 In modern society today, fear of death is not an uncommon thing. In fact, we'll often go to great lengths to avoid thinking about it if we can. The subject itself generally isn't even handled much in movies, except, you know, in horror flicks or crime dramas, where the treatment is usually violent and sensational rather than sensitive or thought-provoking. Yet, The Fountain is one of those movies that handles death really well. It's so good that it may even be deeply moving and healing for anyone going through the grieving process, as it inspires and educates on our transcendent nature. And so, as always, spoiler alert, and here we go. At its heart, The Fountain is a love story spanning lifetimes and dimensions, drawing upon ideas of reincarnation, life, death, rebirth, eternal love, and ascension. So, you know, it's our kind of movie. The plot revolves around a doctor named Wolverine, wait, no, sorry, Tommy, who is trying to save his wife Izzy from dying of a brain tumor by experimenting with a tree from Guatemala that seems to reverse aging. However, this story is also reflected in two other ways, and they weave together so intricately that you don't really know if any one in particular is the quote-unquote real story. Rather, it's far more likely that each of these stories reflect the trinity of mind, body, and spirit. One story is set in our present day. Another during the Spanish Inquisition, where he's searching for the Fountain of Youth, or Tree of Life to be more specific, and a mystical and seemingly futuristic story where he's traveling through the stars in a magical orb with a special tree who seems to be the spirit of his wife and the time that she has left. Despite it jumping from one story to another seamlessly, the whole movie does have remarkable self-awareness, as Izzy is spending her final days writing a story called The Fountain. Roll credits. Which is about the quest for The Fountain of Youth during what seems to be their past life. Now, to be fair, we're never told if Spanish Tommy is modern Tommy in a past life, or just a character in Izzy's book, the same way we're not sure if Future Tree Guy is Future Tommy or the personification of Tommy's own spiritual awakening. But that's what makes The Fountain such a brilliant movie, weaving these stories together perfectly and still leaving room for you to interpret it how you wish. Then sometimes the story throws you clues, like that scene in the office where Bald Spirit Tommy takes the place of his present self for just a moment. The director even said that the story is a bit like a Rubik's Cube, where you can solve it in several different ways, but ultimately there's only one solution at the end, which itself is kind of like life, you know? The one thing that connects all three of the lifetimes together, though, is that all of the Tommies have a fear of death. Spanish Tommy wants to find the Tree of Life so that he and Queen Isabella can forever live and escape the Inquisition. And present-day Tommy naturally wants to heal his sick wife, because he's afraid to lose her. And Future Tommy really wants to make it to Shabalba quickly before his Tree of Life dies. Interestingly, Izzy is very much like his spiritual guide in most of the lifetimes, in that she accepts her fate and embraces death as a part of life, and understands and shares the Mayan priest's view that death is simply the road to awe, and that it's simply a part of the journey of our experience. The whole structure of the movie very much emphasizes this idea that death is simply a part of the experience of life, and a temporary one at that. It balances three storylines that challenge the notions of time, or the division of past, present and future. Despite every lifetime taking place in different time periods, or dimensions, everything kind of blurs into a now, since there's a lot of scenes that are repeated later in the movie, like the fight with the priest, which gives us a more insightful understanding of the actions and context. It isn't even really hidden that this is speaking to reincarnation, but more than that, perhaps there's even a sense here that separation, time and even death are all just illusions, as our various lifetimes and dimensions of existence spin forever on the wheel of time, but are ultimately all connected to the soul in the center. Generally, we see our lifetimes as occurring at different times. I mean, come on, it's literally right in the name. Or at least we often see them as separate events, like we can't be in two lifetimes at the same time, right? But maybe all of our lifetimes are happening simultaneously, and what we perceive as the past or future are really just different angles of the present. If this were true, then it would most likely take our fear of death out of the equation. We wouldn't be so scared to die, because we know that we'd simply return to being a being of consciousness until we decided to have a physical life again. Even Aronofsky, the director, weighed in on this idea back in 2012, saying that ultimately, the film is about coming to terms with your own death, often times driven by love. When he was researching inspiration for the movie, he looked at people who were dying young and learned from doctors and caregivers that such patients find new ways of coping. And most of the time, he saw that the patients often die more alone because their families can't recognize or understand what's going on with them. As weird as this sounds, it's not really our fault. A fear of death is programmed into us by society. So much so that, just like Tommy, we often see death as a kind of disease that we try to cure. Every day people are looking for ways to extend life or feel younger. Just look at the popularity of shows like Extreme Makeover or Nip Tuck. People often literally pay to be young and try to deny that death is a part of life, which is probably where a lot of the anxiety and fear ultimately stems from. Hospitals spend huge sums of money trying to keep people alive, but by becoming so preoccupied with sustaining the physical, we often forget to nurture