet when the ark is finished, the snakes, which apparently have their own direct line to God, slither on by the hundred. What kind of Creator curses man, made in His own image, to marinate in sin forever, but tenderly rescues the snakes who led man astray?