The Chosen (2021) s2e04

One of the features of The Chosen is that it often likes to start episodes in novel fashion. This time around  the episode starts with a long, wordless montage, introducing two brothers. They start as young boys and through the sequence of shots, gradually grow up to become the men. We witness one of them fall from a tree and damage his leg, which appears to have permanent consequences. We see them watch their father remarry. We watch as the younger brother (Simon) begins to seethe at Roman injustice and then leaves the family home. And then the elder brother (Jesse) leaving too to lie and wait at the Pool of Bethzatha in the desperate hope his disability will be healed. Simon, by contrast, joins the zealots. And so it is that two of the relatively minor characters from the Gospels take their shape across a wordless, yet effective and powerful 9 and a bit minutes.

Tabernacles

The context for this episode is the Feast of Tabernacles -- a Jewish festival practised then and still by Orthodox Jews today. This gives the show the chance to show Jesus as thoroughly observing and taking part in Jewish practices. Yet the wider unfamiliarity with the practice among non-Jews, means that we get quite a lot of The Chosen's typical context setting and exposition as dialogue, which is becoming slightly wearying. Matthew and Mary Magdalene -- as seemingly the least observant before -- act as audience surrogates who get to ask the questions so one of the disciples or other can explain to the people at home.

A useful comparison in this respect is the Israeli movie Ushpizin (2004), which manages to explain the essential points of the festival (also known as Succoth/Sukkot/Festival of Booths) and the motivations of its characters without it feeling laboured. It's an excellent film which should appeal to those interested in cinema and religious faith.

For what it's worth, both the healing at the pool of Bethzatha takes place in John 5:1-18, and Jesus going to Jerusalem during Sukkot is in John 7:1-24. Neither incident is mentioned in the Synoptic Gospels. There is, however, some interesting conflation here, because 5:1 starts by saying that Jesus went to Jerusalem for a Jewish festival, but it doesn't say which one. It may have been Sukkot, but if so it would seem to be the previous year's because at the start of chapter 6 he's back at the Sea of Galilee, and then goes onto Capernaum and then in 7:1&2 we read that he initially said he wasn't going to go to Sukkot because some were looking to kill him. So at first look it seems that these two events are quite separate, taking place at two different festivals.

There is, however, another possibility, because while at Sukkot in Jerusalem, Jesus does end up in front of a crowd and as things turn a bit nasty, he says "I perform one work and all of you are astonished" and he goes onto defend healing someone on the Sabbath, even though no miracle has been discussed, let along described. It seems to me, then, fairly plausible that at some point these chapters were in a different order and connected somehow. We know that is plausible because John 7:53-8:11 is entirely absent in the oldest remaining manuscripts of John, and turns up in unusual place in some of the other ancient manuscripts (including in Luke's Gospel after 21:38, where, frankly it fits a lot better).

I don't know if The Chosen was looking to draw attention to these unusual aspects of the text, or if the writers just saw a good opportunity to exercise their creative licence. I suspect the latter -- which is fine -- but personally, I'm glad they did because I haven't looked this closely at these passages before.

Other tensions 

If Jesus is concerned about upsetting people in Jerusalem, he is not showing it. But one person who is, is Schmuel who has set up in one of the poorer quarters of Jerusalem to do some preaching. Meanwhile we're introduced to some Roman soldiers at a checkpoint who are standing guard while some are being crucified (for "murder" Simon is told) as well as Atticus, a member of the "cohort urbanae" ("secret police"). 

The fact that one of the soldiers knows Atticus is "secret" police is a bit of a misnomer, but he's quickly established as a ruthless character, firing the hapless soldier who lets Simon through the checkpoint without proper justification. (Simon says he is visiting family near The Antonia Fortress, but, Atticus, points out, this is a military area. Instead of intervening to stop this person who is lying about their destination / motive, Atticus, is content to observe this potential security breach and hold back.

Eventually it emerges that Simon and his colleagues are planning an attack -- a Roman magistrate has become the target for Simon to assassinate -- and Atticus nor only knows about it, but is planning to intervene at the point that is most politically expedient. There's a discussion in an alleyway with another Roman (Petronius) about it and Atticus actually delivers the line "he wants to 'cancel his reservation'" with the kind of over eyebrow-raising delivery usually reserved for Austin Powers' Dr Evil. 