the spirit. As cheesy as it sounds, a lot of us spend so much time actively trying to avoid death that we forget how to truly live. Perhaps it's because we see death as separate from life, rather than life and death as two sides of a spinning coin. This idea of duality, or triplicity in this case, is pretty common in the movie. You have three lifetimes, the three stars of Shibalba, and multiple events that happen at the same time. An interesting parallel is when Spanish Tommy finally finds the Tree of Life at the end of the movie and drinks its sap thinking it will make him immortal. Only to find that, in a reenactment of the mind creation myth recounted earlier, his body is turned into flowers and grass that burst forth from his stomach as he literally gives rise to a new life. Killing himself in the process. Whoopsie! At the same time, we see future Tommy's tree die just as their orb is engulfed by the supernova. But he too is dissolved into the tree, giving it new life, from which Izzy's ghost then picks a fruit to give to present Tommy to plant at her grave. The point here is life is cyclical. We see it as separate, little individual experiences, but actually everything is existing together in a macro and microstate, just like the old hermetic saying, as above, so below. And while not directly relevant to the plot, there is an awesome background detail that mirrors this idea perfectly. You know those cool trippy visuals at the end when the nebula is exploding and everyone sees that beautiful golden light and sacred geometry that we assume is God or consciousness? Well, those awesome visuals aren't actually CGI. They're water, chemicals, and bacteria that the design team blended together to create reactions. The team then used macro photography to look at the fluid dynamics under a super, super zoomed in lens and blew it up onto the big screen. Yeah, it's so awesome because as one of the designers explained, when these images are projected onto a big screen, you feel like you're looking at infinity. That's because the same forces that work in the water, gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices are happening in outer space. The effects themselves are rooted in the duality of our universe. That which happens on the tiniest of scales also happens everywhere in the cosmos, in a way connecting everything together in one whole big experience. And that same image was also included in NOAA in one particular dream sequence which was also created by the same director. Subtle, but nice. Honestly, it's both funny and a little awkward for humanity that the fountain got fairly negative reviews when it first came out, mostly because it's about the fact that it's okay that we die and we should come to terms with it. But a lot of people don't want to think about that, so why pay money for a meditation on losing someone you love? I mean, this movie came out in 2006 and everything about Western culture denies that death is anything to be celebrated. Like a lot of things though, it's aged like a fine wine, giving us the beautiful message that sometimes, in order to understand life truly, we have to accept death as a part of it. Things aren't beautiful because they last, but it's scarcity that gives something value. The fact that our time is limited is what makes life so much more valuable and ultimately what even gives life meaning. Even though today it's only got about 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, which personally I just find to be kind of weird, I have high hopes that in another 10 years we'll see the score get at least as high as the audience score of 74% if not higher. If anything, the fountain portrays wisdom and enlightenment as coming from acceptance. Towards the end, we see future spirit Tommy meditating in a lotus position and interacting with his past selves through what we can only assume as some kind of astral projection or remote viewing. Or, again, if it's mind-body spirit, then it's his own higher self interacting with his lower selves in the present. But he only gets to that stage once the tree has died and ghost Izzy has finally comforted him enough that he accepts the reality of death with acceptance through love rather than fear. Even Izzy herself is fairly enlightened having accepted death and realized that her soul will soon return to the source. She is able to become Tommy's ghost and guide him to his own rebirth. At the end of the day, the fountain tries and in many ways succeeds to show us that our fear of death is simply something that's programmed into us rather than something innate and natural. If anything, fighting death is simply a resistance to life as it is only another part of the journey on the road to awe. By showing us the true nature of time and our transcendental self, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Wise really give us a cathartic masterpiece that helps alleviate that fear of the unknown that is usually present with death today. Further teaching us also that death goes beyond the physical for while Izzy physically dies Tommy experiences a very powerful ego death. And even the director himself argues that death is what makes our experience intrinsically human since when talking about the Genesis narrative he pointed out that if we drank from the tree of life as well as the tree of knowledge what would have separated us from our maker? We'd be immortal and have knowledge of good and evil. We'd effectively all be God. So what makes us human is actually the ability to die. It's what makes our experience special although if we are in fact spiritual immortal souls living infinite perhaps we ourselves are God's soul experiencing itself as temporal. And so with that, thank you so much for watching. Personally, I feel like the fountain is one of the unsung masterpieces of the mid-2000s cinema. And in our current social climate perhaps we're all due to go and give it a watch again and see what kind of thoughts and feelings it brings up for us. Let us know what you think of it in the comments below and what else you'd like to see us cover. Toodles!