"Death is the road to awe."
THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife but he dismisses her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars as mere imbecilic prattle.
As a concerned neurochemist trying to cure his terminal wife (Rachel Weisz) via ancient tree of life scrapings, Jackman's many lives-one master hero is even more dour and dull than Leo. Poor Rachel just wants to find peace and die but Hugh us too busy being ridden with angst and posturing grief to give a shit what she wants. We flash forward and back through time (via her calligraphy hand-written journal) like we're skimming a glossy-paged graphic novel: a shadowed inquisitor is self-flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and her champion (Jackman again), a seething conquistador who sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree.
All well and good but what makes FOUNTAIN such a classic American Griever saga is Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He loves only the thought her dying, like hurry up and die so I can drink to escape the pain and you can haunt my fringes, like all of Leo's dead wives. Weisz has seen the light but Jackman buries himself in sunless jungles so he can create an eternal light. All this when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? You can float like a Buddha all you want, Hugh. It's as phony as a tree dolla bill. The parts in the beginning where he seems to die and be reborn into another aspect of self are very cool, but turn out to be kind of misrepresentin'. When and if he dies, he demands the whole earth shake and dissolve in admiration. He may meditate and look as self-righteously enlightened as Richard Gere, but the ego is a cunning focus-puller.
Personally, if I ever lost a parent as a child, or vice versa, my attitude might be more conventionally 'oh death, I'm mad at you! Instead I have a great grandmother who lived to 107, and her daughter, my granny, alive and bored at 95 and put on suicide watch at her home if she even jokes about going out in a bang not a whimper. So I'm a represent, for her sake, that under-represented, pro-death voice: If your eyes are truly open, and life appears as it really is, infinite, then you know death is just the brief dream-filled sleep to life's 3-D space-time waking --living in the moment is impossible without feeling this to be true, of facing and making peace with your own mortality--and so when you hear this 'life is still life even if that life is less than lovely' jazz, you understand why our medical system is so fucked up. We'd outlaw death if we could, jamming a crowbar into the wheel and wondering where that grinding sound is coming from, and why the lines at Epcot are so long, and why so many people are being born with such cheap knock-off souls.
I know it's a touchy issue and I don't mean to sound all-knowing or callous, but in not even daring to touch on it, we're killing quality at the expense of quantity. I've known people who've pissed away their life savings keeping a vegetable relative hooked to a machine. And I've waited in lines. At Epcot. And I've seen the limitless expanses of trash dumps, and mass production, and stockyards, and phone books... and suburban sprawl. Know who benefits from our fearful overpopulation? The soul-eaters, the reptillian overlords, and CEOs of giant conglomerates.
What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling is actually its most interesting aspects: the way death is viewed as a form of public transportation; if you surrender to death in the right spirit you never really die. So in a way this tree of life is a sister to the mind altering South American plant concoctions like ayahuasca. But these elements aren't explored so much as passed like ship-shaped phantoms in the on the way to another tearful tantrum. I stood up a few times and yelled at the screen: "Hugh. we may already be immortal, soul-wise, so why cling to one body forever rather than find out?" It may well be that radiation treatments may prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the electromagnetic weave of your immortal soul, which is an electromagnetic field that can become permanently damaged by radiation, hence William S. Burroughs' description of the atomic bomb as a soul killer:
Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.
My point with 'American Grievers' is not to be controversial for attention but to illuminate a gap between romantic male characters in today's cinema and those of old Hollywood, when men relating to their female partners in a direct and tender manner while remaining tough (not falling into rom-com territory) was not a forgotten art. Think of the rapport between William Powell and Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN or William Powell and Kay Francis in ONE WAY PASSAGE and JEWEL ROBBERY. Think of Bogie and Bacall; Newman and Woodward; Taylor and Burton; Gable and Lombard; Gable and Scarlett --all instances of actors able to be both masculine and tender, deep and badass but also sexually healthy compared to the anguished loners of post-'82 American dramatic cinema, who were never supposed to become role models. Aside from Russell Crowe--an Australian--who can still do this?
I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky. in his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER, death is practically advocated as the one truly badass artistic climax of performance. I would hope we're meant to side with Rachel Weisz's right to die vs. Jackman's tiresome "you're not gonna die!" tirades. This keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards any talk of death with dignity or eternal life as a reason to let go of a dying body is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. The characters Jackman resembles in THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN are SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom WRESTLER's Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock. The trouble is, Jackman's the main character in THE FOUNTAIN. He's supposed to be the good guy.Would you want to see THE BLACK SWAN if Hershey's character was the lead, and Portman just an ungrateful daughter?
In the end Jackman may or may not get wise to the joys of nonexistence, but either way his life as a lotus-posin' baldhead taking care of an outer space yum yum tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned" based on his record of glum tantrums. Meditation is where one goes to find the truth of what lies beyond our current mortality, what survives when the rest is burned away, what is eternal and true vs. what is ephemeral. What makes Aronofsky's later films much better is the introduction of art to that equation, to mean art = a very cool death, regardless of your clocked meditation tree-time. As a doctor, Jackman's whole Hippocratic Oath thing stops him from being true to Mickey and Natalie's ideal of deathless fierceness --but truly good doctors know when to stop torturing the patient with painful, temporary stave-off measures and endless spinal taps and start encouraging them to enjoy their last remaining moments. Don't they?
That said, the visuals of THE FOUTNATIN are quite impressive, but again you can have acres of trippy hallucination and it's no more than eye candy for something that never seems to really happen, i.e. the transcendence of the duality of life and death into one eternal deathless state. In the words, psychedelic. If you're going to be that deep, it's cool to not show self-righteous American grievers getting rewarded by the cosmic good fairy as if spiritual points are given just for self-importance. There's more to Zen than baldness and Jason Patric-style sanctimony! Look at Jack and Rose on THE TITANIC! They loved a lifetime worth in a few hours, but ole Hugh doesn't care about a few hours, and that's the very definition of un-Zen. Imagine for example, Leo spending his last moments with Rose just lecturing her about how stupid it was she jumped out of the lifeboat to be with him... that's THE FOUNTAIN.
Fortunately, Aronofsky learned the lesson from its failure at the box office and with critics. THE WRESTLER and THE BLACK SWAN would keep the best elements of THE FOUNTAIN--the even-keeled examination of mortality-- and sideline the blind clingers. Aronofsky learned in THE FOUNTAIN that the best way to make a point about art and the death drive is by portraying artists in physically masochistic fields like wrestling or ballet. Without some true artistic pain, these greenscreened actors are as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.
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