From now to eternity - "The Fountain of Love"
I would like to call it a conceptual film. Director Aronofsky uses a visual language full of metaphors and symbols. And the interweaving psychedelic montage provides an open text for the audience. The mysterious tone of Mayan mythology, the cosmic thinking like "2001: A Space Odyssey", the love and pain of earthly life, and the philosophical thinking about death, eternity, rebirth, reincarnation, redemption, faith, meaning and many other contents make the movie There seems to be some kind of revelation and meditation hidden behind every picture in it. Like a magical Rubik's Cube, although the movie itself has only one structure, it allows you to understand the intricate implicit messages hidden behind the structure through different ways, and here are just a variety of real or illusory possibilities. one of sex.
(1) Narrative
The film uses a parallel and intersecting narrative method to combine the three stories of the Spanish conquistadors, pharmacological scientists, and spacewalkers that took place in different time and space into one and the same story. The themes of love and death are blended together to form a certain science fiction image style. I don’t think Tommy the pharmacologist went on a thousand-year odyssey, and Thomas the Conqueror and Tom Spacewalker weren’t both fictional characters based on their husbands in Izzy’s books. What the film is really about is Tommy's journey from pain, fear, madness to final realization when faced with the impending death of his wife. Here, the Conqueror is the storyline described in Izzy's book, while the Spacewalker symbolizes Tommy's spiritual world.
The real basis of the story is that in 2001, Tommy, who loved his wife deeply, was afraid of losing Izzy, who was already in the advanced stage of brain cancer, so he led his scientific research team to conduct almost crazy drug experiments. Desire to be able to save his wife's life by a miracle. However, in reality, the ever-changing condition and the possibility of death at any time made Tommy more and more anxious and frightened. He was so preoccupied with his experiments that he neglected his last companionship and love for Izzy. Of course, all these performances are purely out of love for his wife and out of the strong feeling of wanting to be together forever. Izzy, who also loves her husband deeply, fully understands Tommy's mood at this moment. She can't bear and is unable to stop her husband from pursuing that last bit of hope. But she knew that she was going to die eventually. In order to help Tommy accept this cruel fact and get back on his feet and continue a brave life, she adopted a method similar to philosophical enlightenment, which was to express her expectations or last wishes through novels. expressed in form. She prepared pen and ink for Tommy, hoping that he would help her complete the ending of the story. When Tommy says, "But I don't know how it ends," she tells him, "You know. You're going to know." Tommy is obviously unable to understand his wife's intentions at first because he is paranoid about his fear and avoidance, but after a difficult spiritual odyssey, he finally understands Izzy's painstaking efforts and what she has been telling him about life and death. Feel.
It can be seen that the film’s intersecting narrative of the three stories seems chaotic on the surface but is actually logical. After Tommy's story was first told, the narrative about the Conqueror and the Spacewalker was closely tied to Tommy's reality. The transformation from real-life scenes to Spanish scenes is transitioned through the plot of reading a book. The text content that flashes quickly and gradually fades out from the camera shows us that the story that happened in Spain is a set of interpretations of the philosophical dialogue between Tommy and Izzy. Symbol, Thomas the Conqueror is the symbol of Tommy who is addicted to experiments in reality. Like Tommy, he takes risks to save his lover and to be with the queen in his heart forever. In order to fulfill his promise, Thomas killed his rebellious subordinates, and the priest who guided him to the Tree of Life also died because of the rebellion; but in reality, Tommy ignored the provisions of the drug agreement and took a mysterious drug. The formula of the tree was tested on macaques. They all encountered various resistances from around them, and at the same time, they all ran towards their goals regardless of the cost. As a de facto helper, the macaque also faces the same threat of death as the priest. But the queen in the Spanish story is not based on Izzy. She is the queen imagined by Tommy (Thomas). She is beautiful and noble, but fragile and helpless, and needs someone to save her. In fact, it is Izzy in his eyes. A mental image, because Tommy always believed that once he accepted the ring that represented true love, he had the responsibility to protect her, and when the invasion of foreign enemies (viruses) threatened her life, he would look for the tree that could The Tree of Life is the only way to immortality.
