Noah: The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer

My two-year-old daughter, Lennon, inherited her father's inability to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. (Other than that, you couldn't ask for a cuter, better natured child.) She sleeps in the same room with my wife and I and most nights, in order to get her down, we have to turn off the TV and all the lights and play possum. This trick eventually works, but not until she's kicked and wailed and thrashed, as though sleep were an evil dark force that she must resist at any cost. Grudgingly she succumbs to the Sandman, and I can carry her off to her own bed; but this is at One o' clock in the morning. I honestly don't know where we went wrong, but somehow we really blew it on this bedtime business. Short of a tranquilizer dart, there's no getting her to sleep before midnight, and at this point, we're pretty much clinging to the hope that it will all straighten itself out once she starts school.

Quite honestly I'm not all that worried about it, but it has presented one problem. As part of my job I have to review videos, which I enjoy--it's one of the few forms of entertainment a couple with babies can consistently look forward to. Unfortunately, Lennon is getting to the age where she's starting to clue-in to what's going on inside that fascinating box--things that we don't particularly want her to clue-in on. Ever. Few movies that I end up reviewing are particularly suitable for two-year-olds--which has turned my wife and I into expert remote control censors. I fast-forward through the violent stuff and my wife fast-forwards through the sex. Profanity is a little harder to anticipate, but we let it slide, figuring that she hears just about as much of it during the course of her parents' everyday exchange of marital opinions. We may not be the perfect Mormon Rockwell Mom and Dad, but our children are going to have themselves a good time.

The most unlikely censorship challenge came recently in the form of NBC's version of the Biblical tale of Noah and his Ark. God's wrath is nothing to be mocked, and I suppose most of us derive a certain amount of satisfaction from watching a wicked man run from a flaming meteorite--but NBC definitely broke the record for the most actors running around on fire in a two-part mini-series. I had no idea this violent madness was going to last for as long as it did, so I just kind of distracted Lennon for a few seconds, but then she pointed to the TV and exclaimed, "kitty." Lo and behold there was a cat. "Nice kitty," I repeated and tickled her--then I saw her eyes get real big and she cried, "noooo . . . " I looked back and sure enough, "nice kitty" was on fire. I changed the channel for what I thought would be a safe break, but when I turned back there were horses, dogs, rats, cats, men, women and children . . . screaming, running, flying through the air . . . on fire--what an epic. Cecil B. DeMille would roll over in his grave.

As we know, Sodom and/or Gommorah was a mighty wicked place--you know you're not living in Mayberry, when they name anal rape after your town. I'm no Bible scholar and I don't mean to be irreverent, but it's hard to believe there weren't more than a handful of decent people living there--with all that wickedness going on, there must have been plenty of small children and babies. There had to be a few nice folks--right? I mean how do you even know if you're evil if there aren't a few good people to compare yourself against. Maybe all the decent people left town because of the difficulty of finding a babysitter. Anyway I thought about this way too much and came up with the following fictitious daily routine for your average citizen of Sodom:

"Ahh another beautiful day for being evil. Evil, evil evil, I love it . . . I think I'll start today off with some good old-fashion lying. Let's see, first off I could lie to my wife about sleeping with my neighbors daughter. ÔNever laid a hand on her, honey.' Then I gotta do some stealing. Love to steal--but it's too early for that . . . nighttime is steal'n time. I know--I'll sell my daughters into prostitution--and if my wife don't like it, I'll beat her with the whip I stole from my brother the day I killed him. Holy crap I almost forgot about kill'n, gotta do some kill'n, lets see--what am I gonna kill me today? Something big. The bigger they are, the cooler it is to watch Ôem die. Love kill'n, but it tires me out, I'll barely have enough energy left to make fun of the lepers. Maybe I'll take me a little nap and then go down to my goat herd, get liquored up and chase Ôem around with my pants down. Hoo-ah, livin' the Vida Loca. It's good to be evil"

NBC certainly took some liberties with the famous Biblical tale. It has to be the most bizzare film epic ever taken from scripture. Half the time it was like a bad sit-com, the guy they got for the voice of God sounded like Potsy from Happy Days, "Hey, Noah, it's God, I gotta cool idea check it out. No, really it is, I swear to . . . me" If you've read the Bible, you know that the God of the Old Testament was pretty much of a right-winger. I always thought that the concept of destroying every living being on the planet was a tad harsh--but NBC's version of God was a little inconsistent. True he was planning to drown everybody but their dog, for their wicked ways--but there's a scene where Noah was sitting out on his porch getting drunk as two skunks and you hear God say, "Noah, you gotta quit drinking." And Noah says, "Hey I don't drink when I'm working." and God says, "well . . . alright, whatever." I'm surprised they didn't use a laugh-track.

To be sure, the story of Noah requires from Bible scholars the biggest suspension of disbelief. It's like a story you'd tell a five-year-old to scare him into being a good boy. "If I find that dog on the couch one more time--it's going to start raining and it's not going to stop until you and that mutt are as drowned as a couple of bilge rats. You got that little mister?" God's not the "Boogey Man." Personally I don't think the Noah thing was intended to be taken literally--I think it's a morality fable similar to Christ's parables. No matter how much "animal magnetism" God might bestow upon a man, the logistics involved in rounding up two of every single type of creature living on this planet today, is too Mammoth a task to hold any water. "Noah, listen to me, dammit I'm your son--it's already raining cats and dogs out here and a hippo just sat on both the wombats. Plus the damn rhinos are gay. Maybe it was just an accident, but we're pretty sure they're gay. Speaking of horns, we haven't seen hide nor hair of the Unicorns. It's a good thing we're going to be the only people left alive or it'd be "Hunt for the Unicorn Killers."

To be honest, I wasn't able to watch the second half of it--I had to work--I'm sure I missed the boat. (I did see some of "Hunt For The Unicorn Killer"--now there's a guy who needed a little Old Testament-style justice. Turn that freak from a Unicorn into a eunuch--chop chop) I'm sure NBC pulled out all the stops, in the second half of this juiciest of all Biblical stories. It must've been like watching Titanic backwards. My daughter would have soiled herself to see so many animals all in one place, (animals are her thing), but I'm equally certain she would've been traumatized to see so many men, women, children and kitties being flattened by tidal waves of water. It's hard enough to raise a kid, without her developing a horrible fear of water. I am going to be consulting the scriptures to see about this business where God, decided it was okay for Noah to drown his troubles with drink. I don't know, maybe it's accurate--after all he was just a sailor man. Arrr . . . they do likes a drop--