Retro Review / Personal Essay by Michael O’Malley
1. Faith Film
When people talk about the films of director Darren Aronofsky, they tend to bring up his edgy arthouse hits like Black Swan or Requiem for a Dream; generally unmentioned: his largest box-office success by far, 2014’s Noah.
When people talk about the great films about faith, the usual touchstones are Biblical epics like The Ten Commandments or postwar European dramas like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (or, depending on the Evangelicalness of the audience pool, modern “faith-based” film industry hits like Facing the Giants or Fireproof); also left unmentioned: Noah.
And yet Noah, the 2014 oddball Biblical fantasy epic, directed by Aronofsky, has stuck with me. It won’t let me go, nor will the notion go away that the film’s semi-forgotten, oddball status belies that Noah is not only Aronofsky’s masterpiece but also the defining faith film of the past couple decades.
At first blush, this might seem unusual, since Noah is not, to be clear, a strictly “Christian” film in the sense that something like 2019’s Overcomer was. Unlike many modern Christian movies, Noah’s writers, Aronofsky and Ari Handel, are both Jewish and based large portions of the screenplay on midrash and the Jewish apocryphal text The Book of Enoch. Taken as a whole, the film is much more firmly grounded in Jewish tradition than in the modern Evangelical world. But it was certainly positioned within the continuum of Christian film upon its release in 2014, when Aronofsky and Handel went on a tour of interviews with flagship Christian media like Christianity Today and the film was screened for church groups and Christian leaders in the typical blocks. And it paid off: the film opened at #1 at the North American box office, and its worldwide theatrical haul ended up being just over $362 million.
But even then, Noah is hardly the only (or even the most) significant faith movie of its year in terms of industry clout and influence. 2014 was something of a banner year for Christian faith-based films. That year saw movies about faith make a huge splash, both from mainstream Hollywood (Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, for example) and the more sectarian wings of the filmmaking industry (the rebooted [and Nicolas-Cage-starring] Left Behind series, Pure Flix’s combative God’s Not Dead). 2014 represents a real turning point: the moment when it seems to have dawned on producers that Evangelical Christians were not simply an audience to fear offending (with features like The Last Temptation of Christ) but also one whose values could be represented onscreen for gigantic revenues.
The following years saw a veritable flood of Christian-marketed (and often Christian-made) cinema nudging into the mainstream. A non-exhaustive list includes: Do You Believe?, War Room, 90 Minutes in Heaven, God’s Not Dead 2, the 2016 Ben-Hur remake, Hacksaw Ridge, I’m Not Ashamed (based on the diary of maybe-martyr and definite Columbine shooting victim Rachel Scott—yikes), The Shack, Same King of Different as Me, The Case for Christ, The Star, I Can Only Imagine, Unplanned, and Breakthrough.
We get a little closer to the staying power of Noah in my mind if we think about where Evangelicalism was headed during the same time period, where there is a striking parallel to this gathering cinematic steam. Anyone who was walking within the Evangelical world at the time (yours truly, for instance) will surely remember the panic of the Obama years as the openly Evangelical George W. Bush was traded for the still Christian but decidedly not Evangelical Barack Obama. Suddenly, the imperialism and nationalism of Evangelicalism’s Bush years was overlayed with a deep anxiety that the political and cultural tides were turning against them in the United States, and Evangelicalism’s reactionary tendencies intensified, particularly in response to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (which, they feared, would force Christian employers to pay for employee abortions) and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage (which would, they feared, force Christian ministers to officiate those newly sanctioned marriage ceremonies). More outlandishly, many Evangelicals—along with much of the conservative world—came under the thrall of birtherism and an irrational fear that Obama, a somewhat but not drastically more progressive executive than W. Bush, was a radical Muslim bent on overthrowing America. It’s a more or less direct line between this moment and the Evangelical support of both Trump candidacies (about 80% of the Evangelical vote in 2016, 76% in 2020), the strikingly traction of Qanon conspiracies among Evangelicals, and the disheartening presence of Christianity at the January 6 capitol insurrection and adjacent rallies like the Jericho March. As American Christianity’s political fictions intensified, so did their capacity to tell (sometimes gentler) fictions at the cinema.
The majority of faith-based films since 2014 (and many before that, too) have been dreadful. More frustratingly, few if any of them have directly confronted the intensification of this nationalist, delusional radicalism, which is probably the biggest story in Evangelicalism of the past decade and a half.
And yet, here is Noah. In some respects, the movie is more or less the story people will remember from Sunday School: humanity has become increasingly violent and sinful, so God sends a flood to wipe them off the earth with the exception of the righteous Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals that ride out the flood in the large boat Noah builds at God’s command. But the movie zooms in closer than the Bible does, and what it finds at that more intimate position is that humanity is not just some teeming, anonymous mass of sinners but specifically a population of people descended from Cain (the man in the Bible who committed the first murder) who have become increasingly destructive under the thrall of the nihilistic ideology of their leader, Tubal-Cain, who justifies the ravaging of the environment and the subjugation of those who oppose them; moreover, these are not the typical heathens or pagans the Bible talks of derogatorily; they are believers in the same Creator as Noah, and they believe that this Creator has authorized them to act this way.
So this is Noah: a movie that is very much about the growth of delusional, even violent belief among people of faith—the most pointed confrontation of the presence of faith within calamity. What do we do in times of great destruction? What especially do we do when such destruction is claimed to be ordained by God Almighty? And most importantly, how do we even know that God actually is ordaining this?
