More on Aronofsky's Noah
Apr. 24th, 2014 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretReviewed the Torah passages of the flood, caught some interesting details that shed light on the film
- Naamah is in the Torah only marked as Tubal-Cain's sister; It's only Midrashically that she is Noah's wife, in the classic misogynistic Midrashic tradition that any woman who is mentioned in one of these genealogies must be mentioned because she's married to an important man. (Though to be fair, there are Midrashim that similarly impute husbands to Miriam)
Still, it's interesting that in the Torah she's Tubal-Cain's sister and Aronofsky removes that detail even as he's making Tubal-Cain a much more important character in the story. I think he wasn't interested in that particular dual-loyalty of husband vs. birth family, which is interesting for a few reasons.
First, because I think classically that is THE emotional horror underneath the story. Noah's Ark isn't horrific because Noah is leaving all the other random people behind, it's horrible because he's leaving his clan behind- the genealogy shows Lamech dying while Noah's in the process of building the Ark, and Methuselah dies at the onset of the flood.
Aronofsky's changes force Noah to confront the horror of losing not just his clan but the whole world. Clan is nothing more than a heritage, a legacy, a tradition, a distant memory of childhood. That's not what Noah is being forced to say goodbye to. He is being forced to say goodbye to everything he finds hateful, and since that is his whole world, he and those around him can't help but miss it, fearing the uncertainty of the new world order.
Secondly, because it refocuses the story on the domestic drama. Naamah has no commitments other than to her husband and to her children, and those commitments and only those commitments are what come into conflict in the Ark. And again, like I said, the internal misogyny of the text, which says that women only are interesting to the story when they're married to important men, but Naamah can't have any attachments of her own outside the ark to worry about. Naamah can't be angry for a betrayal by one of the men out there, she can't have a family she's losing, she can't have any old enemies or old lovers or old friends doomed to die in the flood.
But at the same time, the domestic drama of wanting both your abusive husband and your foolish children to find happiness is very compelling to me. And I liked that even though that's the plot, the final moments of the film, the final image of the film even, is not about any of that... it's about Noah finally seeking out Naamah and trying to give her happiness on her own terms.
-Another note worth mentioning is that the "I am the son of Lamech" scene is particularly ironic when you recall that per the Torah, both Noah and Tubal-Cain are the sons of (different) men named Lamech. Aronofsky doesn't make any mention of this Tubal-Cain's father in the movie, presumably because what works (ambiguously) in text is way more confusing on film. But fanoning that fact adds a nice resonance of mirroring to the Noah vs. Tubal-Cain dynamic.
- Naamah is in the Torah only marked as Tubal-Cain's sister; It's only Midrashically that she is Noah's wife, in the classic misogynistic Midrashic tradition that any woman who is mentioned in one of these genealogies must be mentioned because she's married to an important man. (Though to be fair, there are Midrashim that similarly impute husbands to Miriam)
Still, it's interesting that in the Torah she's Tubal-Cain's sister and Aronofsky removes that detail even as he's making Tubal-Cain a much more important character in the story. I think he wasn't interested in that particular dual-loyalty of husband vs. birth family, which is interesting for a few reasons.
First, because I think classically that is THE emotional horror underneath the story. Noah's Ark isn't horrific because Noah is leaving all the other random people behind, it's horrible because he's leaving his clan behind- the genealogy shows Lamech dying while Noah's in the process of building the Ark, and Methuselah dies at the onset of the flood.
Aronofsky's changes force Noah to confront the horror of losing not just his clan but the whole world. Clan is nothing more than a heritage, a legacy, a tradition, a distant memory of childhood. That's not what Noah is being forced to say goodbye to. He is being forced to say goodbye to everything he finds hateful, and since that is his whole world, he and those around him can't help but miss it, fearing the uncertainty of the new world order.
Secondly, because it refocuses the story on the domestic drama. Naamah has no commitments other than to her husband and to her children, and those commitments and only those commitments are what come into conflict in the Ark. And again, like I said, the internal misogyny of the text, which says that women only are interesting to the story when they're married to important men, but Naamah can't have any attachments of her own outside the ark to worry about. Naamah can't be angry for a betrayal by one of the men out there, she can't have a family she's losing, she can't have any old enemies or old lovers or old friends doomed to die in the flood.
But at the same time, the domestic drama of wanting both your abusive husband and your foolish children to find happiness is very compelling to me. And I liked that even though that's the plot, the final moments of the film, the final image of the film even, is not about any of that... it's about Noah finally seeking out Naamah and trying to give her happiness on her own terms.
-Another note worth mentioning is that the "I am the son of Lamech" scene is particularly ironic when you recall that per the Torah, both Noah and Tubal-Cain are the sons of (different) men named Lamech. Aronofsky doesn't make any mention of this Tubal-Cain's father in the movie, presumably because what works (ambiguously) in text is way more confusing on film. But fanoning that fact adds a nice resonance of mirroring to the Noah vs. Tubal-Cain dynamic.