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aronofsky
September 2009 
The Fountain: Integral Cinema at it's Best!
Posted on Dec 13th, 2006
by 
Julian
Julian
This is my review for The Fountain. I wrote it for submission to the new publication The Integralist, so it's filled with Integral and Spiral Dynamics jagon...bear with it.
I love using movies to teach psychological theory and philosophy. Perhaps this will turn into a regular segmment! :O)
This analysis of The Fountain is actually a wonderful introduction to these life-changing maps of reality. So, if you are interested:
1. Use this link to go deeper into Spiral Dynamics.
2. WIkipedia on Integral Theory here.
3. Stuart Davis recently interviewed The Fountain's auteur, Darren Aronofsky, for Integral Naked. He and I have been trading notes on the film - read his review here.
So you have two web-links, two reviews, an interview with the director and what
I think is one of the most important, beautiful and ambitious movies ever made. Let's get started.
4. My review:
The Centaur Drinks From The Fountain
A love that spans a thousand years? An Indiana Jonesian quest to find the secret of immortality? A New Age reincarnation tale?
Darren Aronofky’s new film The Fountain will doubtless generate as much confused complaint as it will epiphanic praise. Welcome to second tier cinema. In his third outing, Aronofsky follows up Pi and Requiem for a Dream with a mind-bending trip that exposes the doomed “immortality project” at the center of both science and religion and the importance of coming to terms with the existential reality of death.
The year so far is thick with Orange/Green new age offerings that have included The Da Vinci Code, The Way Of the Peaceful Warrior, Down the Rabbit Hole (What the Bleep Part Two), The Celestine Prophecy and The Secret. These films promise to be revelatory but serve up either Green reinterpretations of Blue literalized myth (Da Vinci), awkward frothy Orange/Green mélanges of junk science, metaphysics and ‘prosperity consciousness” ( Rabbit Hole, Secret) or oversimplified regressive Green tinged with Purple magical thinking (Prophecy, Warrior).
Well, so much for the popular spiritual renaissance in cinema.
Where the previously listed films overlook interior transformation, attempting instead to just translate a static stage into cool spiritual language, or to find unlikely scientific exterior referents for misunderstood mysticism or mythic literalism, watching The Fountain is an exercise in integral consciousness. It uses a narrative style that requires the viewer to flex and flow between the three different realities and follow a story that appears at first to be stretching across a thousand years, but is really happening within the interior psyche of Dr. Tommy Creo.
In so doing Aronofky transcends and includes several historical worldviews and arrives at a uniquely contemporary conclusion.
We find ourselves shifting back and forth between three stories that follow Hugh Jackman (Tommy) and Rachel Weisz (Izzy) in different guises and timeframes. First: the desperate research and experimentation of a contemporary cancer doctor to find a cure for his dying wife, who has a fascination with all things Mayan. Second: the story (penned by the wife) of a Spanish conquistador on a quest to save his queen from the sadistic and self-righteous grand inquisitor by adventuring to the Mayan Amazon in search of the Biblical Tree of Life atop a hidden sacrificial pyramid. Success will ensure not only eternal life for both but also his queen’s undying love. Third: a futuristic astronaut/meditator floating through space toward a dying star he hopes will grant his dead wife’s rebirth.
Confused?
This is in essence a simple story about an issue with extremely complex ramifications – the acceptance of death. By metaphorically spanning a thousand years, the film is able to offer multiple perspectives on this key issue. Layered and psychologically rich, The Fountain uses death and our psychological struggle to accept it as the thread that unites the different stories.
The conquistador scenes give us a window into Izzy’s fascination with mythic consciousness and the regressive fantasy that an earlier, Mayan version of religious literalism might free her alter-ego queen from the horrors of 16th century Christianity. Here, Aronofsky astutely compares inquisition era Christianity to the creeping cancer of a brain tumor while suggesting a bloody mirror-image correspondence with the Mayan cult of human sacrifice.
It is in the shaven-headed, isolated future-Buddhist sequences that we enter most deeply into Tommy’s pain, and ultimately, resolution. Taken together, it is Aronofky’s riff on the mirrored blood-soaked Mayan and Christian cosmologies, contrasted with the hubris of insisting that science be a way to “stop aging, stop death” that gets us into the nuts and bolts of the dilemma at hand. The tension explodes and is resolved in, of all places, the interior anguish of the doctor’s meditation.
It is this final meditative representation of the inner journey into outer space and how the three stories culminate that will doubtless be confusing to a culture sadly unfamiliar with interiority.
The Fountain uses a fluid narrative structure that traverses Red/Blue secret Mayan knowledge and Biblical references, Green/Yellow postmodern Buddhist overtones, Purple/Green death-transcending love and an Orange scientific immortality project – all to finally land us squarely in the camp of Yellow existential, post-metaphysical acceptance of the reality of death.
Don’t be fooled by the trailer, this is an existentialist meditation on the human condition dressed up as new age science fiction. The surprise ending subverts heroic transcendentalism in favor of the bittersweet and ultimately transformative heart–rending of deep love and loss.
My only question is this: Following his bald adventures in death meditation, will Hugh Jackman be added at the top of the list to play Ken Wilber opposite Jennifer Aniston’s Treya in the movie version of Grace and Grit?
www.julianwalkeryoga.com
Access: PublicTagged with: the fountain, aronofsky, wilber, grace and grit, requiem for a dream, pi, second tier, second-tier, cinema, spiral dynamics, rachel weisz, hugh jackman, spiritual, psychological, existential, death, bald, heroic, transcendent, human sacrifice, buddhism, mayan, christian, spanish inquistion, science fiction, new age
i am very intrigued! must watch this movie… thanks~!