There's also tension between some of the disciples. Thomas complains to Nathanael that he finds Matthew "irritating", to which Nathanael observes that they're "kind of the same person". Matthew has his own concerns -- he's seen Schmuel and knows that it means potential trouble for Jesus: Schmuel called for Jesus' arrest in Capernaum.  

The healing at the Pool of Bethzatha

Those who know John's Gospel well will know this episode is coming from that earliest montage. Jesus and his followers are staying out of town so Jesus heads to Bethzatha specifically to perform this miracle. He brings Simon (not-yet-Peter), Matthew and John. There's more clunky exposition and then when they reach the crosses at the checkpoint the music changes and Jesus seems pensive. There's a clear suggestion he's thinking about his own crucifixion which, according to this show, he already knows about. 

Jesus having foreknowledge like this is not a big surprise, it's a regular feature of the show. The Gospels are unclear about what Jesus knew and when, but in The Chosen he always seems to act with either divine, or scriptural foreknowledge. Events rarely just happen to Jesus. Any links between them and prophecies in the Hebrew Bible are never just connections made by the author of the Gospel. It's always Jesus initiating them, knowingly fulfilling the words of the prophets. The night before, for example, the group has had a long discussion about a prophecy in Zechariah (14:16) about all the nations coming to celebrate Sukkot in Jerusalem and the show seems to take it as a given that Jesus absolutely knows what its fulfilment would be.

Part of the reason I dwell on this point (which could probably be related to any episode) is because when I was younger and part of a church that took a very similar general approach to the Bible, I heard this story  used as an example of quite a different understanding of Jesus' foreknowledge. According to that speaker Jesus had been emptied of all the divine foreknowledge he had prior to his time on earth and had to rely on following specific words of knowledge he got from the Holy Spirit. 

This story was used as a classic example, because it answered one of the overall puzzles with this story: why did Jesus only heal this one guy? The place was full of people wanting healing. Why just him? To that speaker it was because that was what the Holy Spirit was doing. It gets Jesus off the charge of a lack of compassion, but only defers that question to God himself.

The Chosen has a very different answer. Moments before they arrive, the other Simon (Simon the Zealot) has just been reunited with his brother. Their reunion is emotional, but confrontational (Simon knew where Jesse was and looks down on him as compromised). It ends with Jesse reading out the goodbye letter Simon wrote all those years ago, which ends with the line "When you stand on two feet I will know Messiah has come". Simon leaves to complete his zealot assignment and it becomes clearer that this was some kind of final farewell before his potential death. 

They arrive at the pool and Jesus passes Schmuel and there's a gulp, perhaps the closest the episode comes to acknowledging Jesus' reticence about going to Jerusalem during Sukkot. The passage unfolds largely  as it does in the text (though obviously with plenty of creative decisions), but once healed Jesse goes off into the streets of Jerusalem. And there he is seen by his brother, seconds before Atticus kills Simon in the act of assassinating the magistrate. Simon stops, the exact scenario mentioned in his letter all those years ago (his brother standing on two feet) has just come to pass. Their resulting reunification is genuinely moving.

In other words, it's a double-miracle, the super-supernatural, if you will. The Chosen's answer to the question of "why does Jesus just heal that one person, out of of all those who were there?" is that in so doing Jesus was saving two lives at once, Jesse's and Simon's. 

And perhaps, ultimately, it will save Schmuel's life too. For he witnesses the miracle and is also the one who asks the man why he is unlawfully carrying his mat on the Sabbath in John 5:10  (though Jesus and the other three already seem to have broken Sabbath rules by walking more than 1km). And while is initial response is to go and report this breach of the "oral tradition", there's a longer running story in play, which I suspect may not be resolved until the final season.