The story far away in the galaxy is more closely related to Tommy's state of mind than the plot in Spain. Tom always stood by the tree quietly, feeling her vitality, and kept telling her "Don't worry, we will be fine" and "I will always stay by your side".
The director has repeatedly used symbolic continuous montages to connect the real world and the scenes in the space world. For example, through the flickering changes of light and shadow, the tree trunk caressed in the camera turns into Izzy's smooth body; the mustache on the tree trunk becomes her. The hairs on the skin; the golden flowing nebula turned into circular patterns on the hospital floor; and similar body movements of Tommy and Tom, such as turning back, looking up, wailing, etc. are often juxtaposed in the camera transitions . In the beginning, the vitality of the big tree was "still very strong"; when Izzy fainted in the museum, the tree's hairs began to droop downward; finally, when Izzy died due to ineffective rescue, the big tree finally shrank and withered. . Obviously, the big tree here is a metaphor for Izzy's physical condition, and the glass ball-like star is a metaphor for Tommy's mentality and thoughts. Here, Izzy always seems to be around Tom, but never really there. Tom is afraid of facing Izzy's phantom, afraid that she will remind him repeatedly to complete the ending of the novel, and all he has been doing is studying the nebula and how to keep the big tree alive. When the real-life Izzy dies, the nebula begins to gather, and the vision around Tom becomes Queen Isabella, who, like Izzy, tells Tom, "You can free New Spain from slavery, you can do it." This time, Tom listened to Izzy's words, "Let's finish it." He finally left the sphere that had been waiting for many years to complete the final ending for his wife's novel. And Tom also disappeared into the universe with the big explosion of the nebula.
From this point of view, the film uses a flashback technique starting with the plot of Spain and space, but it is not just a narrative method. In fact, the situation of Thomas and Tom described at the beginning of the film is exactly the dilemma faced by Tommy in reality. Although Thomas found the way to the Tree of Life after going through many hardships, he was stabbed by a Mayan warrior guarding the road and his life hung on the line. This is the last plot in Izzy's novel, and it is also a mysterious code she sets for her husband. How it ends, whether it ends here, or continues the search with pain, or something else, is all up to Tommy. There are several sounds in Tom's world. One is made by Tom himself, who said to the tree, "You can do it, I don't want you to die." The other is made by his wife in his memory. Says "Come for a walk with me", "It's snowing for the first time"; the third is from the phantom of the wife who surrounds her, saying "Finish it!". These three voices intertwine to represent Tommy's painful and conflicting emotions. He longed for a miracle to happen, for a cure for cancer to be found. However, he knew how slim that hope was, and he "didn't know how to accomplish it." He was upset because he couldn't accompany his wife to watch the snow. "I'm sorry, it's my fault." He could only express his apology and guilt more than once. He also wanted to help his wife fulfill her last wish. He looked at the tattoo on his finger and said, "Okay, I believe you, take me away and guide me." It's a pity that Izzy left without leaving any guidance. He still needs to understand everything by himself. At the end of the film, Tommy gave up his pursuit of eternity and accepted the death that humans must face, thus finally liberating himself from the fear of death.
(2) Theme
“So, he drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, and placed cherubim there, and a flaming sword that turned around. "Guard the way to the tree of life." This is the quote from the Bible about Genesis at the beginning of the film. It hints at the storyline and also tells us the main content that the film wants to discuss. From the moment Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the "tree of knowledge, or tree of good and evil", human beings began to live in a world of duality, life and death, poverty and wealth, Sadness and happiness, good and evil...what is the meaning of life? What would happen if they chose not the "Tree of Knowledge" but the "Tree of Life"? What separates us from our Creator, and what makes us special? Maybe all of this is just a process from now to eternity.
At the end of the film, Tommy finally gains the ability to conceive the ending of the novel. The guardian of the Tree of Life saw Adam, the "Father of Mankind", at the moment he took action. He put down the flaming sword in his hand and was willing to die for his sins. Thomas saw the Tree of Life as he wished, but he did not become immortal because of it. When he drank the resin that represented infinite vitality, he fell to the ground in pain, and green grass and flowers burst out of his body. He was buried next to a big tree. And Tom calmly traveled through the nebula to the center of Shibalba, and turned into a dust in the universe with the explosion of the star.
