Something has shifted in the way the cinema has come to depict Biblical epics in the past decade, compared to how it did in the decades before I was born.
Take a film like 1959’s Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston: an absolute monolith of a film no matter what era you’re viewing it in, Heston’s fully realized portrayal of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jew betrayed, enslaved and ultimately redeemed, will probably never stop resonating with audiences. Because all religious baggage aside, it’s just a great movie. Judah’s story weaves in and out of the Biblical events that lead to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, and this periphery to Jesus becomes a crucial part of the film’s narrative.
One curious creative choice made by the filmmakers, which has not aged as especially well as the rest of the masterpiece, was to frame every shot of Jesus so that his face is not visible. In some shots, this is managed tastefully, but they really start reaching during his trial before Pontus Pilate, where a shadow obscures his face despite no apparent source overhead to cast it.
At first, it makes me want to say, “Guys, it’s okay. You’re allowed to depict Jesus Christ’s face. This isn’t the other Abrahamic religion where you can’t depict a certain figure’s face.”
But if you think about the wider culture around the film’s release, this choice makes a certain amount of sense: in 1950s America, Christianity was the dominant religion by far. Children prayed in school to the Christian God. One was simply assumed to go to church on Sundays and to abide by their Bible. By refusing to depict Christ’s face, the filmmakers ascribed to him a certain non-human nature, a reverence that transcended the mundane. They knew this film would be shown far and wide to Bible-believing Christians, and they probably wanted to avoid any chance of depicting that religion’s savior ‘incorrectly’.
In other words, what sets a film like Ben-Hur apart from a film like Clash Of The Titans is that one is based on the mythology of a by-and-large dead religion, while one is still very much a ‘living’ religion. Ben-Hur means not to dissect or question or ‘play about’ with the Biblical narrative, but merely to live within it, as respectfully as it can. Whereas Clash Of The Titans is good entertainment, having no intention of providing its source material the same kind of ‘living reverence’. There’s nobody to really offend, after all, by playing up the extravagant mythology of Antiquity Greece.
You can find that same reverence for the source mythology in The Ten Commandments, another Heston-led epic from just three years prior to Ben-Hur. The devout director of both it and the 1923 version it remade, Cecil B. DeMille, has gone on record as stating his intent with both films was merely to honour and hopefully live up to the divinely-inspired story of Moses. In fact, he directly says this when he stands in front of a curtain at the beginning of the film and introduces it to the audience, before stating to the presumed soda-drinking crowd that there would in fact be an intermission. (Filmmaking was…different back then.)
But today, we’re looking at two much more recent Biblical epics, made in a far different landscape of faith than Charlton Heston’s classic epics. Today, Christianity is a diminished force in the modern world, and multiculturalism is on the rise. Non-belief in any organized religion, statistically, is higher than it’s ever been.
Back in the fifties, a ‘Christian movie’ could be something like Ben-Hur, an epic for the ages that just happened to be explicitly Christian in theme and plot. Nowadays, you hear the phrase ‘Christian movie’ and you probably assume it to be a Z-tier mid-budget film that espouses uncomfortably anvilicious lessons drenched in thinly-veiled bigotry against anyone who doesn’t believe the same, all while couching their aggression as a response to the “oppression” of not being allowed to force their faith on everyone else. I won’t name names, but you know the kind of films I mean. I’m not picking on those types of films for being Christian films; the Heston classics of the 50s are proof that devout filmmakers can turn out masterpieces of cinema while being what we would understand today as fundamentalists. No, no, I’m picking on those sorts of movies because they are vile trash on every level, less a cinematic experience and more just another cog of the right-wing hate and faux-victimization machine. Moving on.
So the movies I’m going to talk about today are not ‘Christian movies’ in that sense. They are, instead, movies that take the mythical framework of certain Biblical stories, and treat them as just that: myth, in line with the fantastical myths of ancient Greece or Egypt.
And with the treatment of these stories as myth rather than historeligious canon, the filmmakers can give themselves leave to deconstruct, to weave their own interpretations, to do things that would have made explicitly Christian filmmakers like DeMille going full-froth of rage and indignation.
So without further preamble, I give you:
Noah: The one where Noah goes crazy, and
Exodus: Gods And Kings: The one where God goes crazy
I’ll be real with you: when I saw Darren Aronofsky’s Noah the first time, I really wasn’t sure what to think. But a second viewing made it click, and I realized the Noah story is one far more interesting deconstructed than played straight.
Because the film dares us to ask, how exactly is one supposed to play the Noah story straight? First of all, the actual text in the Bible is short.
