There is a story about a psychologist who proposed an idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president is accompanied everywhere – or was at this time – by a military attaché who carried the code that was needed to start a nuclear war in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The psychologist proposed that the attaché have the code surgically implanted near his heart and that he carry an axe in the briefcase. If the President decided to wage nuclear warfare, he would have to look the attaché in the face and say, “In order that millions of innocent people die, I first have to kill you to get access to the code.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff were horrified. They said if this system were set up, there would never be a nuclear war.
Noah, The new film starring Russell Crowe and Directed and co-written by Darren Oronofsky, proposes a kind of inverse problem. How do you take the noblest man – a good and gentle father, someone who is so good that he is a vegetarian and won’t even pick flowers because that would prevent their becoming seeds - and use him as a tool in the destruction of all life on the planet? The answer is presented in this film in the form of a Midrash. A midrash is an ancient Judaic tradition of filling out Biblical stories, particularly in the Torah – the first five books of the Bible, by Rabbis who put flesh on the bare bones stories as told – they describe the context in which the stories took place – sometimes based on textual interpretation, sometimes from historical information – and they can bring the characters to life – giving them psychological motives and enriching the stories – frequently to make a moral point or as a means of interpretation.
Raised a protestant, the idea of a Midrash was novel to me. I suppose that the kid’s versions of Bible stories – they used to be in Doctor’s offices when I was growing up – were a kind of Midrash, but they didn’t elaborate much. Mostly they presented visual images – in this case of Noah’s ark, with a prow and windows with pairs of happy animals sticking their heads out. And the story seemed mostly to be about the animals. In this movie, the animals are at best bit parts – it is the human drama that takes center stage, and the questions of justice – of good and evil, of the nature of man, and of the purpose of creation - take center stage. The questions are addressed in ways that I found to be gripping – it is a good movie – but also profound.
This film gives us access to an enigmatic character – indeed makes it clear to us that he is an enigmatic character – and it opens up his psychology in novel and interesting ways. The first of these is the mode of communication between the Archaic God and Noah. How does Noah know God? Bill Cosby, a million years ago, engaged in his own Midrash, a wonderful dialogue between God and Noah. God tells Noah, “Build me an ark 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high”, and Noah says, “Right,” pauses for a beat and says, “What’s a cubit?”
In this movie, God communicates with Noah much more ambiguously, through dreams. These dreams presage the ending of the earth, but they do so, as dreams are want to do, through visual images. Noah sees the mountain of his grandfather, and sees a deluge and people dying. He deduces that he needs to take his family with him to see his grandfather and to take whatever next steps God would have for him.
I have occasionally had patients who are convinced that they have dreams that have divine origin. I make it clear to them that I cannot interpret that type of dream. I am not an oracle reader. I can help them with more common every day dreams, dreams that are produced by their unconscious minds – dreams that are a reaction to events in their lives and that are serving a function – one of integration, problem solving, and wish fulfillment. I explain that understanding these aspects of their dreams will help them learn to communicate better with their unconscious minds and that the wisdom of their unconscious minds will be useful to them in navigating their lives.
Noah’s dreams are of divine origin, but they also seem to be constructed in the much the way that our more garden variety dreams are constructed. They contain the hopes and fears of Noah the person that we are getting to know in this movie. Noah is first introduced to us as a little boy. He is about to receive the blessing of his father when Tubal-Cain discovers them at a site where he wants to mine and kills his father in front of Noah’s eyes. Noah runs away. We next encounter Noah as a grown man with three sons – children he cares for and nurtures – guiding and teaching them as they try to scratch out a living together on barren ground. But when they are threatened by outsiders, Noah brutally defends his children, killing men with as much certainty as he displays in teaching his children not to pick the flowers. This good and gentle man is also living in a harsh and unforgiving world, one in which it is sometimes necessary to kill or be killed. He loves with abandon, but engages in violence as necessary – and perhaps with vengeance as a motive. His dream, then, contains both the fear and the wish that this world – this harsh and violent world that he dearly loves – be destroyed – not by fire, but cleansed - cleansed of the dirty and destructive creatures that are ruining God's creation - by water.