Jesus, Peter, John and Matthew leave the city as dusk beds in. Simon's basking in the glow of the confrontation as well as the miracle. John, perhaps, thinking about how best to write it down. But Matthew -- who Jesus hand-picked to witness this miracle, but doesn't then include it, or much like it, in his Gospel -- still has a question about timing. Why did he not wait another 30 minutes until Sabbath was over? Jesus chooses to be enigmatic. "Sometimes you gotta stir up the water" he replies, and he walks off, towards the camera with a satisfied grin across his face.

Noah adaptations p04: How Genesis develops the flood story

This is part 4 of a series investigating adaptations of the "Noah" story.

"Noah’s Ark" by Greek painter Theodore Poulakis (1622–1692).

In the last part of this series on adaptations of Noah, I looked at the variations of the flood story that were brought together to form Genesis, namely the Priestly and non-Priestly material, but what I didn't go into was some of the key changes those two "sources" and the "final" text of Genesis makes to the Babylonian traditions before them.

These changes are fairly wholesale, which is partly because I'm compressing a few layers of evolution into one, but even focusing on a theoretical reconstruction of the J source and comparing it to the Gilgamesh Epic unearths a very different text. It's a radical overhaul, far more akin to an appropriation than an adaptation. However, as J is still, very much, a theoretical text I'm going to stick to comparing the text of Genesis we find in our Bibles today with the Gilgamesh epic.

Noah

One of the major difference is, of course, the change of identity of the flood hero, from Utnapishti to Noah. In the last entry in this series I looked at where Noah as a character may have emerged from (the first viniculturist), but it's also worth pointing out how that contrasts with Utnapishti.  Utnapishti is an immortal character (at least by the time he is telling his story), Noah is mundanely human. After the events of the flood Utnapishti recalls the god Ea declaring that "he and his wife shall become like us gods!" ( Noah seemingly returns to 'normal life'. Utnapishti now lives in a remote, almost entirely inaccessible place, whereas Noah lives out amongst his descendants.

There's also much more of a sense of Noah's being of no particular rank. Utnapishti is described as having (pre-flood) silver and gold, oxen and lambs, beer and ale, oil and wine and workmen (XI:71-86). Onto the ark he brings kith covering "Members of every skill and craft" (XI:86).¹ Noah just has his family and saves them alone. Yet by the time Gilgamesh meets Utnapishti, there's no mention of his children and descendants. His wife is present -- she even gets some dialogue -- but the two might even live alone. So Noah is a much more relatable, normal, family-driven character.

That said, it's striking how Genesis removes Noah's voice completely. Utnapishti speaks at length to recite his tale, yet even within that there is a sense of him speaking with the gods, back and forth. Noah, some unusually within the Hebrew Bible, does not debate with God, he gets no voice at all. 

One key line of dialogue that is dropped is XI:35 "but how do I answer my city, the crowd and the elders". This concern -- absent from Noah in Genesis -- is often perceived as a lack. As we shall see in the Qu'ran Noah goes to great lengths to preach to the crowd to try and save them even though he is unsuccessful (Sura 71). Many schools of Judaism put Noah on a lower pedestal than other biblical heroes for his lack of compassion or arguing with God, see for example this interview with Shmuley Boteach for the "Times of Israel" where he says: 

Noah is not a hero in Jewish lore. ...righteousness is all about what you do for your fellow man. And Noah does NOTHING for his fellow man. He doesn’t care, he has no compassion. He executes God’s commandment to the letter. So when God says “I’m going to kill everybody,” Noah says, “will you save my skin? Oh, I get an Ark? Okay, fine.” ...he failed in the greatest mission of all. He failed to protect human life. And failed to fight with God when he wanted to take human life. He refuses to wrestle with God. ²

Genesis, unusually for the Hebrew Bible, cuts the flood hero 's objections to God's plans to "blot out from the earth human beings" (6:7), but it's hard to know if this is for theological reasons, or simply because Genesis cuts Noah's voice altogether.

Monotheism

Of course, theologically speaking the biggest shift in the Genesis account is the move from a pantheon of gods, to just the one (although P names him Elohim whereas J calls him YHWH). In Gilgamesh the gods act, to some extent, independently. The decision to send the flood seems to rest largely with Enlil, albeit with the help of various weather gods (XI:97-108). Yet at the same time, some of "the gods took fright at the deluge" (XI:114) and when Utnapishti makes an offering after it's all over we're told the gods gather and are pleased by the smell of it and criticise Enlil for almost destroying humanity but for Ea's intervention (XI:157-171).

