Before Mother! was a critical darling, I think you can find seeds of Aronofsky recasting creationism from a darker perspective — informed by the extra-humanism of the Anthropocene (a perspective I live inside of a lot) — in, of all things, Noah. Which is a testament both to his vision as a writer and a stunning exposure of how the film industry operates, seeing as this interpretive rebuke got funded as a faith-based inspirational.
The visionary subversion at the heart of Aronofsky’s treatment of the Biblical flood is the conceit that God did not intend for humanity to survive. That He chose Noah because He needed someone to build the Ark, and intended that Noah’s offspring not be able to reproduce thereafter. This is pretty sharp stuff. Aronofsky interrogates the creation myth, and uncovers lurking in it a wholly alternate reading, one that exposes how nakedly we have privileged ourselves in the dominant interpretation of the story.
Aronosky’s interpretation instead privileges nature. Noah is deeply invested in calling back to the Garden of Eden, invoking its perfection (man in the Garden is central to the recurrent visions that tell him to build the Ark), and interpreting the task of saving two of every creature as recreating that perfection. In that reading, man is a pollution on the garden. Man’s survival through the flood therefore becomes our history’s formative error. In the film, God commands Noah to kill the newborn daughters of his assumed-infertile daughter-in-law while they are still on the Ark. Noah is morally incapable of carrying out this command. In some service to the dominant myth, Emma Watson gives us a pat explanation that this was God’s way of seeing whether man deserved to live or die – if Noah, uniquely situated to judge his fellow man after fighting to survive them all, could see it in his heart to exterminate the species, the choice would be self-justifying (we do get a bit of commentary from the avatar of man’s immorality in the film, a local warlord descended from Cain, that man’s defining quality is the ability to kill, which Noah cannot here). If not, then it would be because man deserved to live on.
But Noah doesn’t seem too assured of his own (purportedly) divinely-endorsed wisdom. Noah interprets his choice as a moral failure (and hell, Noah stabbed plenty of guys fending them off from the Ark earlier, didn’t he?). In a call-back to the Eden motif, the Biblical account of Noah later falling drunk and naked and being seen by Ham, who was therefore exiled, becomes an expression of Noah’s depression at dooming creation to suffer man’s evils again. Noah’s dipso mindless state, his nakedness, evokes a subconscious appeal to the Garden perfection he was attempting to revive, and Ham’s sin of knowledge of his father’s nakedness perpetuates the cycle of the fall (the genetic determinism theme here is also well-played – the film focuses on exterminating the spawn of Cain, who have become dominant, in the flood. The spawn of Ham, similarly, have been posited as a cursed line in some racist Biblical interpretive history).
The significance of Noah’s agency in even making the choice, though, is key to the moral doubt we are left with as an audience. The creator leaves it to Noah to interpret man’s worthiness in the world, effectively ceding the role of creator. Noah’s moral uncertainty suits the moment. The creator has expressed a kind of divine indifference to man’s fate, and so man lives on regretfully. When God exits stage right, it is almost as if to say that we have inherited the earth now, and tough luck, jerks. He will not wipe us out again because He has left us responsible for our own moral failings. Noah is drunk on the beach in a blinding depression because in violating God’s directive, he has asserted himself over the creator, and the creator is content to concede that authority to us. Noah cannot bear the responsibility he has claimed (which is a pretty resonant theme for us here in the Anthropocene, acting as gods over our planet).
The fact that this got marketed as a faith-based inspirational shows how stunningly little respect the studio has for that market. A quick CGI of the strobe-light rainbow at the end is basically all the service their reading of the myth gets here.
In the Anthropocene, we’ve broken down certain conceptual barriers between us and, well — everything that isn’t us — the animals (Darwin), the climate, the sum of natural resources on the planet. We have the means to understand our role in creation in a radically different way than we did in the year 1800, and culture (again, I posit) is still trying to react, break open its models of storytelling from explaining everything in terms of man’s relation to man to interrogating man’s relation to anything/everything extra-human.
One of the most pointed ways we can mark this shift in perspective is not the creation of new myth, though. It’s showing the marginal shift in old myth to stay relevant. It’s reinterpreting the myths that define our species in a way that specifically marks the evolution in our thinking. That’s what I really appreciate about this recent tear that Aronofsky’s on, he’s invested in documenting that evolution.