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So I finished "This Is Not For You," and got it in under the deadline. It took a couple of late nights, so my sleep-cycle is (once more) a little wonky, but I'm otherwise satisfied. My work-ethic remains crazy strong, yeah! NOw, if only I could apply it to every other thing in my life...
Next up: spine out and bank another short story, just in case Aghast magazine makes its Kickstarter goal--the link is here, if you'd like to donate (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1253195324/aghast-a-journal-of-the-darkly-fantastic)--and then go back to Experimental Film, Chapter Four, which I managed to put in some sort of vague order while talking about it with sovay last night. Then whatever comes next. There'sa lways something.
Over the weekend, Mom finally kicked her sudden cold, allowing us to leave Cal with her overnight and go see Darren Aronofsky's Noah. This hasn't been getting great reviews overall, which is unfortunate, but understandable; people who hoped it'd be another Passion of the Christ are off-put by its emphasis on modern psychology, especially as it applies to PTSD, and don't like the fact that Aronofsky's God is A) never called "God," just "the Creator," and B) kept very firmly off-screen. No burning bush here, just a series of fairly vague, symbolist dreams which Noah (Russell Crowe, aggressively bearded) is forced to try and interpret personally, with varying results. One way or the other, the film is far more rooted in Judaic mysticism than in Christian iconography, which you'd really think people would be quick to figure out (Old Testament, not New), even well before Noah's grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins, unaggressively beardless) shows up saying things like: "Mmm, yes. And what do YOU think it means? Oho, yes, I suppose it could mean that. Or not. Perhaps you should think about it again."
I mean, yes, the Apocryphal Watcher-angels are a tip-off (people keep referring to them contemptuously as "rock-Ents," because they've been punished for choosing to help the cast-out Adam and Eve by defecting from Heaven, and have therefore ended up encased in crippling shell of mud and stone melted onto them by the passage of their blazing bodies from outside time and space into the realm where gravity and mortality hold sway), as is the inclusion of never-explained things like explosive "zohar stones" and prediluvian animals like scaled, feathered dogs. But there's also a huge undercurrent of questioning which runs through the entire proceeding, the back-and-forth of a rabbatinical gathering: does any of this make sense? How can it? Is it a metaphor? Maybe not with the human stakes so high, so specific--there's an amazing sequence set right after the Ark has launching in which Noah and his family sit in the dark, listening to the desperate, drowning screams as every other person on earth takes a realistic yet excruciatingly long time to die. "We could trail ropes in the water," Noah's son Shem begs; "Surely they're not all evil?" Noah's adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson) pleads. And all Noah can do is sit there, shaking his head, because he just doesn't know.
These are basic human questions, already inherent in the incredibly small amount of information we know from the original text. A mere eight generations on from Eden, the world has split into two camps, each spearheaded by a descendent from the original family: Noah's, deriving from Seth, who husband the dying dregs of Creation the way Adam and Eve were supposed to, don't eat meat, preserve and protect whatever they can--and that of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), his murderous lineage obvious in his name, who believes that because humans were created "in his image" and then abandoned, forced to work by "the sweat [their] brow," it's their basic right to subdue everything in Creation to their will. Tubal-cain's speeches to his followers have a crazily familiar ring to them, a black mirror-echo of St. Crispin's Day which twists "men united against massively long odds can never fail" into "so let's just eat everything around us until it's gone, then eat each other! Strong over weak, fuck those who fall! If God really wanted us not to, he'd say something."
When you think about it harder, however--as Noah's eventually forced to, both by circumstance and by the hardships inherent to this task he's taken on--you're forced to realize that this can't possibly be as simple as good against evil, Seth against Cain, because both Seth and Cain were born with Original Sin. If everyone on earth has the rebel blood of Adam and eve inside them, then how can the innocent be truly separated from the corrupt? Maybe everyone's equally capable of atrocity--and though it's God's right to destroy what He created, it's equally humanity's right to assert that they are the way they are only because He made them that way. No wonder Noah ends up drunk and naked in a cave, after the waters finally do recede.
TL; DR: like all of Aronofsky's films, Noah is an amazing spectacle, just as difficult, unwieldy and odd as any exploration of faith seen through the eyes of a formerly Jewish atheist might be assumed likely to turn out. I'd watch it again, but thena gain, I like The Fountain. The rest of you will just have to make up your own minds.