Those are provocative, relevant questions for Christianity to ask in any era but particularly within the period of increased radicalization of the Evangelical Christian Right during the 2010s. But that’s not the controversy the movie generated. Instead, people like Ken Ham predictably condemning the film’s use of extra-Biblical material for being likely to “do more harm than good in relation to the Christian faith and the word of God,” while others saying that Christians should see the movie to “send a message to Hollywood” for having created a Biblical movie. It wasn’t just Ham either; a lot of the rest of the discussion, faith-based and secular alike, surrounding Noah’s release was also preoccupied with the film’s extra-Biblical content and the extent to which it did (or, more often in authors’ eyes, didn’t) adhere to traditional mainstream understandings of the Genesis flood narrative. Both this Christianity Today article and this NBC News piece are representative of the obsession with questions like “What’s with those giant rock creatures?” (the film’s take on the cryptic “Nephilim” reference in Genesis 6:4) and the concern that “Jews and Christians will have a hard time recognizing Noah in this film.”
As is often the case with movies, Biblical or not, the release-date discussion surrounding initially perplexing surface features of the film eclipses the more fundamental question: what does this all mean?
The fact that this question was so seldom asked of a particular movie given overt spiritual importance by believers is even more striking. There were a few Christian reviewers at the time who engaged with the movie on a more serious level, and there has been some academic study of the film since its release. But for the most part, mainstream Christian leaders and audiences moved on to the next spiritually important cultural object (perhaps the Nic-Cage-starring Left Behind adaptation?) without having to take the movie’s ideas seriously on any meaningful level.
Most movies of most types are forgotten, often quickly—2021 marks, for example, the 10-year anniversary of the release of Puss in Boots, a film that, despite the continued ubiquity of the Shrek franchise it is a part of, I doubt most people think about often. Christian movies, often ephemeral fluff despite the faithful’s rhetoric that supporting such films is an important part of the battle against Liberal Hollywood and indeed, the soul of the nation as a whole, disappear even more quickly. But in light of its depiction of a dangerously radicalizing core of believers, the obscurity of Noah seems more significant than just the typical pop-culture amnesia, or even the faith-film amnesia—it’s a burying (if not intentional then certainly convenient) of one of the few films directly engaging with faith’s 2010s crisis on the terms that crisis warrants: as an apocalypse.
2. Apocalypse AS DISASTER
In modern parlance, the word apocalypse is broadly used to describe a civilization-ending disaster: e.g. a zombie apocalypse, or a nuclear apocalypse. The Biblical story of Noah’s Ark certainly fits comfortably under this definition—humanity has turned wicked, so God resets the world with a flood. The language of Genesis shows a literal unmaking of the earth, with the waters of the sky and of the “deep” that God separated in the creation narrative in Genesis 1 crashing together in Noah’s Genesis 7 to return the world to its proto-creation state of Genesis 1:2: a “formless and void” waterscape. Only “righteous” Noah and his family (and the presumably innocent pairs of animals that board the ark) are spared.
It’s a story with a morality familiar to the Evangelical Christians who were part of the target audience for a film such as Noah: human beings do something wicked, so a righteous God must punish them. And aside from a few perplexing details (the aforementioned Nephilim) and an oft-forgotten coda involving Noah getting blackout drunk, stripping, and cursing one of his sons (also included in the movie), the Biblical account of this story plays that simple morality straightforwardly. Transgression, followed by consequence.
There’s something intuitive and even comforting about this arc. Of course a society plagued by evil should face the consequences of its actions. In the Biblical story, it makes even more sense: God Almighty ordained it. It’s easy to get uncritically caught up in these stories and simply accept their moment-by-moment justifications.
But with the more personal distance of the Noah movie, uncomfortable questions begin to arise: Is mass execution really a justified response to humanity’s evil? Was literally every person on earth outside of Noah’s family so completely evil as to deserve execution? Did anyone ask to board the ark with Noah’s family? What about the animals who weren’t among the pairs selected for the ark? Surely they weren’t wicked? These are questions that arise so easily that many of the flood narratives that populate other near-eastern cultures’ writings (either inspired by Noah’s flood or the source material for Noah’s flood, depending on whether the scholars you ask are Evangelical or not) pose these very questions within their flood narratives texts themselves. Mesopotamia’s Epic of Gilgamesh depicts the flood as a capricious plot from the gods against humanity, and the closely related Akkadian epic Atra-Hasis shows the flood as one of several attempts by the gods to stave off human overpopulation, ending its flood chapter, as does Gilgamesh, with one god, Enki, chastising the others for the unethicality of wiping an entire species off the planet. “It is right to punish the sinner for his sins, to punish the criminal for his crime,” Enki says in Gilgamesh, “but be merciful, do not allow all men to die because of the sins of some.”
That’s the true question of an apocalypse, or one of them, at least: the ethics of the whole venture itself. Who lives? Who dies? Who makes that decision? Within the framework of Evangelicalism, which is tied to the idea that the only reason a good person would die is to take the place of a bad person, there is little room for such questions—not when they implicated believers.
In theory, the movie Noah gives the similar answers. There are bad people who die (Tubal-Cain specifically, and more generally the entire familial line of Cain), and there are good people who survive (Noah’s family, and ostensibly Noah himself); God also, as in the Bible, arbitrates the flood. But in practice, the film’s answers are a lot more complicated than that.
