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/