The Face Knife

It is all too easy to be embarrassed by a movie like The Fountain. Writers get to hide their most outlandish scientific speculations and half-assed religious syncretisms behind the rubric of “the Novel of Ideas” but someone like Darren Aronofsky (Pi, the abysmal Requiem for a Dream) is stuck actually showing us a bald Hugh Jackman and his tiny, tiny ears in a bubble made of Karma ascending through the Xibalba Nebula. That’s some hard shit to pull off, particularly with a contemporary science fiction/fantasy film’s necessary reliance on show-off CGI artistes, but although I’m not anywhere closer to believing that death is just a cosmic new beginning, I do think that Aronofsky made a good-looking (and with apparently ground-breaking visual effects*), emotionally involving film based on the idea (or is it a misprision?) that the human race is in exile from a decidedly Earthly paradise.

Personally, 2006 provided more than ample evidence that we live in a fallen world,** and while I’m not sure that gobbling all the “ethnobotanicals” in the world is going to do much to assuage that maybe you want to check erowid.org or the works of Terence McKenna or Daniel Pinchbeck for an alternate point of view. ***

Aronofsky’s ideas are not quite so shroomed-out as those of the psychonauts above, but they come from a similar desire to impose meaning and order on the World. The Fountain traces a tripartite struggle to find the key to the redemption of the Flesh over a period of a thousand years, but the film moves along at a brisk pace and we are not as encumbered by plot or exposition as is normal in such films. This being a Hollywood movie, part of the metanarrative is that to escape our fallen nature you must embrace monogamous, heterosexual love and romance as the end all and be all to life - until you die. Then flowers shoot or roman candles shoot out of your abdomen or something. That sounds very painful but it looks really cool.

The main point of The Fountain seems to be that be you an ascending Buddha, a cancer-riddled novelist or warrior for Spain, there is a “good” way to die. Being a neurotic New Yorker, I just want to lapse into Woody Allen-esque jokes here but it might be good to engage with the ideas of the film. On the one hand, there’s the cryptic line uttered by a Mayan priest - “Death is the road to awe.” I’m not sure what that means, but when a guy decorated with more body parts than Leatherface’s cottage is shouting it at you as he’s about to decapitate you with a flaming sword, it gets you to think about it. Not sure it’s going to become anyone’s catchphrase, though.

The Fountain is not all about the persistence of metaphysical notions like the Soul or Love, and that’s what makes the movie itself, in the end, redeemable. The body and the various urges to accept or deny it are portrayed in some sharp vignettes. For instance, one of the film’s villains is another of the recent parade of cinematic, literal, gory self-flagellants, and the most heroic character, as part of the progress of her death, loses the ability to feel any physical pain (however, this reveal comes right after she’s enjoyed a sloppy bathtub shagging, and the subject is not broached whether or not she has lost the ability to feel pleasure either).

I don’t think very many people’s minds are going to be blown by The Fountain, at least the way Aronofsky intends them to be blown, but it is nice to see a science fiction epic that pushes the medium forward in new and cinematic ways.

* The “space” effects were generated using macro-photography of chemical and bacterial reactions. See Wikipedia.
**and indeed, there were a spate of similarly apocalyptic films released at the end of the year (Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men and, er, Apocalypto), each of which I hope to engage individually in the coming days, as it proved too intimidate a task to combine all into one essay
*** Oh, and like the film, for optimal effect make sure your room is decorated with subtle, tasteful patterns and mandalas (even the hospital glass had some arabesques applied) to provide a nice floorshow as you transcend consciousness or whatever.