Aronofsky and Handel’s screenplay seems almost perversely bent on finding the spaces between the traditional Biblical answers. God’s message in the film to Noah about the flood is maddeningly vague, a wordless vision depicting a flood washing away the teeming hordes of humanity with no instructions as to edge cases such as: What if someone outside of Noah’s family seems worthy of being on the ark? What is supposed to be done to those who stow away on the ark? Is humanity supposed to be wiped out entirely? God never returns to clarify how the morality of a “bad=death-by-flood” applies to these scenarios, which inevitably turn up in the movie. This is, in some ways, Biblically accurate; between chapters 6 and 7 of Genesis, God spends a collective 25 verses explaining the logistics of building an ark and stocking it with animals and food, while at the same time spending exactly zero verses providing nuance to His declaration that “I have determined to make an end of all flesh.”
Aronofky is open about this in numerous interviews. “There is very little in there,” he tells the Christian Broadcasting Network about the Biblical flood narrative, and to The Independent, he remarks, “When you read the Bible, there’s very little story there about it.” The simplicity of the Bible story, so comforting to some, is the very thing that opens the door to make Aronofsky’s take so disquieting. When the Almighty does not clarify Himself beyond broad binaries, it can be devastatingly hard to figure out what to do with the non-binary details of life.
This is not lost on the characters. Tubal-Cain says just that: “Nobody has heard from [the Creator] since He marked Cain,” he tells Noah, referring to an event nine generations prior in Genesis 4, when God banished Cain for the murder he commits (this is also Biblically accurate—the only time God is mentioned in the chapters between the banishing of Cain and the flood is a brief, cryptic aside involving Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch that ends simply with a statement that “God took him”). “We are alone,” Tubal-Cain continues. “Orphaned children, cursed to struggle by the sweat of our brow to survive. Damned if I don't do everything it takes to do just that.”
This speech is, from a certain perspective, the most relatable that the otherwise vile Tubal-Cain ever becomes, since it more-or-less describes the world we live in, too—it’s not as if God is frequently stopping by to help present-day believers figure out notoriously troublesome verses like Mark 12:17’s “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” or the numerous passages throughout the Bible that seem to condemn homosexuality, or the ones that promote genocide.
Most Christians (Evangelicals included) would not, as Tubal-Cain claims, say that the Creator has abandoned us; they would point to the Holy Spirit that indwells every believer as evidence otherwise. But that said, the Holy Spirit has hardly been collectively clarifying, as ongoing doctrinal debates attest. And in a world in which the Almighty does not declare from on high the meaning of scripture for all to hear and even purported revelations of the Holy Spirit bring people to conflicting conclusions, the act of interpreting God’s word and will can feel like a tooth-and-nail fight for survival. Because sometimes it is, or at least is perceived to be. The lives, for example, of members of the LGBTQ+ community are literally on the line in the fight for acceptance and affirmation within Christian institutions, and while on a systemic level, the homophobia of American Evangelicals bemoaning “religious liberty” is blatant, individuals behind the cause are also motivated by a sincere, deep fear (warranted or not) of Christianity being legislated out of existence in the United States. There is an existential tenor to the very mundane idea of simply deciding what words mean.
3. Apocalypse as Unveiling
There is a second, more ancient definition of the word apocalypse than merely “a disaster.” In its original form in Ancient Greek, the word apocalypse means “an uncovering” or “unveiling”—usually describing a story in which some divine secret is revealed that helps humanity understand their world. [Editor’s note: Vanderbilt theologian David Dark wrote what for my money is the best essay about the COVID-19 pandemic by inviting us to think about it as this kind of apocalypse.]
Probably the most famous apocalypse of this sort is the one described in the New Testament book of Revelation, in which God reveals to John of Patmos a startling vision of the future of heaven and earth, most likely intended to help early believers make sense of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. But the Bible is full of other, lesser-known apocalypses, too, from Jesus’s eulogy of Jerusalem in Luke 19, also probably intended to contextualize the sacking of the Temple, to the back half of the Old Testament book of Daniel, which most likely is meant to help the Jewish people understand the Babylonian exile.
In all of these cases, the curtain that usually separates humanity from God in order to show God’s control over situations where otherwise it might seem that God has left us. In the anguished midst of violence, destruction, pain, and anxiety, our brains grasp for understanding: Why did this happen? How could this happen? When will it stop? What does this mean? Apocalyptic writing answers these questions on a sociopolitical and often cosmic level. It gives meaning to the uncertainty of the present.
What’s more, the “disaster” kind of apocalypse begets the “unveiling” kind of apocalypse. In face of chaos and pain, we look for meaning.
The Noah story is famous for its flood apocalypse (a disaster-kind apocalypse), but it’s worth pointing out that in the Bible, a disaster apocalypse seems underway even before the flood: Genesis says that “the earth was filled with violence…and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.” The Noah movie, as it does with most things, elaborates considerably on the details of these few verses; in the film, mankind has begun to industrialize at the urging of the film’s antagonist, Tubal-Cain (who is traditionally regarded as the first blacksmith because of Genesis 4:22, which calls him “the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron”). This has left the earth an ashen wasteland, ravaged by machines and mines and fires.
This is where the film opens: its characters watching the world around them crumble. And as people do in times of chaos, these characters are trying to understand what this chaos means. They look for the unveiling type of apocalypse.
