Noah Gittell notices that a “new series of pop culture protagonists are not fighting the end of the world; they’re welcoming it”:
Take Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which is at once an epic disaster movie and a penetrating exploration of the misanthropy that underpins the genre. How else to describe films that wring entertainment from the potential end of humanity? As played by Russell Crowe, Noah has a deep, simmering hatred for man even before God asks for his help. Civilization is ruled by rape and savagery; Noah, meanwhile, teaches his children to respect even the smallest flower.
Most disaster movies would end when the great flood comes and our hero saves his family. Noah lets the story continue and takes misanthropy to its logical endpoint. Once aboard the ark, Noah receives another message from God telling him that mankind is to end his with his family. Since his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson) is pregnant, Noah pledges to murder his infant grandchild, if she is born a girl, i.e. with the capability of repopulating the planet with humans. Mankind, we are told, is a failed experiment, a harsh assertion for a Hollywood movie.
David Sessions finds that such misanthropy isn’t reserved for Noah; his first response to the movie was, “I think the moral of the story was that God is evil”:
It’s not very clear here what the sins are, but we know that man is accused of a) multiplying and b) being violent. But as Noah’s family quickly finds out, they’re just as violent as everyone else. After watching the shocking goings-on at a nearby camp of Canaanites, Noah realizes he and his wife would kill them in a heartbeat to protect their children. Near the end of the ark ride, he’s become a raving madman chasing two newborn babies with a knife, and his two oldest sons are prepared to bring him to what would appear to be a very righteous end. (They kill Tubal-Cain instead, and after a dramatic knife-raise, Noah leaves the babies in peace.) Even if most of this isn’t in the Bible, we know that the reboot of humankind produced even greater achievements in multiplication and mass murder. So God killed millions of people because they were violent, and then saved enough of them that they could return to exactly that state? It’s not surprising that Aronofsky’s Noah comes to believe that humans are supposed to die out in the new world. Either he kills those babies, or God is cruel and insane.
And speaking of the end of the world, Joel S. Baden questions the way the film’s environmentalist message fits with the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis, arguing that of “all the stories in the Bible, the flood narrative is perhaps the least environmentally friendly”:
In the end, the deluge does nothing to wipe out the violence and wickedness that brought it about in the first place. It is God who changes, accepting that the human race is inherently superior to mere animals, and bloodthirsty at that: “Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat,” he says after the waters have cleared. “The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.”
In fact, in the Bible, the motivation for God’s promise never to bring another flood is Noah’s sacrifice of some of the animals he brought with him on the ark. (The Bible tells us that Noah brought not only two of each animal, but seven pairs of the clean — that is, sacrificable —animals.) It is the smell of burning animal flesh that reminds God that humanity is worth saving: No other species cooks for him. That aspect of the biblical account is nowhere to be found in the film. There is no sacrifice at the end of the movie.
Though humanity makes no promise of better stewardship in the Bible, God makes a unilateral promise never to destroy the Earth again, no strings attached. Whatever we may do, however evil we may be, however much we destroy the planet, we need not fear wholesale natural destruction, says Genesis, in what can only be seen as the antithesis of the environmentalist message.
Previous Dish on the film here.
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