This contrasts with the Genesis where the one god deems humanity deserving of judgement and decides to send the flood, but preserves only the righteous Noah and his family, almost like some kind of theological selective breeding programme. Noah is not saved because one particular god acts to save the gods from the consequences of the reckless actions one of his colleagues. He is chosen because he is the only righteous human and his descendants represent the best chance of faithful behaviour in future.

Motivation for flood

The logical question from there is why did the gods/God want to wipe out humanity in the first place. Here we see an evolving tradition. In the Atrahasis Epic, it is because the humans have become so numerous that they are now too loud and preventing the gods from sleeping. The Gilgamesh Epic does not specify exactly why the gods want to "diminish" humanity (XI:189-91), but given its overall thematic concern about humanity's negative impact on the environment it may well be due to concern about the environmental consequences of over-population.

Genesis removes the ambiguity and changes the motivation. Now rather than being motivated by noise or environmental degradation, the issue is sinful behaviour. God is displeased by "wickedness...evil...violence" (Gen 6:5-13). Whilst there's some debate, the preceding verses (6:1-4) seem to be deliberately connected here to the rest of the story to give an example of exactly the kind of thing that God is displeased with (the "sons of God" having sex with the "daughters of man").

It's perhaps here that the authors intentions show most strongly. We move from subservient minor gods attempting to extinguish humanity so they can get better quality sleep; through to a more cautionary tale about respecting the "natural" world the gods inhabit; through to a sense of a single God with clear moral objections to human behaviour.

Fruitful and multiply 

There is another place where the author of Genesis also shows their hand fairly clearly, and in contrast to his predecessors. After the flood and Noah's subsequent sacrifice God gives Noah a new covenant, which starts in 9:1-2 with the words

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. (NRSV)

And as if to further reinforce the point later he repeats "be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and multiply in it." (v7)

There's a couple of points to make here. Firstly that this is something of an about turn on both Gilgamesh and Atrahasis where the point of the story seems to be a warning that the gods want to keep human numbers in check. Ea may intervene and criticise Enlil for almost wiping them out completely, but his criticism is not that it is inherently wrong, just that it went too far and didn't consider the downside. His suggestions of options Enlil could have taken instead (lion/wolf/famine/plague) area would all still have substantially reduced the human population.

Of course, God's drastic action equally reduces the human population, but his action is to reduce evil and to start again. As soon as (he thinks) that is done, then he orders Noah and his family to get on with re-populating the Earth. Gilgamesh's environmental concerns about a growing human population are not a concern here. The opposite is positively encouraged and the genealogies that follow demonstrate how Noah and his descendants fulfilled this element of their mandate.*

'Dominion' and dread

This brings me on to the second point here, which is that this should be no surprise to anyone reading Genesis from the (literal!) beginning because in Genesis 1:28 God has already said: 

Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ (NRSV)

There's a lot that could be written here about the echoing of this passage, how it suggests God is rebooting; how this time God makes a slight change and allows humans to eat meat. But I mainly want to point out that these are the classic anti-environmental clobber texts -- verses that have been used in the past to justify ruthlessly exploiting the planet for our own gain.

Way back in 1967 Lynn White Jr. wrote an influential article "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" which argued that Christianity "not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends".³ White's claims have generally been taken as true, though they do lack a certain nuance. Richard Bauckham, for example, describes White's article as "bursting with confident and ill-substantiated generalizations",⁴ and claims that such an interpretation of these passages is only relatively recent. Instead he argues that it "was Francis Bacon, in the seventeenth century, who hijacked the Genesis text to authorise the project of scientific knowledge and technological exploitation whose excesses have given us the ecological crisis".⁵

In practical terms Bauckham's arguments are largely academic (so to speak). Prior to Bacon, and whether it knew it or not) humanity had comparatively little impact on its environment relative to subsequent events. Deforestation in some areas had certainly been considerable (much of the forests in Britain had been cleared during the Bronze Age,⁶ for example), but the Industrial Revolution hugely increased humanity's ability to destroy its environment. And, Bacon and those with similar views absolutely used such passages in Genesis to justify their reckless approach to the planet. 

