Darren Aronofsky on Noah and the environment in Paris

Darren Aronofsky on Noah and the environment in Paris December 1, 2015

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Darren Aronofsky is in Paris right now, taking part in a massive art project for the climate talks there, and the New York Times posted a short blurb yesterday in which he referred to the environmental themes of his most recent movie, Noah:

Mr. Aronofsky’s most recent film, “Noah,” is about the biblical flood and humanity’s failure to stop it. “There’s a very important environmental message in it,” he said.

He added: “Most of the work I do outside of storytelling is work for environmental causes. When I was 16, I was really lucky to hook up with an organization called School for Field Studies. It’s out of Salem, Mass., and they send high school students to environmentally fragile places around the world. One year I went with them to Kenya, and the following year to Prince William Sound, where I studied thermal regulation and harbor seals. Two years later was the Exxon Valdez spill.

The Times reporter gets the point of the film slightly wrong, I think.

For one thing, the flood is presented not as a consequence of mankind’s actions, but as something that is sent by God as a punishment or remedy for those actions.

Thus, the film cannot be about “humanity’s failure to stop” the flood, because the film never hints that it would even be possible for humanity to stop the flood. Indeed, the film strongly questions whether it would even be desirable to stop the flood.

More interesting to me is Aronofsky’s statement that the film has “a very important environmental message” — because when I interviewed him prior to the film’s release, he explicitly said that his movie wasn’t “an environmental message film”.

Now, of course, many people involved in the making of Noah have discussed how the film and its production were driven by environmental concerns, including:

Plus, Aronofsky himself has talked about how the look of the film was inspired by the Exxon Valdez spill and the Alberta tar sands; he linked the themes of his film to the environmentalism of Pope Francis; and he and his co-writer Ari Handel took part in a Noah-themed panel discussion on the nexus of faith and environmentalism.

And Aronofsky’s film is hardly the only movie about Noah to draw environmental lessons from his story; see other Noah-themed films such as Noah’s Ark (1999), Evan Almighty (2007) and Unogumbe (2014). (See also the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which aliens decide to destroy humanity for harming the planet, and specimens of all animal species are selected for preservation in an “ark”.)

So why did Aronofsky tell me Noah wasn’t “an environmental message film”?

I suspect it was because I was interviewing him for Christianity Today, and — mindful of the controversy that had been kicked up by Brian Godawa’s early script review (which was headlined ‘Darren Aronofsky’s Noah: Environmentalist Wacko’) — he was cautious regarding how that theme would be perceived in evangelical circles.

That’s just speculation on my part. But, since I interviewed him a full month before the film came out, it’s something I’ve wondered about every time I’ve come across one of these other interviews that gets into the environmentalism more explicitly.


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