In the most striking scene in the entire film, Noah tells his family the story of creation, paraphrased (with some minor creative liberties) directly from the passage that opens the Bible, Genesis 1-3, starting with the awestruck beauty of the Creator’s work in crafting the natural world and ending with the famous “Fall of Man” when Adam and Eve eat fruit that God told them not to. Noah tells his children that God “gave [humanity] a choice: follow the temptation of darkness, or hold on to the blessing of light,” and that once humanity chose the darkness of straying from the Creator’s way, the world began to die. In Noah’s retelling, the story ends here: “For the ten generations since Adam, sin has walked within us. Brother against brother, nation against nation, man against creation. We murdered each other. We broke the world. We did this. Man did this. Everything was beautiful. Everything that was good, we shattered.”
By framing the Genesis creation story this way, Noah more or less explicitly signals to his family (and us viewers) what his purpose is for telling this story at all: this is an explanation of why the world is in shambles; this is why the planet is dying. This story makes sense of the current pain they and the whole planet are suffering. They know what they have experienced—now here is what it means. This is not the Creator’s fault. It is the fault of mankind.
It would be nice for Noah and his family if everyone shared this story and the meaning it conveys, but the central conflict of the film is that they don’t. This is what makes the descendants of Cain the story’s villains: they do not interpret the words of the Creator in the same way, nor do they share the same meaning for why the world is as it is.
Just as the scene with Noah explains the basic interpretive framework Noah’s family has for the catastrophe they inherit at the film’s beginning, there is a parallel scene with Tubal Cain that shows the perspective held by the line of Cain. In this scene, Tubal Cain tells of “the greatness of man,” which he explains thus: “When The Creator finished making the sky, the ground, the sea, and [the] beast[s], He wasn't satisfied. He needed something greater. Something to take dominion over it and subdue it. So He made us in His image. Us. This is your world… seize it.”
What makes this moment remarkable is that Tubal-Cain is paraphrasing from the same passage in Genesis that Noah is. The idea of humanity’s “dominion” over the natural world might seem strong, but this is the exact word used by God to describe humankind’s role on the planet in Genesis 1 (or, at least, the word that English translators have used)—in Genesis 1:28, God tells the humans He has created, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Taken with Tubal-Cain’s earlier assertion that “we are alone,” it’s not hard to parse this man’s apocalyptic vision that imbues meaning to the catastrophic world at the beginning of the film: that the Creator put humanity in charge of a world fated to decay in the Creator’s absence, making humankind’s mandate to “dominate” the world even more essential as they must increasingly fight for survival. This is not within a completely different belief system as Noah’s; Lamech, Noah’s father, tells Noah at the movie’s beginning, “The Creator made Adam and then placed the world in his care. This is your world now, your responsibility”—more or less using “care” and “responsibility” to replace the “dominion” and “subjugation” of Tubal Cain’s beliefs. The actions of both hero and villain hinge on the word of God; the conflict—the one that tears the world asunder—is in the gap between “responsibility” and “dominion,” i.e. in how to interpret that word.
4. Apocalyptic Disagreement
This is a feature of a world without direct and unambiguous communication with God. It is the same feature that split Christians over the issue of immersion versus sprinkling in baptism. It is the same feature that had many early Christians demanding that male gentile converts lose their foreskins. It is the same feature that resulted in abolitionist Christians and enslaving Christians to disagree over whether or not the Bible allowed one to own a person of African descent. It is the same feature that resulted in disagreements among Christians over whether or not interracial marriage is sin. The same feature that today ignites a scorched-earth war over whether or not LGBTQ folks deserve the full acceptance of Christian institutions, or whether critical race theory is “gospel.” Not all of these hinge directly on interpretations of scripture, but most do on some level, and they all turn on the interpretation of God’s will. The obvious question for believers in such schisms is: what to do when you can’t agree on what the will of God is? What to do in an apocalypse with no apocalypse?
There are, of course, some disagreements that reasonable people should be able to move past—I think we’re probably good to not stake too much on whether we can all get on the same page about the process of baptism. But any honest survey of the theological dividing lines will inevitably come to those that are inherently high-stakes: the ones where life is on the line. There are Christians who support conversion therapy when the psychological costs of which on LGBTQ folks can be literally fatal; there are Christians who are convinced that “carbon dioxide's warming effect is likely so small as to be undetectable” and who call attempts to address climate change “spiritual deception,” when even just a fraction of climate-change-fueled disasters cost nearly $10 billion in heathcare—money that represents a staggering total of human suffering. The list goes on. These are not arbitrary or inconsequential disagreements. These are disagreements where truly divergent ideas about the desires of God have significant consequences on human life. These are disagreements in which an entrenched, predominantly white Christianity have staked their beliefs in places within these debates that directly harm other human life. And when I watch Noah, this is the part of my mind the movie catches on.
These disagreements are apocalyptic, in both senses of the word: capable of causing physical calamity and purporting to unveil the secrets of the divine will. The fact of living within a calamity becomes the act of interpreting it. Noah and Tubal Cain represent dueling ideologies, sure, but in a sense, their circumstances never gave them an opportunity to do anything but embody an ideology. In the absence of God explicitly communicating the divine will, they must interpret for themselves, and in the presence of an existential threat such as the ravaged earth at the film’s opening, they must cobble together their own apocalypses. There is a soft self-idolatry in declaring one’s own apocalyptic “unveiling” in lieu of the Creator doing so, but surviving within the landscape of the antediluvian earth requires them to decide where they stand re: Genesis. Does mankind have dominion over creation? Then it is only reasonable to pillage natural resources in order to survive, as the descendants of Cain do. Does mankind have a Creator-given mandate to care for creation? Then survival involves the protection of living things and their environment, as Noah and his family does. The very act of existing in such a world is one of interpretation.