Just to fill up enough screentime to have something that could legally call itself a feature-length motion picture, any filmmaker is going to have to take liberties in some way. It’s actually surreal how bare-bones the original text is on the subject of God doing that thing where you shake an etch-a-sketch. (Spoiler alert, but it doesn’t work out so well for the pixels.)
We’re not getting much of a character deep-dive there, either. Noah is told by God to do the thing and so he does the thing. Any adaptation of this story is going to need to fill in the gaps with itself.
The film itself is a character study of Noah, being told by God to do something unthinkable. This is the part a lot of our childhood Sunday-school depictions of Noah tended to gloss over. We remember the old man dutifully building an ark and bringing along two of each animal, we remember the flood, and we remember those Sunday-school images of Noah and his animals stepping off the ark as a beautiful rainbow shines overhead. It’s played up as a story of hope and renewal.
But the film invites us to think about Noah himself, and the mindset of such a man. The film invites us to consider what might happen to the mind of a man who has been told by the Creator Of All that an apocalyptic flood is coming to wipe away all life, save for those on this ark that he must build.
Noah understands that in committing to this task, he is leaving all the rest of humanity to die horribly. He commits to the task with monastic devotion nonetheless, sure in the steps of the Creator.
When the rains begin to fall, and the tribes of men besiege the ark, there’s a moment that on my first viewing really turned me against Noah, the character. The film shows us that while the tribes of men had become corrupt and violent, there were still good people among them. One of those good people, a girl whom one of Noah’s sons tries to spirit away onto the ark, gets her leg caught in a trap in the forest. Rather than try to save her, Noah simply grabs his son away. As the rushing army closes in, the innocent girl is brutally trampled to death.
But on my second viewing, I realized what that moment is trying to show us: that the great work has turned Noah into a psychopath. By devoting his life to a cause that involves the end of humanity as they know it, he has lost all compassion for humanity.
And after Noah’s family load themselves up in the ark and the rains have overtaken the world, there’s a very harrowing moment where, with this one family secure in the ark, we hear the countless agonizing screams from just beyond its walls as an entire species slowly drowns.
That’s what your Sunday school lessons, those weird Wisdom Tree games from the AVGN videos, and the Bible itself glossed over in the Noah story. The screaming, pleading, slow death of all things.
Because this movie invites us to consider that the Noah story isn’t one of hope and renewal. It’s a story of apocalypse, and horror, and genocide from on high. And it asks us to consider that anyone who devotes their existence to serving those purposes will naturally be driven mad. (I’m reading this back and thinking, ‘what a perfect Christmas article I’ve cooked up’)
In this film, God Himself comes off almost more like an eldritch abomination: unknowable and unreachable by humanity, communicating through dreams and imagery for we could not understand His true voice, and absolutely destructive, cleaving humanity from the earth like bugs under a boot for reasons they may or may not even be able to perceive. This film invites us to consider the Christian God as an eldritch horror, and Noah as the acolyte, the kind of True Believer who is typically cast as the villain in media like Dead Space and The Call Of Cthulhu, driven insane by exposure to the cosmic blue-and-orange-morality that he faithfully serves.
The midway point sees the best scene in the film: Noah tells his family the story of creation, as illustrated by a beautifully imagined and masterfully edited visual sequence (one whose imagery blends elements of evolution and the Christian creation mythos) about the coming of life and the downfall of man.
Noah is now of the mindset that God intends for human life to expire, that Noah’s only purpose in building the ark was to save the animals, not himself nor his family. He intends for his family to be the last people.
So, of course, when an act just prior to the flood ends up causing an unexpected pregnancy on board the ark, Noah assumes that the only way to fulfill God’s plan is to kill the child if it turns out to be a life-bearing girl, and thus we enter the ‘Noah the wild-eyed babykiller’ phase of the film.
See how I thought this movie was batshit insane the first time I watched it?
But now, I see this whole act as the film daring us to imagine just where that kind of total devotion to such a destructive God, and complete disregard for all humanity, ultimately leads you.
Ultimately, humanity wins out, and as Noah comes face to face with those baby girls, he just can’t bear what he thinks God wants him to do.
Noah is not a ‘Christian film’, for it views the events of the Flood through a humanist lens, where the Biblical story asks us to view only the absolute rightness of God’s actions, at any given time, at the expense of all humanity. For that is what becomes of religious stories as they become myth: they become subject to the morality of the storyteller, and let us not mince words – the Old Testament God has much to answer for when these ancient tales are viewed through the lens that human lives have inherent worth beyond worshipping the God of Abraham.
Meanwhile, Exodus: Gods And Kings adapts the book of Exodus, which sees God calling on Moses to spearhead the effort to wrest the Hebrew slaves from perdition in Egypt, and much like Noah, this film views certain Godly actions through a more humanist lens.