Thus even if it would not be for another two millennia or so, the change of emphasis by the author of Genesis took a story warning of environmental harm and changed it in to a narrative that would play a significant role in bring such harms into being.

The 'Ark'

There's another change here as well that tallies with my "green issues" approach to this subject. In my introductory post to this series, I mentioned that it was going to address "adaptation in an era of changed weather patterns and human responses to that, and the idea that adaptation has parallels with recycling". I noted in post 2 that line 4 of Finkel's flood tablet (part of the Atrahasis Epic) "destroy your house, build a boat" (repeated in Gilgamesh) are essentially a command to recycle, albeit driven by necessity rather than green ethics.⁷

In Genesis that initial sense of urgency has gone. The "ark" is no longer an improvised craft but a meticulously planned construction. While a little of this transition occurs in Gilgamesh, the time scale remains at 7 days. When we come to Genesis God gives no indication when the flood will arrive leaving speculation to vary from between 7 days (as in the sources) and 75 years, based on a calculation of Noah's age when his eldest son was born and his recorded age when the flood begins.

In Gilgamesh, the boat is square (XI: 28-30), a cube even, 10 rods in each dimension, covering an area of one acre with six decks (XI:57-61). In Genesis the ark (which literally just means "box"),⁸ has become elongated -- 300 cubits long, but only 50 wide and 30 high (that's 133m x 22m x 13m, Gen 6:15), which actually works out at only 0.75 of an acre, with only three decks. 

I can't help wondering if this new shape and dimension reflect the temple or the Ark of the Covenant in some way (even though both are translated as "ark" in English, the Hebrew uses two different words, both of which mean just "box"), particularly given the likely time of composition -- perhaps just as Noah finds sanctity in the Noah, so the tribes of Israel should find it in the temple; or just as God protects and honours Noah and his family in the ark so too the Ark of the Covenant is worthy of special treatment, or something like that. For the record Solomon's temple was 60 cubits long, 20 wide and 30 high (1 Ki 6:2) and perhaps also had 3 floors (1 Ki 6:6) the Ark of the Covenant was made from "acacia wood; it was two and a half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, and a cubit and a half high" (Ex 37:1).      

Lastly we get a change in materials. In The Flood Tablet's version of the Atrahasis Epic the coracle is made from the recycled reeds and "kannu ropes and ašlu rushes... fronds and palm fibre" (lines 10 & 11).⁹ In the Gilgamesh Epic again we get reeds (XI:21-4) and "ropes of palm-fibre". In Genesis we get what the KJV translates as "gopher wood" with the NKJV and NASB following suit, but other recent versions (NEB, NRSV, NLV) translate as "cypress wood", with the NRSV noting (accurately) that "meaning of Heb uncertain". The Ark of the Covenant was made of acaia wood (Ex 37:1) and the temple was of stone construction but had cedar walls and fir/cypress floors (1 Ki 6:7,15), though there are  two Hebrew words that the NRSV translate . So while Noah's Ark is made of a more solid wood than Atramhasis' and Utnapishti's boats, which increases similarities with the temple/Ark of the Covenant we're not talking about the same material and the requirements for source preparing and building with it seem like a greater task than its Mesopotamian counterparts. The main takeaway is that it's no longer a recycled, improvised craft. but a solid, very much premeditated one.

Others

I'm aware the above are very much my selection of the ways that the story changes, and that in making that selection I have overlooked some real whoppers. I spoke in the last instalment of this series about the addition of seven pairs of clean animals coming from the non-Priestly material in 7:2, but there are a number of other major ones depending on the angle you're coming from. For example, I've not mentioned the omission of the swallow, the 2nd of the three birds Utnapishtim sends out, or the window/zohar that gets added to the roof of Noah's boat, or the name of the mountain on which they run aground. There's obviously quite a lot, but I hope what I have included gives some indication as to how the changes reflect the theology and beliefs that the story in Genesis is promoting and/or reinforcing.

