Thoughts on 'The Fountain' (director, Darren Aronofsky; 2006).

August 20, 2018

Thoughts on 'The Fountain' (directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2006).

'Questions'.

Does the character 'Tom Creo', a doctor who had been unable to cure his wife's ('Izzi's') brain tumour, use an extract from the 'Tree of Life' to outlast humanity; and, as 'Tommy', travel through space-time to 'Xibalba', a dying star - a place where Izzi had told him souls are united and reborn? And is he the reincarnation of a dead Spanish explorer, who failed in his quest to discover the source of life and save his queen?

Illustration 1: Tomas Verde (top), Tom Creo (bottom-left) and Tommy (bottom-right) - actor, Hugh Jackman.

By opening out a 'story-within-a-story' - Tom's attempt to 'finish it' (Izzi's incomplete book, 'The Fountain', about a 16th c. A.D. conquistador) - into three parallel tales, the film maintains an entirely allusive narrative texture. Mayan myth and Catholic mysticism are interwoven in a blend of history, comparative religion and sci-fi.

Illustration 2: The cover to Izzi's book 'The Fountain'.

'Death as duality'.

On the surface, the movie can be read as a simple love story: about a husband whose passion for his wife is so great he can't let her go. However, it is also a fable describing a man who needs a thousand years - more than ten times the normal lifespan - to finally accept the fact of death. The contrast between Izzi and Tom is really that of two different philosophies: one which embraces death and one which resists it. Tom's statement 'Death is a disease, it's like any other. And there's a cure. A cure ... and I will find it!' replicates a delusion shared by an earlier, more famous, fictional prototype: Victor Frankenstein (author, Mary Shelley; 1797-1851); that character's denial of the death of his mother is notable. I'm inclined towards interpreting the fantastical elements in 'The Fountain' as being psychopathological projections - the product of a mind reeling from the horror of death.

Illustration 3: Victor Frankenstein attempts to re-make life, but creates a monster instead (illustrator, Theodor von Holst).

'The Eternal Feminine'.

The internalizing of grief, through its refraction into substitute worlds, lends urgency to the conviction, 'Together we will live forever' - words spoken by 'Queen Isabel' (past) and 'Izzi's Ghost' (future). There's also a compelling force of male romanticism in the obsessive focus upon, and worship of, an idealised feminine figure, reminiscent of Dante's [c. 1265-1321] reincarnation of Beatrice's soul in 'The Divine Comedy' ('3 - Paradiso').

Illustration 4: Beatrice guides Dante into Paradise (illustrator, Gustave Doré).

Illustration 5: The Spanish Queen (top), Izzi (bottom-right) and 'Izzi's Ghost' (bottom-left); actress, Rachel Weisz.

Tomas Verde finds the Tree of Life inside a 'hellish' South American jungle; but in his attempt to possess its power, he risks being 'devoured' (metaphorically and literally). Is Tommy's journey into the heart of a star also a suicidal headlong crash, rather than an act of spiritual self-realization? Ultimately, the planting of a seed at Izzi's grave, in the 'present-tense', acts as an imaginative bridge between death as prosaic reality and death as 'myth' - with the viewer left to decide where they stand.