We American Christians live in apocalyptic times. The world in which we live is shaken by calamity that threatens to upend society, from the immediate threat of cross-bearing protesters raiding the U.S. capitol building to the looming, long-term specter of climate change—and if you talk to someone more conservative than I am, they’ll also stake society on these issues (plus the issue of abortion), even if they word the problems in a way that validate their own perspectives (as I have with mine). The most prominent disagreements are ones where lives are, in some form or another, on the line, making neutrality impossible. Indifference to, say, the acceptance of queer love is essentially passively hitching your wagon to whatever ideology dominates at the moment (and whatever human cost ensues), and the same goes for any number of other contemporary fights. Many of these disagreements of our current moment are not, of course, new, but the frequency by which these disagreements puncture the privileged perception of neutrality does seem to be escalating.
As on Noah’s dying planet, it’s impossible to live without making conscious decisions about these disagreements, with human life at stake. So at least epistemologically, we exist in a brutal stalemate: each claiming the blessing of God while the human cost escalates.
5. God’s Will
For those embroiled in (and even endangered by) these fights, it is tempting to wish for an apocalypse in the classical sense: that God would peel back the sky and declare what this all means—simply arrive and make the divine will completely unambiguous. The incontrovertible presence of God would surely set things right. So in the face of calamity, believers cry, “Come Lord Jesus,” invoking just such an event.
The perversity of the Noah film is that such an event occurs not twenty minutes into its runtime, and it does nothing to make the fight for human life easier. The presence of direct revelation from God leaves us with no fewer questions than before.
In the Bible, Noah receives a reasonably straightforward revelation. The passage in Genesis 6 just says, “And God said to Noah,” followed by a beat-by-beat explanation of the plan for the flood, right down to specific measurements on how big to make the ark. Things are not so easy in the Noah film. Not long into the movie, Noah receives a vision from the Creator detailing the now-famous plan to wipe out all life from earth with a flood, except for those in the large boat the Creator wants Noah to build. Perhaps “detailing” is too strong of word choice to use here, because what Noah sees is pretty oblique: an underwater scene of a submerged crowd, their hands clawing at the water as they drown. A message from the Almighty, certainly (at least, almost certainly—when Noah is asked if “He” spoke to Noah, Noah responds with a just slightly unsure “I think so”). But it’s hardly one to quell any doubts over interpreting God’s will, and one of the first things Noah does after receiving this vision is to go to his grandfather, Methuselah, to ask him what it means.
The ambiguities in just what the vision in Noah means haunt the rest of the film. After speaking with Methuselah, Noah concludes that the vision indicates that the Creator is sending the flood to wipe out all human life, since it is human life that has broken the world to begin with. For Noah, this means that it is also the Creator’s will that he and his family are to be the final human beings, surviving the flood only to preserve the two-by-two animals in the ark so that animal life will be reborn in the new world after the deluge. As Noah sees it, God does not want human life to continue after Noah’s children.
Immediately, the film begins to complicate this narrative. It is, after all, one thing to passively let the human race drown in the flood outside the ark; it is quite another thing to actively enforce the idea that humanity must die, an enforcement that looks an awful lot like murder.
First, there is the case of Na’el, a woman with whom Noah’s son Ham falls in love and whom Noah, convinced that God has decreed that there should be no further human generations, intentionally leaves trapped outside the ark when the rain starts—guaranteeing her death. Then there is Tubal-Cain himself, who sneaks onto the ark in hopes of taking over the last chance for humanity’s survival and thus further extending his (in his mind) divinely mandated dominion over creation. Noah and Ham together kill Tubal-Cain in perceived self-defense. There is a deep tension felt between these act and Noah’s core belief that the Creator made humankind to care for life.
And finally, in the most wrenching complication of them all, there is the film’s climax, when on the ark it is discovered that one of Noah’s daughters-in-law, Ila, is pregnant with twin girls, to whom she then gives birth before the flood waters have subsided. If the Creator’s will is for Noah to shepherd in the extinction of humankind, then surely both of these children must die. Did the Creator truly mean that new, innocent human life must be extinguished along with the collective evil of Cain’s descendants? Not according to Ila and Noah’s wife Naameh, both of whom scream protests as Noah holds a knife above one of the infants, preparing to strike.
This final scenario is heavily reminiscent of another famous story from Genesis, the infamous Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham is directly commanded by God to make a human sacrifice of his son, Isaac, only to be stopped by an angel at the very moment Abraham picks up the knife to kill Isaac, an angel who tells Abraham that this whole scenario was to test his devotion to God. Noah’s events form a twisted inversion of Abraham’s story’s resolution. There is no angel appearing to halt Noah’s hand; typical of the world of the film, Noah’s situation forces him to act without explicit divine guidance, based on interpretations of past divine guidance.
It’s this moment that breaks Noah’s commitment to his interpretation. He looks to the sky and tells the Creator, “I cannot do this.” He cannot kill the child, even though he believes God commands it. And of his own volition, without an angel to permit it, without a new vision to guide him, he puts the knife down.