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1. All quotations taken from The Gilgamesh Epic taken from Andrew George's translation [CITATION]

2. Hoffman, Jordan (2014) "Hollywood ‘Noah’ is kosher, says celebrity rabbi" in The Times of Israel 27th March. Available online: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hollywood-noah-is-kosher-says-celebrity-rabbi/

*. I actually owe this observation (inserted after initial publication) to James Wykes's thesis The Contextualized Noah: The Deluge Patriarch in Genesis, Jubilees, and Pseudo-Philo (2012) available from Academia.

3. White, Lynn Jr. (1967) "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" in Science, New Series, Vol. 155, No. 3767 (Mar. 10, 1967), pp. 1203-1207. p.1205. Available online: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofhumanities/theology/beyondstewardship/files/HistoricalRoots_of_EcologicalCrisis_(1).pdf

4. Bauckham, Richard (2002) God and the Crisis of Freedom: Biblical and Contemporary Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press) p.219.

5. Bauckham, Richard (2010) Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Waco: Baylor University Press) p.6

6. Thomson, Hugh (2012) "The Sherwood Syndrome" at Aeon 12th September. Available online: https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests

7. Finkel, Irving (2014) The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, (London: Hodder), p.376.

8. Rachelle Gilmour as interviewed by Dave Roos and Helen Bond in "Ep. 68 A Face-Melting Look at the Ark of the Covenant" for the Biblical Time Machine podcast. Relevant clip is from 5 minutes. Available online: https://www.biblicaltimemachine.com/listen-to-episodes/b24fssktgs7yzxz-scarm-bxjxm-jr9y7-khjbb-zn9dd-w9jgd-lc4nj-w8mhr-x6662-en45b-6crbr-cw5tr-ye69n-cbkng 

9. Finkel, p.377

Protozoa (Aronofsky, 1993) and Noah

This post is part two of a series looking at Darren Aronofsky's other work and how they relate to his 2014 Noah.

Aronofsky's second student film reappeared in 2021, but there's been remarkably little discussion about it since then, given it's the work of a major future Hollywood director. It's shot in a way that's remarkably reminiscent of it's time: early digital video; a grungy, lo-fi look and feel; disaffected young adult protagonists who feel closely connected to how the maturing Generation X was expressing itself at the time. There's a similar vibe running through out cultural output at the time from Richard Linklater's Slacker (1990) and Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel "Generation X" through to Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994) and 1996's Trainspotting.*

In it the film's three protagonists, Pete, Dave and Ari, in a very early appearance from Lucy Liu, discuss the meaning of life, drawing on what is essentially a modern day parable with a decidedly biblical flavour. It's not hard, then, to draw the lines from this to Aronofsky's Noah (2014). Like that film it also spends much of its time around black deserted landscapes, searches for meaning amid destruction, and centres on characters who are not easy to like. It's not much in terms of plot and character development, at least by his later standards, but in terms of mood and themes it certainly captures some of the feel of what Aronofsky would realise more fully twenty plus years later.

Even so, it's nevertheless surprising when the first real piece of dialogue (aside from cursory greetings and some opening chat) dives straight into conversation featuring biblical epics. Pete starts telling Dave about a guy they used to know called Blue whose Dad was a TV repairman and who had got stuck in an unfortunate cycle of watching television endlessly. One night "some network shows one of those 1950s biblical epics. You know the type with Liz Taylor and Yul Brynner?" He starts watching it only to discover "it's a film on the story of Abraham" specifically the scene of him "smashing up the idol shop". This speaks to him so powerfully that he does the same with his TVs.

The details given about the film do not correspond to any given biblical epic, indeed the story is rabbinical not biblical. This is doubtless intentional as it allows Aronofsky to suggest the mythic mature of the story as a whole. The (plainly incorrect) details are in the right ball park and certainly leave the viewer knowing exactly the type of film being referenced, but the lack of a concrete referent also detach the story from reliable history. The point of the story is the meaning which can be derived from it. In other words this is a modern-day parable. 

