Postscript on Noah

I have been following a lot of the debate on the film "Noah" where critics like Dr. Brian Mattson, film maker Brian Godawa and others pan the film as decidedly divorced from the intent of the Biblical story.   In particular, the images that seem pulled directly from Gnostic ideas and Kaballah drive a lot of tit for tat arguments about the meaning of the film.

I guess I have to agree with Godawa and Mattson on this particular point - they are pointing to specifics in the film that seem to either contradict the Biblical text or subvert it with specific extrabiblical imagery and content one of the most obvious is naming a strange light-bearing metal after a prime text of Kaballah, the "ZOHAR".   The rebuttals all seem to say the same thing - yes those images are there, but they don't really mean anything negative.

Now this is a curious thing.  On what basis should any normal rational person believe that a filmmaker who stated that he drew on extra-biblical sources, who stated that he was making the "least Biblical" Biblical epic ever, who stated that environmental devastation was a key theme and who included specific Kaballah and gnostic imagery in the film did not intend those symbols to mean anything contrary to the admittedly sketchy Biblical text?   (more)


The argument is nonsensical.   Yes the mineral is named "Zohar" but it doesn't have anything to do with the Zohar text of Kaballah.   Yes the fallen angels are beings of immaterial light trapped in material bodies, but that has no relationship to gnostic dualism at all.   Yes, Adam and Eve are also portrayed as beings of pure light before the fall, but don't assume that has any meaning that might contradict them as being formed from the dust of the ground and the Christian notion that matter has no negative connotation in itself.   Yes the earth is a bleak place that has been clear-cut of all trees and strip mined of all minerals, and Noah insists all humans are meant to perish including himself and his family but we shouldn't think there is an environmental message there.   Yes two prominent characters "bless" their children with the skin of the original snake, but don't assume anything insidious was meant by that.

Godawa does make a link to the postmodern ethos where a text never means what its author intended, so the apologists for the film seem to be seeing what they as "interpreters" of the "text" of the film want to see.   But it remains odd that after acknowledging that the symbolism is there, they chide others for drawing the conclusion that the symbolism means something obvious.

Now on this I should be clear.   Aronofsky has every right to make whatever movie he wants and people have every right to see it and like it or dislike it.   That is not the issue.   The issue that critics of the film are bothered with are simple.

One, it was a bad film.

Two, though it was necessary to "fill in the blanks" and speculate about dialog and situations because the biblical text is so short and sparse, the film departed from what little Biblical text there is in ways that turned the basic theme of the story into something foreign to the text.

Three, it was marketed to churches as a Biblical epic and endorsed as such by a number of Christian leaders when it departed from the Biblical story in ways that should be troubling to any orthodox Christian.

All this is fascinating to me, troubling to me.

But from my perspective, the focus is on point one.   It was a bad film.