Darren Aronofsky's Dramatic Space: Noah's Ark as a Re-Presentation of a Universal Narrative

Introduction

Darren Aronofsky’s film “Noah” which was released in 2014 had a great boxoffice success thanks to narrating a story, which was based on a universally accepted holy narrative. The story of the film was remarkable with the myths explaining the creation and the descend of the humankind onto the earth and was enriched by other several religious themes.

The genesis of humankind, and Adam-Eve, the Flood and Noah’s Ark legends is taking place in all divine religions and numerous myhtical narratives. Thus these narratives, which receive a universal acceptation, are all addressing to the universe of common meaning values of humanity and people’s common perceptions for centruies. Co-sreenwriter (with Ari Handel) and director of “Noah”, Aronofsky, utilizes the impact of these ancient narratives, so he touches and reaches to viewers all over the world with a “Noah”, who was easily re-shaped and inspired by these narratives.

On the other hand, themes based on holy legends may cause interpretational clashes due to different religious dogmatisms. “Noah” has been banned in many countries like United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Malaysia etc. (Apalaçi, 2014) since the common holy and historical contexts were emptied and deformed in this movie. However Aronofsky had used these themes merely as mythological narratives rather than holy stories. In terms of narrative theory, the narrator (Aronofsky) has a feature that does not have a counterpart in the real world just like the heroes of the story, and narrators serve both as the constructive and reflective elements of the narrative World (Bolat, 2019, p. 37). He basically refictionalized the narratives, which serve as an inspirational source for the movie “Noah”, in order to adapt them to cinematographic language and to express himself better through these narratives.

Aronofsky conveys his ideas and worries, the clues of which were already provided in the 2006 movie (“The Fountain”), related to the contemporary society, humankind, environment, and beliefs through his new movie. Due to these intentions; almost all religious stories, including “Noah” itself, differ from traditional narratives. All the holy narratives included in this movie were re-shaped by Aronofsky as his own dramatic space. Thus Aronofsky’s, “Noah” reinterpretation was selected as a topic worth analysing and evaluating from an intertextual perspective by using thematic film analysis (Yılmaz & Candan, 2018, p. 2413) method.