Pete continues to describe this scene of destruction which Blue is not enveloped in:

Pete: Sparks, glass, TVs burning in flames... except for one. It's in flames, but it's not burning.

Dave: The burning bush!

Pete: Right. But it's a TV. And then it talks to him.

Dave: The TV?

Pete: The fucking TV. "Do not come near. Put off the shoes from your feet. For the place where you are standing is holy ground". And then Blue takes off his hi-tops and the voice says "I have come down to deliver you unto the wilderness. There you will discover the truth."

Dave: The truth?

Pete: Yeah. The meaning of life.

So now we have a modernisation of the Moses story breaking into one that starts by inspiration from (of all things) a biblical epic. So the biblical allusions work on two levels. There is the biblical story of Abraham which (apparently) was on screen at the moment of revelation, and inspired the story's anti-hero to smash up his TVs. This is obviously quite far removed from real life. But there is also the ending to the story where purportedly real events are impacted by the supernatural, validated by their similarity to a biblical story (Moses and the burning bush) and which end with "the meaning of life".

If the young Aronofsky wasn't quite able to satisfactorily unpack what exactly the meaning of life was/is in the remaining 10 minutes of the film, then we should perhaps forgive him. He was only 24 after all. But Dave is inspired to board a bus carrying some people less fortunate than himself (who he's previously been mocking) in a bid to help them. And while Pete and Ari are less driven to change than their friend, they do decide to return to the source of all this life-changing wisdom. Or at least they decide to go and watch the TV.

Perhaps they too will be inspired. Or perhaps they too will get caught watching it, unable to tear themselves away. Or perhaps TV is still just TV and Dave's transformation is built on nothing but a story.

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Two other things caught my attention. The first is one character describing LA as "the city of the snake". I've not heard that before, so it's interesting given the prominence of both a snake and a snake skin in Noah.

Secondly, in the midst of Pete's story, which is told partly by a brick-o-brack of different techniques, we're shown all the drugs that he tried and while they may not be actual drugs, the depiction of them in such a matter of fact manner was quite striking – perhaps not the kind of thing that a studio (either then or now) would permit. It's noticeable too that while the list includes hard and soft, legal and illegal drugs (heroin and opium through to tobacco and caffeine) it doesn't include alcohol. This feels like a deliberate omission and I guess it catches my attention because of the scene at the end of Noah where he tries to drown out his survivor's guilt with alcohol.

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* The connection to Clerks, which I've seen but don't recall that well, is from one of the few reviews I did manage to find by Swapnil Dhruv Bose at Far Out Magazine "Protozoa: Darren Aronofsky’s bizarre student film". Available online: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/protozoa-darren-aronofsky-bizarre-student-film/

Another Italian Nativity Film: Vangelo Secondo Maria (2023)

Over the years I've written about lots of Italian Bible films and quite a few Nativity films, indeed there's a special, and surprisingly large niche of Italian Nativity films, with one seeming to come along every few years most recently 2019's Il primo Natale (Once Upon a Time in Bethlehem) which went on to become that year's biggest grossing home-grown Italian movie at the box office.

Clearly, then there's a market -- in Italy at least -- for modern reworkings of the Nativity story and given the prominent role that Catholicism still has in Italian life it was only a matter of time before a new one came along. And so Sardinian director Paolo Zucca has adapted Barbara Alberti's controversial 1979 novel for Sky Cinema/Vision.

This time though it appears to be more of a dramatic re-telling than a comedy. From the looks of the trailer, and a few of the comments I have read about the film, Vangelo Secondo Maria will offer a more feminist take on the story (it came out in May in Italy) although it is naturally more conventional than Il primo's time travelling comedy.

The film stars Benedetta Porcaroli (above) as Mary, best known for the Netflix series Baby (2018-20) and the recent Sidney Sweeney nun-horror Immaculate (2024). Opposite her as Joseph will be Alessandro Gassmann (below), 33 years her senior, best known for . More pertinently, though, is the fact that he has already appeared in two other Italian Nativity films, Un bambino di nome Gesù (A Child Named Jesus, 1988) where he played the adult Jesus and Raffaele Mertes's La sacra famiglia (The Holy Family, 2006) where he also played Joseph. He had previously had a minor role in one of Mertes's other biblical TV movies Samson and Delilah (1996). So it's interesting to see him both play the father of a character he played a generation ago and to see him play the same character twice in otherwise unrelated movies. Also worth noting is Maurizio Lombardi who played Inspector Ravini so brilliantly in Netflix's recent Ripley remake.