Noah’s Grandfather, Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins), helps induce a second dream, with tea, and gives Noah a seed from the Garden of Eden. These two tools help him create the ark. They also lead to a confrontation with Tubal-Cain, who is now the king of the hordes of evil people that God, and Noah, would eradicate. Noah’s family – in a departure from the Biblical text – consists only of his three sons and a barren girl that he has rescued on the way to Methuselah’s mountain. And Noah goes out into Tubal-Cain’s hordes to find wives for his sons. But he is confronted by nightmarish scenes of people who are trading their daughters for food and, sickened, he returns to the ark convinced that God wants him to save the animals, but destroy humanity. He concludes that his sons should be the last living people. This is neither the plan of his children, nor his wife. They want to live and to promote generations to follow. They are more aware of the love between them – and with him - that redeems their own wickedness.
Noah, as he engages in a terrible exercise that will result in the murder of many, becomes closed to the loving part of himself. He becomes essentially evil. And, I think, he projects his evilness, not only onto those, like Tubal-Cain, who deserve that, but also onto those he loves. As he does this, he removes himself from them and they react to that in various ways – his wife turns to Methuselah as an ally against his plan, and his son Ham, who tries to find a woman to take with him as his wife, becomes furious with Noah. Ham recognizes the evil in him, noting that Noah has caused the death of the woman Ham has found – a woman that Ham declares to be innocent. Noah becomes increasingly at odds with his family as he clings to his interpretation of what God wants him to do.
God, as is frequently the case, does not communicate with Noah as Bill Cosby’s God would. Instead, Noah is confronted with the unplanned births of grandchildren – the result of Methuselah’s intervention – and, not surprisingly, cannot bring himself to murder them in cold blood. Despite our knowing the end of this story – we exist, at least in the context of the story, because Noah did not end all of human life, I found myself caught up in the question of how Noah would handle this moment. Psychologically, he must heal the rifts that have come to be inside himself – he must move forward in a world where his offspring – he will be the father of all of humanity – are capable of murder – the murder that separated him from his father and from his birthright. He will be responsible for a world that will wreak greater technological damage on creation than Tubal-Cain’s hordes could possibly have imagined. And he will be the father of a world that exists in the wake of the murders that he has been party to – the people who climbed on board the ark but whom he let drown rather than bringing them into the ship because they had room.
Noah, this man who believes so strongly in justice and who works so hard to return order to the world will allow evil to return, because he feels attachment to humans. At the moment when human life could have ceased; when we were hanging on by the thinnest of threads and, when someone who was informed about the inevitability of man’s destructive ways with creation could stop it – when, unlike Adam who did not know the consequences of eating the fruit, Noah did – he chose, and God backed him up with a covenant symbolized by the rainbow, to continue this thing called human life. We, in our own small way, play Noah when we have children; when we consume goods, when we drive our cars, eat meat, do all those things that we feel mildly guilty about, we participate, with Noah, in the conflicted enterprise of living; of affirming the value of humanity despite the dirty, horrible mess that our living causes. This movie writes large a latent story that could be read in the Bible, but one that we might too quickly skip over – the heart of a conflict that we can feel between how we would have the world be, and how it is – and the reason that we “settle” for living in the world as it is turns out to be quite simple – we love the people in that world, flawed though they are. Noah, as every President to date has done, decided that human life needs to be preserved. Though we may hate our enemies and want to destroy them, we can find a way, at least Noah did, to recognize that their evilness is something that lives within ourselves, and that we can muddle forward - there is no way that we, or a world with humans in it, will be pure, and, despite that, it is better with us in it, with or being able to love each other in spite of ourselves.
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