By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—I don’t know if it is more environmentally sensitive to go to a movie house or to watch the same film at home on a DVD. I suppose it would depend on the driving distance required for each option divided by the number of people in your party intending to watch the film.
It’s clear that renting the DVD from Redbox for one day is financially more prudent than paying for individual movie tickets, no matter how many are in the party. Money may also be a factor in environmental calculations. How many miles do I have to drive on the freeway to earn the amount of money it costs to take a group to the movies? How much gasoline will that use up, versus having my family watch a DVD with me on my home television?
I’ll leave that to mathematicians and statisticians to calculate.
San Diego Jewish World has a correspondent in Taiwan, Dan Bloom, who is a promoter of “climate fiction” or “Cli-fi” as literary and cinema genres. He has noted that Noah co-directed by Daniel Aronofsky and Ari Handel and starring Russell Crowe,is considered an important enough climate change movie as to warrant a nomination for the proposed “Cliffie” movie awards. “Cliffie” is derived from “cli-fi.”
While I don’t dispute Bloom, my own reaction to the film was that its more important statement was that man can come to woefully misunderstand his relationship with God. The fact that pre-diluvian man had despoiled the earth was the premise in the movie for why God decides to wash the world clean. But the most interesting conflict in the movie—the real drama, so far as I was concerned—was how Noah’s family pushed back against Noah’s delusion that God intended for his family, like the rest of humanity, to be destroyed.
It took some biblical legerdemain for Aronofsky and Handel to even come up with this plot line. In Genesis 7:13, we are told “On that very day Noah came, with Shem, Ham, and Japheth, Noah’s sons, with Noah’s wife, and three wives of his son with them, into the Ark—they and every beast after its kind, every animal after its kind, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, and every bird of any kind of wing.”
From this point on, I will discuss not the biblical tale of Noah, but the Aronofsky-Handel version. They are quite different.
In the Aronofsky –Handel version of the story, only two wives go aboard the Ark – the wives of Noah and his oldest son Seth. Although Ham seeks a wife from among the people about to be drowned, he is prevented from rescuing her by Noah. Thereafter, Ham’s resentment against his father burns so fiercely he is all but ready to kill Noah.
Noah’s wife is too old to conceive again, Seth’s wife is barren, and in Noah’s reasoning neither Ham nor Japheth are supposed to have wives. Noah believes that he and his wife are destined to take care of the animals rescued on the Ark and to eventually be buried by Shem and his wife. They in turn are to be buried by Ham and Japheth, who, being without wives, will not be able to have children. God, according to Noah, wanted humanity to become extinct when Ham and Japheth died.
But, to use the biblical phraseology, God opened up the womb of Seth’s wife, and she became heavy with child. Noah, convinced that all humanity, including his family, was evil, becomes enraged by what he believes is a transgression against God’s plan.
He declares that if a male baby is born to Seth and his wife, this will only delay by one generation God’s plan to eradicate the human race, and so perhaps a baby boy can be abided. But if a female child is born, she someday would be able to have another child (presumably fathered by Ham or by Japheth). To prevent that, Noah vows to kill a girl child upon her birth.
I’ll leave it to readers who haven’t already seen the movie to guess how this conflict is resolved. The more important point is that God’s intentions can be misinterpreted even by a man like Noah– whom God specifically chose to live through the flood and to be His zookeeper. And if one who was in such a close relationship with God can get it wrong, what must we conclude about all the people today who claim to be prophets who understand what God’s plans are for humanity? Logic tell us that they are even more likely than Noah to get it all bollixed up.
The moral of the Noah movie isn’t only that screwing up the environment is bound to bring horrible consequences. It is that anyone who says he knows God’s will is as likely to be as wrong about Divine Intentions as Noah was.
No leader who claims to know God’s will – whatever religion he or she pretends to profess – can truly be worthy of our unquestioning obedience. And that’s a lesson that all of us – especially the Jews, Christians, and Muslims mired in Middle Eastern conflict—cannot afford to ignore.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com