For Noah, still convinced of the validity of his interpretation of the Creator’s will (if not committed enough to follow through), his action means that he has let down the Creator, betrayed his appointed mission. “I failed Him,” he says in the film’s coda, once the flood waters have receded. Humanity, the species that destroyed the first creation, will persist in this fresh new world to destroy it once again.
But in its final minutes, the movie presents a challenge to that idea—one that not only confronts Noah’s feelings of failure but also his earlier interpretation of the Creator’s will. In a quiet conversation between Noah and Ila, Ila quietly but firmly pushes back against Noah’s belief that the Creator appointed him as steward to humanity’s extinction.
The Creator “chose you for a reason,” she tells him. “He showed you the wickedness of man and knew you would not look away. But you saw goodness, too.” According to Ila, Noah’s ultimate reluctance to end all human life is not a betrayal of the Creator’s will but part of its design. “The choice was put in your hands because He put it there. He asked you to decide if we were worth saving. And you chose mercy. You chose love.”
This interpretation is striking for the ways in which it pushes against the very energies that have animated the characters throughout the film: an offering of love and mercy as an alternative to total punitive justice, an extension of a second chance after deep depravity, a rejection of complete subjugation and violence in response to opposition. Perhaps most radical of all is that small word: choice—the idea that perhaps the Creator’s will is to give human beings room for autonomy and a voice in deciding what it right. As screenwriter Ari Handel says in an interview, “Noah is given every opportunity to come to this affirmative, merciful decision—God brings him there, but it’s given to Noah to decide.”
The word choice unshackles the “righteous” life from the endless quest to define human life in terms of rigid interpretation of the divine will. It is a reordering (but not a rejection) of Noah’s initial belief that humanity must care for creation—not that human flourishing is that which follows what the Creator has willed, but that the Creator’s will is that which follows human flourishing.
As all interpretations do, Noah’s earlier recounting of the Genesis creation account leaves out pieces of the canonical Genesis story, but probably his most significant omission is the words that the Creator tells every living thing, including humanity, after its creation: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Baked into the very order of existence is the idea that the Creator wishes for the collective flourishing of life, an idea that Noah, in his dogged grasping for the divine will, revises when he understands the apocalyptic vision about the flood to mean a complete end to human life. Ila’s message gently undoes that revision, leaving room for the possibility of human flourishing if humanity chooses it.
And Noah does choose it. In the movie’s closing minutes, he returns to his family and gives a birthright to the granddaughters whose lives he once believed the Creator had condemned: “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” Significantly, Noah makes this realignment without any direct revelation from the Creator—he has, in a way, leaned into the idea that in a world without a divine meaning-apocalypse, humankind must do the work to interpret their own meaning based on what they know about the Creator.
As those only familiar with the Sunday School version of Noah will remember, at the end of the Biblical Noah’s Ark story, God puts a rainbow in the sky to signal a promise that never again will a flood be used to wipe out all life on earth, and in the film, it’s only after Noah blesses his granddaughters that the rainbow radiates across the sky—essentially a blessing of life’s flourishing after the flood. A film full of uncertainty ends on a note of at least some clarity: humanity, with divine blessing, once again taking up the mantle of stewardship of the earth in a world made anew, this time bent around the idea of life’s thriving. This is as close as the movie comes to having a devotional thesis of the kind that a more traditional faith-based film might have: protect life.
6. Orthodoxy WILL NOT SAVE US
Reactionary, conservative Christianity has co-opted the word “life” in a way that’s reductively focused on the unborn, while at the same time, ironically, using it as a cudgel to justify all the litany of ways conservative politics have failed to protect life on a national and planetary scale. But Noah replenishes the word with its planetary (even cosmic) scale. The same blessing describes every facet of creation in Genesis 1: “God saw that it was good.” This phrase has an egalitarian bent to it, not prioritizing one thing over the other, until humanity is breathed into existence “in the image of God.” Many have argued that this makes humankind more important than the rest of the universe, but even then, the Creator gives humankind the same directive as all other life: “Be fruitful and multiply.” And to the extent that humanity is given “dominion” over the earth, they are only told so under the understanding that they will not kill—in fact, they are given the same vegetarian diet as all other life (an oft-forgotten piece of Genesis). Even when, after the flood, God grants permission for humans to eat animals, they are told that they “shall not eat flesh with its life,” a phrase made seemingly under the antiquated understanding that the lifeforce of a living thing was contained in its blood. Again, life itself in its broadest possible understanding is to be protected.
A fundamental feature of humanity’s project in creation is to promote the flourishing of life, the movie argues. Moreover, it argues that life itself is sacred, not the command to preserve life. In these final movie scenes, Noah spares human life before he actually believes that the Creator has blessed his decision to do so, which has startling (and perhaps uncomfortable for some believers) implications about what the film is saying about the hierarchy of sacredness in the world. It’s not that the Creator’s command to preserve life is sacred but rather that life itself is sacred—a small but crucial difference because it values tangible effects over obedience. What should believers do when the will of God is unclear, as so often it seems? Reframe the question by focusing on what we know God values: life, in its holistic sense. What can we do to value life, as God does?
This, of course, seems like little help in resolving the conflicts the movie sets up, and which we modern-day believers experience regularly. After all, this merely shifts the conflict from interpretation of God’s rules to interpretation of God’s values. Instead of fighting over meaning, the fault lines of our divisions will fall between different ideas of what God values, and what actions these values necessitate. To put it in the movie’s terms, does God value caretaking or dominion? To put it in the terms of our modern culture wars, does God value heterosexuality more than open-handed love, business over the planet, the unborn over comprehensive healthcare?