I'm going to put your review to the test and make sure you got all the colors and sequence of events correct. *poke*poke*
I can't imagine Jennifer Aniston as Treya…I can see someone like maybe Kate Beckinsale
who starred in Serendipity and Underworld. I also think she's more attractive and interesting.
Weird how certain films/books with an spiritual-evolutionary theme end with an interior scene (Akira, Ghost in the Shell)
maybe thats how the world ends lol.
on closer investigation, i have to say:
i too wrote a review of the fountain for the integralist. i don’t know if either of ours were accepted, but here are my notes on your review.
- typo “mortality project” = “immortality project”
- it’s exceedingly un-integral to immediately forward the implicitly final conclusion that it’s all happening in creo’s “interior psyche” (unless you’re willing to expand that interior to include the transpersonal, and then you have to account for exteriors, and THEN the interpretation is pretty content-free) - especially because your review is likely to be read by people who haven’t seen the film and you have to be more careful how you are conditioning their own first experience of them film). i didn’t see anything i would call “evidence” for this.
- it’s also not clear (except perhaps at the end of the film, and again, at least offer a spoiler alert) that future creo is in search of reviving his dead wife in particular. the three eras of the film being pre-modern, modern, and post-modern in their contours, it’s quite possible that future creo is actually experiencing past lives and might be searching for just that grand recapitulating orgiastic moebius moment that he finds at the end of the film - do we really know what he’s after? at any rate, all i think we have to go on is that he appears to be quite concerned with saving the life of his TREE.
- i enjoy your comparison between the inquisition and the brain cancer - that’s a pretty clear one but i didn’t catch it first time through. thanks!
- be careful with what you accuse science of doing. the scientific immortality project in the film was specifically a pathological masculine project reflected in at least the pre-modern and modern threads of the story (it’s tough for me to say that future creo remains pathological…i get the feeling that we really don’t completely grasp his interior). izzy’s movements through the film are feminine immortality projects, as well: sending the man off on a live-saving heroic journey (in the name of one’s country) and immortalizing herself via immersion in fantasy (or IS it fantasy? the movie is inconclusive, intentionally…but either way, it’s absoprtion in the atemporal). it’s not just about his obsession; it’s about hers, as well. the interesting thing is where each project falters and the characters accept death/transcendence on the terms it is handed to them - experienced, appropriately, as fullness by izzy and emptiness by tommy.
- i totally agree with you about hugh = ken. thought so from the first instant that i saw him with a shaved head. i found it amazing that aronofsky hadn’t read grace and grit or ANYTHING integral when he made that film…that collective unconscious sure made a tool out of him!
anyway, thanks for your voice. i love these deeper reviews.
Julian, what a fucken pleasure to read this review.
Ya know, I strolled into the theater with my ladyfriend to see this movie when I was firmly entrenched in some of that nasty green infused with red narcissism. I was on the spiritual path I was sure, full of Conversations with God, “Secrets,” and whatnot.
This movie changed a lot for me. The sheer cinematic beauty along with the best score I've ever heard in a movie (and being a music afficianado before being even a human, this was huge for me), was enough to capture me completely.
As the film enters it's crescendo you are absolutely mesmorized. I have no doubt that this movie left trails interiorly that led me to soon pick up “A Brief History of Everything.” The rest is now, as they say, history.
I truly enjoyed reading a review of this movie in which the reviewer was obviously within the same worldspace as the piece of art he/she was reviewing.
cheers
I think that you have an interesting take on The Fountain and have certainly put your finger on the film's pulse.
As mentioned above by Michael, I think that the film is admitting of several interpretations as to the levels of reality accorded to each temporal segment. IMO there are at least 5 interpretations I have bumped into (other than abject confusion or hostile frustration that is).
1) The easy read is the story is about literal reincarnation.
2) The slightly more difficult read is that it is symbolic (Tommy as body, mind, spirit; past, present, future; etc.).
3) The more sophisticated read is of course that the whole tale is Tommy making sense of death through the symbolic imagery afforded him by his wife's incomplete story. The torrent of images is his very second tier(plus) reframing of the given narrative and/or the experience occurring in his own interior awareness.
4) Another interpretation is that the three timelines are in a certain way unreal. Linear temporal causality is out the window. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It is in a sense a tenseless view of time and space (the ring, the seed, the tree, etc.). Past, present, and future are always present and interpenetrating.
5) Yet another interpretation, the one I initially held, is that the film taken as a whole is a cinematic koan. It is realized in a transcendent leap when one is atomized by the extremely powerful dark to light shift. In a split second the need to fully and finally know is dropped in the face of the luminous (numinous). To use altitude colors, Thomas' amber loyalty to queen, Tommy's orange brilliance, and even Izzy's green multicultural reach are all cold comfort in the brutal face of the reality of death. Finally, even the authenticity of teal and the spacious bubble of equanimity that is turquoise are blown to luminous smithereens by the atom bomb of the Real.
On a personal note, this movie really helped catalyze a serious shift in my self-sense. It happened at almost the exact time that I first experienced the Big Mind process. In the theatre the ending of the movie literally catalyzed a profound state experience for me. I was struck speechless and dumbfounded and stayed in my seat for minutes afterward. Now 'my view' of the film is that I hold all of 1-5 fully and am open to holding a few more views on it if possible.
Just my $.02,
Mark