Decrypting Aronofsky

Aronofsky's Noah is the most controversial Bible movie since Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Moreover, it's controversial in a different way. In general, Christians defended Gibson's film against non-Christian opponents while Christians attacked Scorsese's film against non-Christian supporters. 

But in the case of Aronofsky's Noah, we're witnessing an intramural Christian debate. And it's not just a case of "progressive" Christians defending the film while conservative Christians attack the film. The film has both conservative defenders and detractors. It's as if Christians are watching two (or more different) films. They offer such divergent interpretations. How do we account for this?

I have a theory. Aronofsky is Jewish. To be sure, he's a secular Jew (or so I've read), but he takes a profound interest in Jewish tradition. 

Modern Judaism is actually quite alien to modern Christianity. For a couple of reasons, we think we have more in common with Jews than is really the case. For one thing, some Jews (e.g. Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, David Horowitz) are our cobelligerents in the culture wars. At the level of social ethics, evangelicals and conservative Jews share much in common. Secondly, when Christians think of Jews, Biblical Judaism is our default frame of reference.   

Yet Christianity and Judaism have been diverging for the past 2000 years. In fact, there's a retroactive sense in which the split between Christianity and Judaism began to emerge long before the advent of Christianity. By which I mean, you have all that Intertestamental literature (e.g. 1 Enoch) that never made its way into the Protestant canon.

To a great extent, Christianity and Judaism have led parallel lives over the centuries. Each has undergone tremendous internal development, which increasingly differentiates the two, culturally and theologically. Take the Talmud. Or Kabbala. Or Jewish novelists like Kafka, Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, Paul Celan, Giorgio Bassani, &c. That's not a Christian frame of reference. 

For Christians, the modern Jewish experience is a closed world. A code language. Superficially, we have much in common, but the surface commonalities disguise incommensurable differences underneath. 

I suspect Aronofsky's Noah is something of a riddle because it has so many conceptual influences and subtextual allusions which are foreign to the cultural, religious, and literary experience of most Christian viewers.