The film's trailer came out 2 months ago and certainly gives the impression that it really wants to bring the story into the 21st century. For a start the camera work seems very contemporary with similar colour tones and lighting, and quirky camera angles, point of view shots that are more about conveying emotion than fact and some sequences that might be fantasy or might just be very outside of the typical telling of the nativity story. 

Then there's the music, which may be nothing to do with the film's final soundtrack, but it certainly conveys a contemporary feel, and the fact that it's sung by a woman adds to the impression that this will be a Mary-centred retelling. Lucia Tedesco puts it so nicely "Quello a cui noi assistiamo è la storia della vita di Maria dall’unico punto di vista di cui avremmo dovuto disporre, ovvero il punto di vista di Maria"(What we are witnessing is the story of Mary's life from the only point of view we should have had, that is, Mary's). That's something that comes across in the dialogue too. Right at the start Mary says "I don't want to get married" and cries that the law is made for men not women". Later on we just hear Mary's voice cry out "I'm challenging you to answer me".

But there's more to it than that. At one point Mary says "let's pretend that instead of husband and wife you're the teacher and I'm the student" and the following shots and dialogue suggest that Joseph takes her up on that and sets about equipping her, not only teaching her more about the law but also what looks like some kind of inner-life-focused martial art. And lastly there's the shot below which physicalises Mary in the viewer's eyes, even if not in Joseph's, and seems without precedent in a historical nativity film (as far as I can remember, at least, the only Mary film that shows something even vaguely equivalent is Godard's modernisation Hail Mary (1985).        

The title of the film of course seems like a nod to Italy's most famous and successful Jesus adaptation, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew, 1964) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. There wasn't anything immediately obvious from the trailer that seemed like a nod to Pasolini's film, aside from perhaps a certain fixity of the camera, but it will be interesting to see what else emerges if/when I ever get to see the final film. The other film that comes to mind is Giovanni Columbu’s Sardinian Jesus film Su Re (The King, 2012). 

The more fantastical elements of the trailer certainly seem like a significant departure from both Pasolini's and Columbu's approaches to the subject, although perhaps not out of keeping with some of his other work such as Il Decamerone (1970). I suppose one key indicator of this is the brief appearance of an angel (below), shot in side profile. Pasolini's angel was played by a young woman (Rossana di Rocco) who wore a simple white dress, but here the angel is played by a young man who has wings. This is a particularly interesting detail (to me, at least) because di Rocco did appear in a later Pasolini film dressed as an gel with wings, but here the character was a human dressing up as an angel. There's a sense that for Pasolini angel's wings were theatrical 

I don't want to speculate too much about the trailer. As most of the film is not there and some shots in trailers are sometimes absent from the final cut of the movie. There have been a number of reviews of the film. I won't go into them all, but a couple of things that caught my attention were as follows:

1. At one point in Sky Italia's own review they say "Tra riferimenti a Enki e Enlil, dei della mitologia mesopotamica" (between references to Enki and Enlil gods from the Mesopotamian myth). This caught my attention because I've been writing about those same myths in my work looking at Noah (Darren Aronofsky, 2014)

2.  Lucia Tedesco at Lost in Cinema also mentions that not only is the film shot in Sardinia but also that bits of the dialogue are in Sardinian as well. There are also significant spoilers in her review. She has an generally positive review of the film, as does Hynerd's (Eleonora Matta)

3. Alessio Accardo at Close-up Italia mentions director of photography Simone D'arcangelo and his love of  Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly Andrei Rublev. Despite the film that this film is in colour (as opposed to Rublev's black and white) I can certainly see the connection with some of Tarkovsky's other films.

I have no idea how I will get to see this film at the moment. I guess I'm hoping it will get a DVD release in time for Christmas, or at least be released to streaming.