“The least Biblical biblical film ever made” – the director famously promised. There is a certain degree of smugness attached to the claim, as if in subverting some Christian assumptions about the story was a sort of new idea that hadn’t been tried before.
In fact Aronofsky is hardly exceptional in using a Biblical story as a very loose hook on which to base a major piece of art. In fact he’s not exceptional at all – it’s not a remotely radical idea to use a Biblical story in this way. In art there have endless re-imaginings of Biblical stories which emphasize different ideas and creative expressions of the artists’ own minds. Whether it’s the theological “The Last Temptation of Christ”, the epic “Ben-Hur”, the Disney “Prince of Egypt” or Pullman’s “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ”, it’s hardly an unfamiliar source for artistic re-interpretation.
Like his predecessors in this world Aronofsky has a story he wants to tell. He’s been a little disingenuous with his statement that this film is “just entertainment” – it is entertaining but that is not all it is. He has a message and a story he wants to tell about the perils of abusing our world’s resources. Noah becomes the first great environmentalist, one who quite literally in this film battles against those less enlightened people who abuse creation.
That’s fair enough – it’s the nature of good film making in fact. It has a message to portray and it uses a good narrative and story to bring that message to life in an entertaining way. In its essentials this film amounts to a better constructed, more engaging version of the 2004 disaster film “the Day After Tomorrow”.
This is where the point of using Noah for that narrative arch comes in. After all Aronofsky is a creative and interesting film maker, he could have told this story, as “The Day After Tomorrow” did, using a brand new story without having to adapt anything else. The point of using the Bible though is the very powerful cultural resonance the Noah story holds in the popular imagination. In some ways it should be a poor choice for a film because, as one reviewer put it, it’s a story that rivals Titanic for being “unspoilerable”.
Unspoilerable because everyone whether Christian or not knows the story of Noah and the Ark. If Aronofsky wants to add an evil king, giants, battles and anything else it doesn’t really matter because everyone already knows the basic story and how it will end. The appeal of using the story is that despite the fact that no-one can really ever be surprised by the basic storyline it does capture the imagination because it is a story which is so alive within Western culture.
From a Christian perspective then there is nothing really to be outraged about. For all Aronofsky’s smug statements and atheist glee that the Biblical story has been taken out of a Christian context actually it should be Christians who are smug. When one of the world’s top (and avowedly atheist) film makers has a big story that needs to be told and can’t find anything that works better than a Biblical story shouldn’t that be a cause for celebration rather than outrage? Aronofsky hasn’t secularised the Bible, he’s merely proved how relevant it remains in engaging with even an issue as apparently modern and rational as environmentalism.
Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos
Image from wikimedia available in the public domain