The first time I watched this film, the first thing that stuck with me was its portrayal of God. After Moses is exiled and finds for himself a loving family of nine years, God comes to Moses in visions, appearing as a child, and he is not screwing around. He demands that Moses journey back to Egypt to free the Israelites, which Moses eventually does after some creepy gaslighting on God’s part and a tearful farewell to his family.
Only, after Moses teaches the Israelites guerrilla warfare strategies and they start attacking Egypt’s supply ships, God appears to Moses again and scolds him for being too ineffectual, too slow. Moses replies that this will take time, but God isn’t having any of that.
The plagues build up one by one, but the Pharaoh’s resolve remains unbroken. When God tells Moses what He intends to do as the final plague, to kill every first-born Egyptian child, Moses is repulsed. He’ll have none of it.
I love that scene so much. It’s almost like Scott is recasting God in the Exodus story as this celestial beast that Moses has unleashed against his foes, and now he can’t call it off and it absolutely does not know where to draw the line, with Moses reacting with the appropriate shock and horror.
Of these two films, Ridley Scott’s take on Exodus does tend to stick generally within the framework, whereas Darren Aronofsky’s Noah takes a story with a great amount of cognitive dissonance and rips it all away, and instead shows us the stark horror and madness at the heart of the Noah tale.
Compare the Ridley Scott take on Exodus to The Ten Commandments, which for as much of a masterpiece as it is, is very much a product of its time and directorial ideology as you might expect. While Heston’s Moses in DeMille’s telling is also rightly shocked when he realizes what shall happen, it’s set up in a way that sort of absolves God of responsibility: God says that Pharaoh will bring the final plague upon himself by what he names, and then Pharaoh orders the execution of every first-born Hebrew slave. Moses is stunned when he realizes that this is to happen to every Egyptian child, but rather than rebuking God’s infanticidal plot as in the Scott version, the Heston Moses merely paints the lamb’s blood over the door and gets well out of the way of the creeping death. Remember, this is a film by a devout filmmaker for whom the source material was sacrosanct; not in a million years would he have wanted to deconstruct, or dissect, or – God forbid – paint the word of his God as anything less than unimpeachable. Scott’s take, meanwhile, looks the horror in the eye.
Coming into The Ten Commandments from a 21st century humanist perspective, seeing it actually for the first time in my thirties, I thought it was so incredibly awkward and strange how the final act of the film sees the Israelites whom we’ve seen Moses work for hours of on-screen time to try and save from oppression, get bored when Moses is taking communion with God for months and so they start an orgy cult based around some random golden idol. At which point Moses comes back with the titular Commandments, gets angry, decides his people are no longer worth saving, then smashes them and opens a portal to Hell beneath the golden idol (Or something??), after which the Israelites are forced by God to wander the desert for forty years until the generation that did the golden calf stuff has all died off.
Thing is, that’s just how the story goes. From a simple narrative perspective, that whole act seems to cut against everything that Moses was trying to accomplish to that point. Except, when taken as a devout reading of the original story, DeMille’s take was never primarily about freeing slaves and yearning for freedom; it was always a story chiefly about offering complete love and fealty to the God of Abraham and all His laws. This strange final act makes all the sense in the world when viewed from that perspective.
And tellingly enough, Scott chose not to do it that way, expressing the Israelites’ desert wanderings as a simple consequence of being freed from slavery and wandering on foot in a vast desert region; the Commandments do come into play at the end, but I think Scott understood that when we view this story as a tale from one of our many wondrous mythologies, that whole final act just doesn’t track with the rest of the story. Exodus: Gods And Kings is a film primarily about delivering slaves from oppression, with an angry God bringing His vengeance to bear in the process.
Funnily enough, there are things about Exodus: Gods And Kings that the DeMille version also did and which come off as oddly antiquated in the 21st century, such as having so very many white people play in this Egypt-set picture, and having so many of them wearing outfits that would have been ridiculously, swelteringly hot in actual ancient Egypt – a concession that you can understand being made by devout Christian filmmakers in the repressive 1950s, less so here. This stuff doesn’t really bother me, I just wanted to point it out.
I’m sure there are many more examples across the entertainment landscape of Christian myth transitioning more and more towards just that, a more fantastical, mythological framework in modern media; we’re not exactly at the point where you’d have a Christian myth version of God Of War, or where Moses is standing right next to Thor in the next Avengers film, but it’s been giving us some very interesting takes, especially Aronofsky’s Noah.
Now that we’ve talked politics and religion over the dinner table, I leave you with that for the holidays. Oh shit I forgot to talk about Kevin Smith’s Dogma wait don’t end just yet I-