When the rains came

I haven't paid much attention to Hollywood's biblical blockbusters since I turned about 20.  For the most part, they seemed both bad theology and bad aesthetics.

But the release of Darren Aronofsky's Noah may draw me back to the theater, just out of morbid curiosity. 

The story of Noah and the Ark is known to all.  Kids have (or used to have) as toys small wooden boats that they could march their little lions and giraffes into -- two by two.  As the story was told to us in Sunday School, God did seem a bit excessive in his irritation with mankind, but then we weren't sure exactly what mankind had been up to, back in those antediluvian days.  But, it all ended well for our heroes -- the dove, the olive branch, God's covenant embodied in a rainbow.

James Baldwin added a bit of uncertainty to the denouement, it's true, by alluding to the ambiguously hopeful language of a Negro spiritual:  "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time".  But that was later -- no one told me anything in Sunday School about any "fire next time."

The reviews in publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker make it clear, however, that Aronofsky has presented us with no Sunday School pageant.  He reads the story in the Bible as revealing to us -- or at least to him -- an appalling world, an appalling God, and a frighteningly appalling Noah.

As both child and adult, I've always read the story in Genesis as describing a world much like our own, where humans just like ourselves had been increasingly acting out, as we humans are apt to do, until a somewhat anthropomorphic Deity finally felt he'd had enough.  Modern society hadn't yet invented "time out, go to your room" or "you're grounded" as punishments for wayward kids; under the circumstances, only mass drownings seemed appropriate.

But Aronofsky proposes that in the brief three chapters of Genesis since Eden, the world had gone downhill -- physically and morally -- in a big way, rendering our present-day fears of global warming and criminal conduct somewhat laughable by comparison.  Fallen angels still hung around earth, now embodied as 16-foot high "Watchers" who, although fallen and frankly plug-ugly, were friendly and helpful to Noah and family as they built their ark (more a floating box than a boat), all without the assistance of Home Depot.

Humans back in the day tended to live many hundreds of years; Noah himself was about 500 years old when he got the chilling word from God.  We might be getting a bit irritable at that age ourselves, and can sympathize with the irritation and intolerance that Aronofsky's Noah apparently displays toward everyone, including his own family, and ultimately toward God himself.

So does Aronofsky get it right?  My own version of the Bible explains the events leading up to the Flood fairly succinctly as follows:

When men began to multiply on the earth, and had daughters born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and they took wives for themselves, as many as they wished.  Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is flesh.  His lifetime shall be one hundred and twenty years."

There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men, who bore children to them.  These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

When the Lord saw that the wickedness of man on the earth was great, and that man's every thought and all the inclination of his heart were only evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth and was grieved to the heart.

Genesis 6:1-6.

  My edition of the Bible seems somewhat frantic in offering an unusual number of reassuring annotations to these verses, annotations that don't entirely alleviate the peculiarity of their imagery. 

Who were the "sons of God"?  From the reviews I've read, I'm not sure that Aronofsky deals with that issue, but some writers have suggested that embodied angels had been dallying with fair human women.  Sort of a "Leda and the Swan" myth.  My Bible's annotation insists that the sons of God were the descendants of Seth and Enos, while the "daughters of men" may well have been wicked offspring of Cain.  An interesting, but not surprising, inclination to blame the women for any resulting improprieties. 

But it's of course the "giants on the earth" who really grab our attention, as they did Aronofsky's.  To him, the giants were huge angels embodied in stonelike bodies.  To the annotator, they were merely "men who were noted for their strength and cruelty."   

Genesis says nothing about the post-Edenic earth's having fallen into environmental crisis, or having been ravaged by constant warfare between brutal contending forces (although, a few verses later, it is proclaimed that the earth was "corrupt" and "filled with violence.")  But, on the other hand, neither does Genesis claim, as I gathered from Sunday School, that men like us lived peaceably if wickedly together, happily tilling the soil of the Fertile Crescent and raising cheerful but corrupt families.  It just doesn't say much of anything on the subject.

A brief textual description of an astonishing and powerful event presents great advantages to the dramatist.  He can interpret the event in any of a number of wildly differing fashions, none of which do harm to the underlying text.  He can bring his own hopes, fears, and obsessions to the story he tells.  Ancient Greek dramatists famously made such use of their civilization's own myths and legends.

It sounds to me that Darren Aronofsky has done exactly that.  And I'm afraid I can't resist going to watch it.