Noah's Arc

Like most everything else in this country these days, movies are easily cast into the Us vs. Them paradigm. From Zero Dark Thirty to Frozen and far too many movies in between, going to the theater has become as freighted with as much weight as going into the voting booth. I can imagine a Stephen Colbert interview with a family standing in line to see Frozen:
Colbert: So, you're raising your kids to be gay?
Father: I'm not raising my kids to be gay!
Colbert: So you're homophobic?
That may be Colbert's schtick, but I think he's pretty much nailed our national level of intellectual discourse (so thank you, cable television).

Off the top of my head I can think of any number of reasons a reasonable person might choose not to go see Darren Aronofsky’s new movie Noah. Russell Crowe, for one. Or maybe you don’t like 3-D…or you don’t like Biblical epics…or you’re still pissed off at Aronofsky because you didn’t get his last film, The Black Swan. All legit reasons, but here’s one reasonable people should avoid: don't boycott the film because you don’t want to give aid and comfort to your political and religious enemies. Reasonable people should be above all that. 
As any conscientious fiction writer knows, one of a writer’s ultimate responsibilities is to create a main character with what the college Lit. instructors call a character arc. In other words, the hero or heroine must land in a place at the end of the fiction that's different from where he or she was at the beginning. For one popular example, Michael Corleone’s arc in The Godfather takes him from man of conscience, military hero, devoted mate of Kate to employer of thugs, corrupter of politicians, brutish husband. Sometimes the arc takes the hero to a better place, sometimes to a worse place. The demand of fiction is simple--that there be an arc…a movement of character; no one cares about a character who goes nowhere.
Generations have cared about the arc of Noah’s story…even before it was Noah’s story…back to the time when it was Ut-napištim’s story and hundreds of years before that when it was Atrahasis’s story and millennia before that when it was Ziusudra’s story. As reported on Livius, the excellent Internet chronicle of ancient history, the Noah story…rather the story of The Great Flood...has had, what they call on Broadway, legs:  

The story of the Great Flood has its origins in Sumer, the southern part of ancient Babylonia. Even though the younger Epic of Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgameš, written in Babylonia, change many details, they continue to refer to Šuruppak as the city of the hero of the Flood story, even though the Sumerian name of the hero, Ziusudra, has been changed into Atrahasis or Ut-napištim. In the youngest Babylonian version, by Berossus, we see the original name return: testimony to the vitality of the Sumerian story, which has been called Eridu Genesisby modern scholars.

Unfortunately, as has already become apparent, the so-called controversy over the 2014 iteration of Noah's ark is going to swirl around sophomoric debate points. True believers holding the film to a strict adherence to the Biblical word. And Non-Believers harping on the story's somewhat dubious science. In order to maintain the firmament of their beliefs, the True Believers, as usual, have to ignore or deny factuality. In this case, the facts are that the story of Noah (like many Christian tales and practices) comes down to us from paganism and the numerous pre-Christian versions contained more than one god. If anyone has a complaint to make, it's the ancient Babylonians whose original telling of the tale gets robbed of its dramatically more compelling conflict among the gods that led to the flood (rather than the Bible version that features an embittered God devoid of both patience and charity). As for non-believers who smugly dismiss the story because the facts don't add up--all those centuries old men building a massive ark, all the creatures of the world being assembled on one boat--really, folks? Let's just get Neil deGrasse Tyson on the line and put an end to all this nonsense.
Our friends the True Believers, alas, are pretty much beyond reason (how else could they get that way?). But the Non-Believers live and die by reason…and it's reason that leads one to ask: how much of an insult is it really to your intelligence that Odysseus fights the Cyclops? Or Perseus battles Medusa? Or Ahab struggles with a giant white whale? There are those among us who may claim the fundamental truth of The Great Flood Story, but that does not make it so, nor does it require us to engage them in debate as if it were so. However, to argue against the Noah story or any other great myth on scientific grounds is to miss the meaning of it. Myths...extended metaphors about existence...need not withstand narrow theological or scientific scrutiny in order to reveal truths about the way humanity perceives itself and the world. 
In his landmark book, The Sacred and Profane, Mircea Eliade, explained what it is about The Great Flood myth that has kept it alive in human culture from cuneiform tablets to CGI. It all has to do with the power of water symbolism. Writes Eliade: 

"The Fathers of the Church did not fail to exploit certain pre-Christian and universal values of aquatic symbolism, although enriching them with new meaning with the historical existence of Christ. For Tertullian water, 'before all the furnishing of the world, [was] quiescent with God in a yet unshapen state…Water was the first to produce that which had life, that it might be no wonder in baptism if waters knew how to give life…' Noah and the Flood have their counterpart, in countless traditions, in the cataclysm that put an end to humanity (society) except for one man who would become the mythical Ancestor of the new humanity. The Waters of Death are the leitmotif of paleo-oriental, Asiatic, and Oceanic mythologies. Water is pre-eminently the slayer; it dissolves, abolishes all form. It is just for this reason that it is so…creative." 

The staying power of the Great Flood story is that it's essentially a story of renewal…about second chances. Whatever details change from Babylonia to the Old Testament to Hollywood, the essence of the story remains the same--Mankind gets a do-over. And Mankind loves, loves, loves…indeed, needs...the promise at least of do-over--whether on Earth or in Heaven--because the alternative is so deeply dispiriting.  
There's a buried bonus in all this for our friends in the reality-based community. Reread what that early Christian scholar Tertullian had to say centuries before Darwin: "Water was the first to produce that which had life…."  This flies directly in the face of the story in Genesis that contends that man came from dust. And it's not just Tertullian saying this; water as the giver of life is prominent throughout Christian practice and teaching, bringing it far more in alignment than is dust to dust to what we know about the origins of the species. To paraphrase good Dr. Tyson: The good thing about myth is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.