There is an image in the movie Noah that I can't seem to get out of my head. As Noah stands on the scorched earth, facing down the watchers, a stream - presumably a sign of God's blessing or presence - bubbles up and spreads across the land, bringing new life wherever it goes.
The tension between that scene and the impending chaos, between the water that gives life and the water that destroys it, is breathtaking. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it seems that it is explicitly that tension that stands at the center of the whole movie.
Only, the focus of the tension isn't really the water, but God.
In his interpretation of this ancient tale, Aronofsky gets at a question we have been asking ourselves for centuries:
Can God be trusted?
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Can we be honest for a moment? The flood narrative is a horrifying story.
How we ever decided that the story of God wiping out all that life -- of Noah closing the door to the ark as family after family after family - men, women, and children - faced the surging waters and their inevitable, suffocating deaths -- how we decided that was a kid's story, worthy of wallpaper and bed-sheets, is beyond me.
We have largely numbed ourselves to this terror, but think about what you felt the last time you heard about some poor, unhinged mother drowning her children in the bathtub. Everything in our nature groans under such an atrocity because the idea that a mother, who should love and nourish and protect her child, would instead commit such violence, against her own flesh and blood, defiles our deepest sensibilities.
To pretend we don't shudder to think of God in the same light is to lie, at the very least, to ourselves, if not to others as well.
So, how will we stand in the face of such a God?
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One of the (many) beautiful things about Noah is that it allows us to explore the possibility of the other.
For example, Og, one of the watchers, explains that they came to Earth because they saw how Adam and Eve had been cast out of the garden and they pitied them. Isn't that the emotion we'd expect from God? Isn't that pity, that compassion, what we would expect to override His frustration or His anger?
Shouldn't pity have held the waters at bay?
Or, think about Tubal-Cain. What has he done, if not provide for those under his charge? When the cities' mines run dry and the people are starving, he leads the charge - note that: he doesn't sit back and command others forth, but he, himself, leads his men into battle - to secure for them the provisions they feel they need, even to the point of challenging the Watchers in order to gain a place for his people on the ark.
Isn't that loyalty and provision what we would expect from God?
It is uncomfortable to think in those ways. We want to dismiss the Watchers as rebels and Tubal-Cain as a barbarian, but Aronofsky just won't let us. Instead, he paints each with generous and compassionate strokes. We respect the Watchers, giving up everything to help someone else; we empathize with Tubal-Cain as he rails against Noah for closing his ark to the world and threatening the lives of his daughter-in-law and the children she carries in her womb.
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Of course, some will say the answer to the horror of the flood is justice, the great rallying cry of our hero, Noah.
After all, while the Watchers had intended to show pity and to help man, what, exactly, had been the result of their aid? The wickedness of humanity was not chastened by our expulsion from the garden. Rather, through the help of Samyaza and his kin, that wickedness was able to grow and spread, finding fuller and more potent expression, until the darkness we embraced in the garden soon covered the whole of the Earth.
Or consider that, while Tubal-Cain intends to provide for his own, he accomplishes that end only through the destruction and exploitation of others and the world in which they live. More than that, the substance of what he provides, and manner in which he provides it, actually tear down the humanity of his own people, the very humanity he is seeking to preserve.
As Noah stands on the blood-soaked soil of the human encampment, watching men hand over their daughters to lustful soldiers in exchange for food, it's easy to see that the Watchers and Tubal-Cain were not the saviors we may have originally thought they were.
Perhaps those people really were beyond saving. Perhaps violence and hatred and greed are stains that just won't wash out.
However, the true crowning glory of Noah is that, even here, we find no solace.
See, one of the ways we numb ourselves to this story is to imagine some great chasm of time and temperament between ourselves and those ravaged by the flood.
Like Noah's wife, we are well aware of the deplorable nature of those out there, but we know ourselves to be good. While they were envious and spiteful and proud, we are loyal and strong and loving. We know enough to realize we are not perfect, but surely the good in us out-weighs the bad.
Aronofsky's Noah robs us of that conceit.
The great realization that Noah makes, as he stands in the camp of the descendants of Cain, is not just how bad they are. The realization he makes is that whatever wickedness he sees in them dwells also in him.
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There are many people who struggle with the dark turn that Noah takes as it becomes clear that Ila, Shem's wife, is pregnant.
For those who grew up with the story of Noah building his "arkie," it seems so drastically out of character for this supposedly righteous man to transform so suddenly into a murderous, raving lunatic.
However, if justice really is the answer we want it to be, can we really say that Noah's determination to cut down his grand-daughters is all that inconsistent?
If the pervasive wickedness of humanity is beyond saving and if that wickedness is universal - meaning, no one escapes its presence, regardless of the degree to which they act on it - by what right should any of Noah's family survive, much less grand-daughters who, as mothers some day, could perpetuate the evil the flood was meant to wipe out?
Can we really argue with Noah when he claims that that would mean the destruction of all that life would have been for nothing?
The fact that we recoil at the image of this knife-wielding Noah, shows that justice is no more an escape from a flood-sending God than anything the Watchers or Tubal-Cain had to offer.
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It turns out, then, that in the course of his film Aronofsky has offered us three possible replacements for God:
To those who believe God should have been more merciful, that His pity should have stayed his hand, he offers us the Watchers.
To those who believe that God should have done more to provide for His people, that their wickedness is due to some lack in this regard, he offers us Tubal-Cain and his subjects.
To those who believe the flood narrative is an example of justice, that the only right course of action was for God to wipe out all those wicked people, he offers us Noah holding a knife over his grand-daughters (and, consequently, ourselves).
Which brings me back to that image I brought up at the beginning of this post -- the water.
The "replacement gods" were all capable of producing horrors of their own, but only God, like the water, is capable of producing beauty in the midst of all the horror. Only God is capable of bringing life out of so much death.
Just as a drop of water from the sky was the first sign of the death of all things, it was a drop of water from the sky that restored the flower picked by Ham, bringing new life.
By the end of Noah, we may not find the horrors of this ancient tale any easier to bear. The fact that, upon finding dry land, Noah immediately drinks himself into a stupor, bears witness to that fact.
After it all, we remain at the mercy of the flood-sending God.
However, given that He, and He alone, is capable of turning terror into beauty, of bringing life out of death, perhaps at His mercy was the best place for us all along.
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