The Fanatic: Creation, Destruction, & Belief – A Video Essay

A wide-ranging analysis of the scifi films Noah (2014) and Prometheus (2012)

by Josh McNamee

Camus said that there was only one properly serious question in philosophy, and that is suicide. But the question of whether we should embrace annihilation is inherently tied up in the question of why we are here in the first place–the question of creation.

The lingering effects of the Enlightenment and huge advances in fundamental physics have led to a popular conception of life as a rational phenomenon, explained in some way by the long chain of cause and effect that brought it into being. There remain irritating holes in this conception, and it is by no means universally held. In fact, it is fully alien to most of our known history, in which intentional creators and creation myths proliferated.

Creation myths are a staple of cinema going back to the start of the medium. These themes are common not just in the biblical adaptations that have recurred throughout cinematic history, but in sci-fi and fantasy works, horrors, and even comedies. People see myths represented in cinema so often that conversations often slip between the cinematic and the mythic as if they were interchangeable, as if the relation were in fact more than aesthetic.

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah tells a creation myth in a story of destruction, the almost-absent creator looming over the events that follow. An absent creator also looms over Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, a far more cynical story that is nonetheless all about creation.

In Noah, the end has already come. The society we are shown blossoming in the opening sequence has consumed itself and everyone who lived in it, leaving only stragglers behind in the ruins. Industrialization and industry have swept through the world, consuming and being consumed, leaving nothing to remain.

Noah is a fanatic. His vision drives him to construct the Ark and save life on earth, but even from the start it makes him paranoid and impulsive. The requirement on him to interpret the messages from God destroys his sense of proportion; he forgets that he himself inscribed the limits of their mission. Noah only truly trusts his own motivations, his own interior. He is fanatical.

In Prometheus, knowledge leads inextricably to destruction. The Alien, the perfect killing machine, is the derivative that the taint of knowledge brings out of any living creature. Peter Weyland, the geriatric plot-moving antagonist of Prometheus, is obsessed with meeting his creator. Weyland has set off from Earth in his own ark, with his own group set to repopulate some distant world.

Weyland is convinced beyond all reason that if he is able to meet his maker he will be healed. Not healed of a particular ailment, but of the condition of life itself. He ascribes his creator with absolute power and absolute benevolence–to him at least. The dark joke of Prometheus is that the desire on the human’s part to meet a perfect creator is mirrored by the inability of the android, David, to escape his. Weyland loves David, but his human love is insignificant compared to the Godly compassion that David expects.

To take on a project like this video, or any artistic endeavor really, requires a certain measure of single-mindedness. You have to see the thing before it exists, and endure the lengthy period in which what you’ve made doesn’t even come close to the thing you imagined. Often it won’t even be a good match when it’s done. But you have to not be averse to plowing ahead alone, trusting that once the idea is sufficiently realized, then friends and acquaintances will begin to see why you have bothered.

It’s a risky, indulgent feeling, and the thrill of pulling it off can be intoxicating. Being able to justify a course of action to yourself and yourself alone makes you feel powerful. This is the kind of allure that people experience in the arguments of Nietzsche or Ayn Rand–permission to disregard common convention in the pursuit of a specific goal. And this can be a dangerous, seductive feeling, one that has been used to justify all manner of horrific behavior.

Noah’s belief is his entire world, and the entire world comes to his belief. There is an appeal in that. But it can be hard to shake the feeling that we’re all much more like the protagonists in Prometheus: floating, unmoored in an improvised cosmic comedy. Fated by birth to serve at the beck and call of idiots and imbeciles, our entire fate turning on the whim of some daydreaming oligarch.

Noah is a vision of the future; Prometheus is a vision of the past. Our society will not self-sustain its way to the stars, no great lumbering spaceships bringing us out to meet our maker. Can we aspire to more than becoming an angry displaced mob living in the ruins of the past? We have to.

For more great film analysis in this vein, watch Josh’s other video essays, “Man of steel is not objectivist” and “Sixteen attempts to talk to you about Suicide Squad”