American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN

"Death is the road to awe."

Was it an accident I watched THE FOUNTAIN (2006) the very next night after INCEPTION? There are no accidents in cinema when your cinematic reality is more high-def than your foggy day-to-day free-floating grind! There's a handful of differences twixt the two: DiCaprio's brooding dreamweaver in INCEPTION becomes FOUNTAIN's Hugh 'Wolverine' Jackman as a concerned neurochemist trying to cure his terminal wife (Rachel Weisz) via ancient tree of life scrapings. She just wants to find peace and die but he's 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, with a shadowed inquisitor flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and a seething conquistador who sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree.

What makes this such a classic American Griever saga is Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He sees only her dying. She's seen the light and Jackman only sees the shade. He thinks if he buries himself in sunless jungles he can create an eternal light, when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? And besides, if you've been forced to perform as long as our sweating sun, you'd be ready to die too. Jesus, heal these children! 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 life--living in the moment is useless without it--and so when you hear all this life at all costs 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 of life 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 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 bring it up just because no one else will, and 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? China.

What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling are actually its most interesting aspects, i.e. the way death is handled as a kind of transport, i.e. if you surrender to death in the right spirit, you never really die - and the idea of this tree of life as related to mind altering South American plant concoctions like ayahuasca. But these elements aren't explored so much as passed in the CGI artsy night on the way to another tearful tantrum. A good 70% of THE FOUNTAIN seems to be these Jackman tantrums. 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, for example, may prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the 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.

Imagine if in doing chemo we are prolonging our current life at the expense of mutating our immortal soul, like the Bridey Murphy medieval witch in Roger Corman's THE UNDEAD?

My point in dissing the American Griever thing in film isn't meant to just draw controversy, 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 romcom 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-70s American dramatic cinema! Aside from Russell Crowe--an Australian--who can still do this?

I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky, for his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER death is seen as just the coolest of two grim options and endorsements of the better to burn out than fade away adage of Neil Young. 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. THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife but all her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars and the beauty of the moment are dismissed and ignored by him as imbecilic prattle. We're meant to notice this in the film of course, the keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards death with dignity is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. In discussing THE FOUNTAIN we discuss the roots of THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN, with Jackman's buzzkill character an early reflection of SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom and Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock in THE WRESTLER.  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' baldhood fool taking care of a space tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned" based on all his 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 so much more 'earned' 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 this 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! There's also nothing romantic about Jackman's jackass hero. 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 unconsciousness. 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 the way immortal art can make you transcend death even as you die, and ditch the douchebag. 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 pro wrestling or ballet, more than just showing the art of CGI illustrators shellacked over greenscreened actors as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.