Next up: spine out and bank another short story, just in case Aghast magazine makes its Kickstarter goal--the link is here, if you'd like to donate (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1253195324/aghast-a-journal-of-the-darkly-fantastic)--and then go back to Experimental Film, Chapter Four, which I managed to put in some sort of vague order while talking about it with sovay last night. Then whatever comes next. There'sa lways something.
Over the weekend, Mom finally kicked her sudden cold, allowing us to leave Cal with her overnight and go see Darren Aronofsky's Noah. This hasn't been getting great reviews overall, which is unfortunate, but understandable; people who hoped it'd be another Passion of the Christ are off-put by its emphasis on modern psychology, especially as it applies to PTSD, and don't like the fact that Aronofsky's God is A) never called "God," just "the Creator," and B) kept very firmly off-screen. No burning bush here, just a series of fairly vague, symbolist dreams which Noah (Russell Crowe, aggressively bearded) is forced to try and interpret personally, with varying results. One way or the other, the film is far more rooted in Judaic mysticism than in Christian iconography, which you'd really think people would be quick to figure out (Old Testament, not New), even well before Noah's grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins, unaggressively beardless) shows up saying things like: "Mmm, yes. And what do YOU think it means? Oho, yes, I suppose it could mean that. Or not. Perhaps you should think about it again."
I mean, yes, the Apocryphal Watcher-angels are a tip-off (people keep referring to them contemptuously as "rock-Ents," because they've been punished for choosing to help the cast-out Adam and Eve by defecting from Heaven, and have therefore ended up encased in crippling shell of mud and stone melted onto them by the passage of their blazing bodies from outside time and space into the realm where gravity and mortality hold sway), as is the inclusion of never-explained things like explosive "zohar stones" and prediluvian animals like scaled, feathered dogs. But there's also a huge undercurrent of questioning which runs through the entire proceeding, the back-and-forth of a rabbatinical gathering: does any of this make sense? How can it? Is it a metaphor? Maybe not with the human stakes so high, so specific--there's an amazing sequence set right after the Ark has launching in which Noah and his family sit in the dark, listening to the desperate, drowning screams as every other person on earth takes a realistic yet excruciatingly long time to die. "We could trail ropes in the water," Noah's son Shem begs; "Surely they're not all evil?" Noah's adopted daughter Ila (Emma Watson) pleads. And all Noah can do is sit there, shaking his head, because he just doesn't know.
These are basic human questions, already inherent in the incredibly small amount of information we know from the original text. A mere eight generations on from Eden, the world has split into two camps, each spearheaded by a descendent from the original family: Noah's, deriving from Seth, who husband the dying dregs of Creation the way Adam and Eve were supposed to, don't eat meat, preserve and protect whatever they can--and that of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), his murderous lineage obvious in his name, who believes that because humans were created "in his image" and then abandoned, forced to work by "the sweat [their] brow," it's their basic right to subdue everything in Creation to their will. Tubal-cain's speeches to his followers have a crazily familiar ring to them, a black mirror-echo of St. Crispin's Day which twists "men united against massively long odds can never fail" into "so let's just eat everything around us until it's gone, then eat each other! Strong over weak, fuck those who fall! If God really wanted us not to, he'd say something."
When you think about it harder, however--as Noah's eventually forced to, both by circumstance and by the hardships inherent to this task he's taken on--you're forced to realize that this can't possibly be as simple as good against evil, Seth against Cain, because both Seth and Cain were born with Original Sin. If everyone on earth has the rebel blood of Adam and eve inside them, then how can the innocent be truly separated from the corrupt? Maybe everyone's equally capable of atrocity--and though it's God's right to destroy what He created, it's equally humanity's right to assert that they are the way they are only because He made them that way. No wonder Noah ends up drunk and naked in a cave, after the waters finally do recede.
TL; DR: like all of Aronofsky's films, Noah is an amazing spectacle, just as difficult, unwieldy and odd as any exploration of faith seen through the eyes of a formerly Jewish atheist might be assumed likely to turn out. I'd watch it again, but thena gain, I like The Fountain. The rest of you will just have to make up your own minds.