But such thinking misses what is so transformative about Noah’s change of heart in the movie. When Noah puts down the knife rather than kill his granddaughters, he is shaping his actions based not on obedience to God but on the value that life should live. He is basically short-circuiting the framework that leads to such intractable conflicts such as dominion vs. caretaking. In a moment of indecision, the exegetical specifics of what the Creator says are less important than actions that help other human beings. In short, don’t argue—act.
It’s tempting to spend our time defining and honing orthodox views to combat what we recognize as false orthodoxy. For evangelicalism, all is subordinate to God’s will, which for evangelicalism is usually strictly defined by the text of the Bible (“God’s love letter to us” or something similar is the usual logline). Thus, all is subordinate to one interpretation, which evangelicalism then spends its social capital defending. Evangelicalism’s mantra is “The Bible says,” and when the topic is what something “says,” then the struggle is inevitably on what it says. So when someone responds that maybe perhaps the Bible doesn’t actually say that abortion is the only political issue that matters (or that making abortion illegal is the only way to engage that issue) or that maybe it doesn’t actually support the mass eradication of homosexual desire, the conversation has already been defined on the terms of obedience, of orthodoxy.
The Noah movie isn’t so much an argument against interpretation or orthodoxy, or even against conflicts along those lines; it clearly has a take on what the God of the movie says and views is right, and Noah and his family are depicted as noble for how they stand up to the harmful theology of Tubal-Cain. But at a certain point, orthodoxy and the inevitable conflicts surrounding it become an obstruction. This goes doubly in times of calamity apocalypse. While we argue about conversion therapy, LGBTQ people continue to take their lives; while we wring our hands over whether or not it is a violation of religious liberty to mandate that Christian employers cover birth control in their employee insurance, people drown in medical debt and die uninsured; while we debate the role of human activity in climate change, the earth burns.
How many Christians last summer watched George Floyd die beneath the knee of a police officer and then said, “I would support Black Lives Matter, but—” followed by some theological nitpick? “The Bible doesn’t support Marxism”; “the Bible doesn’t support ‘sexual deviancy’”; “the Bible doesn’t support godless atheism.” Narrow obedience, robbing us of the solidarity that life obligates for life. And so life exists in groaning agony while a body of believers prioritizes futzing around with theological lines in the sand over the basic wellbeing of a creation that God has declared “very good.”
There are degrees of harm in this, but only degrees. Out of one kind of orthodoxy, the descendants of Cain dominate and destroy the earth, but out of the elevation of a different orthodoxy, Noah closes the doors of the ark on Na’el, leaving her to drown; he stands with a knife raised to kill two infants.
Orthodoxy will not save us. Orthodoxy will not save anyone. Salvation comes only when Noah puts away the knife, and with it an obsession with interpreting the Creator’s will.
This should not be confused with an abdication of justice. The world of the film is clearly being destroyed by specific sources, occurring on a systemic level. Such atrocities demand action; systems such as the industrial devastation of Tubal-Cain’s nation must be dismantled. The film is not timid about the cost of dismantling such destructive systems; the flood that the Creator sends to end the brutal system of Cain’s industry comes at the cost of countless human and animal lives—as the flood waters rise, the movie allows us to hear hundreds of people on the outside, screaming and banging on the exterior of the ark as they are slowly taken by the deep, and there is a profound tension between the fact that the Creator values life and yet destroys virtually all of it in order to rebuild. Noah has few comforting answers for that tension.
It’s helpful to remember that Noah does not end with this tension but rather with a way forward. The destruction of oppressive systems is not an end to itself. For life to flourish, it must exist within an environment that allows it to thrive, and for human life to flourish, it must have a community to nourish it. Noah himself does not find true life after the flood until his conversation with Ila brings him away from his self-imposed exile and into the world that his family is trying to build anew. “Help us to do better this time,” she tells him. “Help us start again.” Decoupling action from orthodoxy gives us the power to do as God has done: create.
Justice is not just the negation of harm but also the creation of something new and good. It’s important that the work that God calls Noah to in the Bible (and what Noah assumes the Creator tells him in the movie) is an act of construction: build and ark; build a space for the preservation of life. The radical dismantlement brought by the flood would have succeeded at nothing but erasure had it not been paired with the tangible space of ark, and the post-flood world would have meant nothing for human life without the creation of the community we see in the film’s final minutes. If life is truly to flourish, the negation of evil must come alongside the building of good. To care for life and for justice, the film presents, means the presence of both radical destruction and radical creation.
Creation, true radical creation, means embracing that divine idea that “God saw that it was good.” Creation is open, communal, brought together around the idea of this simple, shared goodness—a collective not hedged by destruction nor sifted thought the hoops of orthodoxy. It is a place for life to simply be, full and abundant. A space for us all.
This should not be mistaken for generic “unity” among humans. The language of “unity” and “healing” that has pervaded Christian discourse in the wake of Trumpism and QAnon (not to mention the decades—even centuries—of queerphobia and racism and classism that have pervaded American Christianity) rings so hollow because it implicitly denies the cost of justice. It acts as though the difficult work of dismantling the systems that turn Christianity into a tool of subjugation and destruction can be adequately reduced to simply “getting along.” This is, in the words of another Old Testament voice, to cry “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. A Christianity that in the name of Jesus buys into conspiracy theories that prop up a nationalist, fascist-leaning president cannot simply be, full and abundant, without dismantling what has made it so in the first place; nor a Christianity who views all other forms of life as justifiable collateral damage in a militant directive to ostensibly protect the unborn; nor a Christianity built on white supremacy and racial segregation; a Christianity devoted to markets and capitalism; a Christianity premised on allegiance to any nation, especially one who pursues supremacy and imperialism with such impunity as the United States.
