Noah

For a blog that began as a way for me to write movie reviews, it has been a long time since I posted anything resembling a film write-up. For the last couple years, I don't think I've posted a single straight movie review at all. Instead I wandered off into talking about my travels, my job, my lodgings, cities, etc.

Maybe it would have stayed that way, and I could have kept going along as I have been (e.g. here I am in some tropical paradise working form the beach, blah, blah, blah).  But that was before I saw Noah.

It was a pure whim to go into the theater yesterday. I was down in Tualatin, working at the Starbucks in my favorite lifestyle center off I-5. It was mid afternoon and I had some time to kill. A random impulse had me walking over to the multiplex and getting that tingly feeling of spontaneously buying a movie ticket for the first time in a while.

Every once in a blue moon a movie comes out that seems to completely change the way I look at the world. I didn't realize it would be this one. Darren Aronofsky is a genius director, to be sure. Of course I loved The Wrestler, one of the best movies I saw during my run of movie watching 2008-2010 (seen in Waltham, Massachusetts, if I recall). But it didn't completely overhaul my soul like Noah. All of his previous work pales in importance to this one, in my opinion. It's the film of 2014.

Why? Because Noah points out the life and death struggle that is facing all of us---whether civilization and humanity will continue. In that way, it's no holds barred, as Coop says.

Maybe it was the timing---the movie has come out right at the same time as the latest IPCC report from the United Nations on global climate change, as well as the report from NASA about the future of the planet. Computer models don't lie, people.  Neither does the UN!

And neither does Neil DeGrasse Tyson (would someone please give that man a Nobel Prize already! He deserves it just on his creativity in rebooting Sagan after so many years).  Tyson's rough-and-tumble, never back-down-from a challenge debates against the so-called "deniers" is the very spirit of scientific inquiry and should be mandatory viewing for anyone who can't see straight on this issue.

Watching Noah, something became very clear to me as scientist. After many years of trying to wrap my mind around the Gaia hypothesis, which forms the basis of modern climate science, I was able to see that it is no longer a hypothesis as such should be regarded as a full-fledged fact as solid as Newton's laws (more so, in many ways). Simply put, it is irrefutable that we are maggots on the face of Mother Earth and she is about to shake us off like the parasites that we are.

This is essentially the message of Noah. It's exactly the same message that President Obama tried to convey is his State-of-the-Union. CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FACT!!!!

Sure, Obama is not a scientist per se, but I have literally never in my life seen a physicist speak with such absolute certainly of an opinion as Obama did in front of Congress and the nation that evening. If there is one thing that I could say about his presidency, it is that the scientific community could learn a whole lot by how he expressed himself on this issue.

As Galileo once said, as I used to tell my students in Austin, the most fundamental principle in science is respect for authority.

I would write more on this issue but frankly I've begun to wonder about my carbon footprint from this blog. At the very least I'm probably going to go dark like Blackle. O.K., that's probably a bit much I realize, and I don't really know if it will do any good at this point. In the postmodern era, as we all know, science serves social goals, not some phallocentric concept of masculinist and biased "objective truth" that is basically a gang rape of Mother Earth. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we make a statement.

As my friend Okki says, and as these courageous scientific heroes would surely agree, "Somebody call someone...about something!!!"

Aronofsky's Noah would understand perfectly...