The Fountain
A lone hero searches across time and space for the Fountain of Youth, to rescue his dying wife…
JADE
I love that this film begins with the Spanish conquistadors scene. When you make something like The Fountain, how do you know which story to start with? The love story of the doctor and dying wife is the most immediately relatable plot, but beginning the whole thing with this holy war mission of the conquistadors makes the lovers' tale all the more interesting.
ALEX
Beginning the film with the conquistadors is amazing, I agree. Technically, it begins with calligraphic lines describing the hidden Tree of Life referred to in the Book of Genesis. Starting the tale in such dramatic, fantastical terms makes a “Treasure Hunt” the basic frame with which you absorb the other two stories.
JADE
On this second viewing, I remain dumbstruck by the Tommy the Space Traveler plot. What can be said about it? What is he doing? As he heads toward a dying star, with the dying Tree of Life, what can we really say is his conflict? In this elemental space, it is perhaps revealed that he has to overcome the idea of conflict itself.
ALEX
In the Space Traveler plot you have the inner soul of the Hero, with all forms fallen away, yet this is also the central stillness from which all forms arise. This is the Hero in contemplation of himself.
His conflict seems simple enough to me–this is the neuroscientist present day doctor, having achieved his maniacal quest to conquer death, at least far enough into the future to construct a spaceship and travel to Xibalba. In his quest to conquer death he experiences his dead wife as a torturing phantom, and himself is slowly torturing the tree which shares the spaceship with him. He’s developed his soul enough that he feels able to finish the book his wife left him with in the doctor plot, but fears the completion of the story as he fears his own death.
JADE
Oh, this is fantastic! I never read the Space Traveler part as an extension of the doctor story; I thought of it as a separate timeline. That’s great.
It’s so interesting that his character can go as far as piloting a little bubble containing a sacred tree across the galaxy, but he cannot accept something as simple as death. The tortuous relationship he has to the tree is the worst part of the movie to watch. It’s so uncanny. It aligns perfectly with the God character in Mother! saying “Nothing will ever be enough,” as he takes the very last thing his dying wife has to give him. At least in The Fountain we get to see a heroic arc: Tommy’s eventual acceptance of death, and the creation that sprouts from it. It’s like an integration of yin and yang energies or whatever.
ALEX
Yes, the treasure being achieved here is an integration of death, or suffering, with the upward ascent towards life and love and creation. It’s striking and impactful poetry, that Aronofsky equates death with the male and life with the female. It sets a yearning in the audience for an integration that we understand with our mind, our heart, and our loins simultaneously.
JADE
This film fits beautifully into our “Treasure Hunt” theme, with several treasures being uncovered at once.
Three separate plot lines rely upon each other for development. I like this style of storytelling (which reminds me of films like Magnolia): Three disparate plots eventually revealed to be united is how I like to imagine all the pieces in a season of The Mandarin.
“Finish it,” comes the voice of Rachel Weisz right at the beginning. She says it a few times throughout the film, urging her hero to make an end to the book she’s writing. When Tommy does finally open the book to the last chapter, the final line she has written says something like “all around him was death.” Then on the next page, “Chapter Twelve”... There’s more? We’d like to ask. The pages are blank, but she insists to him that there is. Her hero-doctor, intent upon finding a cure to the “disease of death,” cannot accept Weisz’s fate because he, like so many modern scientists, is not in touch with the spiritual dimension of his life. She forces him to become in touch with this again.
Something that has stopped me before in this movie, which I found less difficult to accept this time, is this emphasis on death as a creative act. Rachel Weisz’s purely blissful cherubic face at the moment of this revelation felt particularly disturbing to me. What is Aronofsky suggesting? This seems dangerously close to a death cult mentality.
ALEX
This emphasis on death actually stood out to me as ambiguous and possibly destructive, for the first time, on this viewing (many, many times have I watched this film). For many viewings in a row I focused mainly on the underlying unity of the disparate timelines, and the diverse sets. The same colors, and shapes, and character archetypes are displayed in a masterful kaleidoscope of different forms.
But this also means that there’s something basically the same about the Spanish Inquisitor’s worship of death, mortifying his flesh, covering all of Spain in a murderous witch hunt, and Rachel Weisz’s innocent and awe-filled contemplation of Xibalba, the Mayan underworld of dead souls waiting in the starry night sky. Making the Inquisitor the center of his scene, with the same colors and effects as every other scene, makes him the Hero at that moment.
JADE
This makes me think that the Head Inquisitor's self flagellation is not aligned with Weisz’s angelic acceptance, but with the intense promethean efforts of her hero-doctor-husband, as he works to find a cure. The effects are similar: while they hunt down a cure, or hunt down nonbelievers, they are viciously single minded, and disconnected with the real souls of people around them. Ultimately, both of them are doing harm to the Rachel Weisz figure.
ALEX
Okay Jade, here’s a challenge. How is this vicious single mindedness like Aronofsky’s own process in Mother?
JADE
In Mother! Aronofsky demonstrates in even more brutal terms this view that creation comes from death. The colors are even similar. The golden crystalline “heart” in Mother! mirrors the dying star of Xibalba which Tommy the Space Traveler is moving toward. While in Mother! the set has to explode in flames for this new “heart” to be made, Xibalba explodes to reinvigorate the Tree of Life and Tommy the Space Traveler both. In The Fountain, death does not seem too grotesque, while in Mother! the cancerous role of existence is all around, and too awful to bear.
Mother! might be a cynical reaction to The Fountain. The director felt tension, maybe, between the knowledge that The Fountain is his most sincere work and also a death cult. So Mother! takes the death cult issue and forces you to look at the most gruesome part of it, head on.
ALEX
What I love most about The Fountain is the upward ascent, the basic optimism embodied in Rachel Weisz and the “wise woman” doctor played by Ellen Burstyn. It’s glaringly absent in Mother!–an inner assurance that all things basically add to the good of the universe, an admonishment to keep your eyes open, even in the dark tunnels, lest you miss something beautiful.
I think that making a central character out of this optimism informed the shot-to-shot details of the entire film. It’s the same basic love of cinema and the editing process, which made for truly innovative sequences of brutal and beautiful physicality in his previous film Requiem for a Dream. The Fountain is able to let this basic love of the process shine forth, because it contains a benevolent goddess character in the person of Rachel Weisz, giving her blessing to the entire spectrum of Aronofsky’s expression.