To wrench Christianity from any of these or the myriad other entanglements that have made it a religion of abuse and calamity will be searing and painful, a long, excruciating process that will surely have great cost, both in terms of Christianity’s privilege in American society and also the individual congregations that surely will not survive the process. But the pain in justice should not be mistaken for the creation of such pain in the first place—division and destruction already exist and hold Christianity in their sway, devastating the environment, the LGBTQ community, Central-American immigrants, and any number of other groups on the receiving end of Christian domination. The anguish of tearing the faith from such division and destruction is a function of Christianity’s ensconcement in those systems, not of the act of pulling it free.
But in pulling Christianity from these systems, what to pull Christianity to? That is the work of creation. These two things cannot be decoupled: dismantling makes space for creation, and they must happen in tandem. Some have interpreted the cryptic line in Genesis that humankind is made “in God’s image” to mean that human beings have the capacity to create, just as God created the world. Noah’s insistence on using the name “Creator” instead of “God” leans into this idea, underlining that a fundamental characteristic of this deity is the ability to create. So as we work to tear apart that which causes harm, we also must work to make spaces that not only don’t cause harm but actually allow life to flourish.
In a world mid-apocalypse, where markets and police and orthodoxies beat back aberrations from the current order of things, the models for life-flourishing spaces are rare, though not unheard of.
There is a certain school of thought that revolution must be tied up in violence—violence to overthrow oppressors, to destroy unjust systems. And the Creator’s world-destroying flood in Noah certainly bears out the idea that systemic change cannot exist without destruction of some kind.
But what sometimes goes unmentioned is that a revolution cannot solely exist as violence; it must also create something new to catch us all falling out of the status quo, or else the language of revolution becomes the language of annihilation. The revolutionary language and actions of the Christian right may have an ideation of dismantling the things it views as harmful, but this vision is impoverished of any sense of solidarity or community with the broader creation. The most prominent examples of right-wing revolution show an imagination that cannot conceive of the creation of a space for all, whether that be the Unite the Right rally’s explicit embrace of the Confederate States of America and antisemitism, an Oregon militia’s attempt to turn public land over to private industrial use, or even just the seeming inability of the annual March for Life to address the material concerns of women who seek abortions and which create unwanted pregnancies to begin with. Right-wing movements are loudly (and sometimes forcefully) “anti”—anti-state, anti-abortion, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant—but rarely are they interested in the creation of something new, and when they are, such visions are pointedly exclusionary: a white ethnostate (obviously excluding other ethnicities), a Christian nation (presumably excluding other beliefs), a libertarian meritocracy (excluding those who cannot [or have been kept from] pulling themselves up “by their bootstraps”). Notwithstanding the obvious oppression of an ideology that, for example, would ignore someone’s human rights because of their immigration status, even the more “compassionate” corners of the right wing struggle to envision a world in which the needs of all are met. To put it in terms of the film, if they are not part of the rioting crowd actively trying to tear Noah’s ark apart, they are at least Noah himself, deciding who can board and who cannot.
It is rare, especially in the post-“end of history” world, to see the left dismantle oppressive systems with the point of a gun, but focusing just on guns and militia ignores the revolutionary creative acts that the left has accomplished. Most inspiring is the tangible creation of spaces that have presented a way for all life to thrive. This ranges from legal fights for collective ownership like community land trusts and Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia in Minneapolis to, when legal means fail, wild (if unsuccessful) experiments in anarchy like Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and direct action/civil disobedience like Philadelphia Housing Action’s occupation of vacant buildings to give people on the streets access to housing. These are visions for the future that have the capacity to allow life’s flourishing. In the context of an apocalypse whose effects will hinge on humankind’s ability to create a new, less oppressive world, these are theones building the arks.
Christians must ask ourselves why we side with orthodoxy over arks. As far as the mission to create a world in which all life can thrive is concerned, the Christian should be as invested as any other lifeform, because we are, in fact, lifeforms—despite the tendency of believers to focus on the metaphysical, we must not forget our essential physicality. Human beings are not set apart from creation, neither in Genesis nor in tangible scientific terms; we’re part of it. We have the specific call from Jesus Himself to “love your neighbor as yourself,” and it is not a call to an exceptional mission so much as it is an invitation into solidarity with all life. The building of an ark with room for all. Perhaps the QAnon Christians and the Trump Christians and the rest of us believers in need of sanctification cannot be argued into abandoning harm, but perhaps those who shake out of those beliefs in the coming flood can find their way into whatever spaces we have created—but only if we have created them and without stipulation.
That’s the reason Noah sticks in my brain even years past when most viewers have thought about it. I can’t think of a single film that’s as dogged in interrogating both the culpability and the collective promise of faith. This is every bit the film with the political, theological, and cosmological imagination that the mainstream Christian culture of the United States lacks. It’s an unshakeable film, one that I’m less able to shake with every passing year—one that dares to say that even in a theist world, we are all we have: not because the Creator has abandoned us but because the Creator has placed us in solidarity with the entire planet.
God saw that it was good; so should we.