Judging from the story and ending, "The Fountain of Cherishing" mainly wants to explore the view on death, and thereby extend thoughts on the meaning of life. Tommy finally breaks through the glass sphere of fear and avoidance and achieves a kind of spiritual transcendence. Accompanied by bright and spectacular images and fast and melodious drum music, Tom the Cosmic Walker peacefully explodes and dies with the Shibalba Nebula. This scene similar to religious Nirvana actually shows the spiritual pleasure of being forever freed from fear. What helps Tommy achieve this relief is his new understanding of love and the meaning of life.
At first, Tommy was fragile and sensitive at heart. He didn't want Izzy to talk to him about any topics involving death. In fact, he was afraid of losing her. Therefore, he declared war on fate and wanted to "stop aging and stop dying." He believed that to get rid of pain, he had to defeat death. "Death is a disease, and like any other disease, there is a cure." He wanted to find it. . However, his resistance or contempt is not due to Sisyphus's simple persistence and happiness, but to his subconscious helplessness and despair. As the Mayan guardian said, in his case, "death is the road to fear."
Unlike Tommy, Izzy, who has been suffering from illness for many years, has an aesthetic interpretation and recognition of death. She told Tommy that the golden nebula was actually a gathering of extinct stars that would one day explode and die to give birth to a new planet. And she found her place, it was called Shibalba, a world where dead souls could be reborn. She also told him that according to the Mayan creation myth, life was created by Adam, the ancestor of mankind, with his own body. His body turned into the trunk of a big tree stretching to the earth, his soul turned into a branch stretching to the sky, and Shibalba It was created by his children in heaven. Of course, Tommy was preoccupied with treatment and didn't pay attention to what his wife said. But Izzy has always used her own religious fantasy way to help Tommy understand that there is more than one form of life, and that we are all just a tiny part of the universe. After Izzy's condition worsened, she told Tommy a story told to her by a Mayan tour guide, saying that after the tour guide's father died, a seed was buried in his grave and grew into a big tree. The tour guide said that his father He became part of the tree, and his soul flew away with the foraging birds. The film does not mention the situation of the tour guide and the origin of the story, but it is obvious that Izzy has been enlightening Tommy with a kind of cosmic thinking that transcends the external form, trying to make him understand that death is not an end, but a new beginning.
In fact, Tommy's final realization and detachment were precisely due to his understanding of this truth. He arranged the death ending for Thomas. Thomas' body turned into flowers and plants, but he was actually reborn in another form. And Tom finally came to the center of Shibalba, which is where Izzy said he was, where the nebulae gathered and exploded into another planet as mentioned before, and the Tree of Life came to life again. It can be said that Tommy accepted Izzy's views on life in his mind, so the Tom who represented trouble and escape also disappeared with the rebirth of Izzy's soul. Of course, Tommy's realization is still the result of the true love between him and Izzy. Before Tom finally decided to break out of the glass sphere, the image of his wife continued to appear, and the Queen Isabella, who symbolized Tommy's inner mirror, also Finally standing with Izzy's mirror image. It was her(their) love and trust that gave Tommy the courage and strength to "finish it". So, when the recurring scene in the film of his wife inviting him out for a walk appeared again, he did not go to the laboratory, but ran to the snow, to his wife, and to Shibalba's "heart." There, he found the lost wedding ring, which he put on his middle finger, covering the tattooed ring carved out of pain and longing for eternity. He no longer needed to eat the bark of a big tree to overcome the pain in his heart. Fear, and no longer needed to carve growth rings on his arms to travel through the pain of time, because he knew that Izzy had not really left, and she would be with him forever.
On the snow-white cemetery, we saw Tommy burying a warm seed. We believe that a lush tree will grow there soon.
"Goodbye, Izzy."
"I've done it for you."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes, everything is fine."
(3) Visual language
The director's theme of Tommy's fear of death is realized through changes in lens color. In the movie, we can see that the images in the lens are constantly transforming between color and black and white, darkness and light. This change in color is related to the protagonist's experience and mood. Among them, the scenes involving Tommy, Thomas and Tom were shot largely in darkness, only to burst into bright white at the end. Every time the shot transitions from color to black and white, the protagonist is almost always in a state of confusion, anxiety or pain. For example, when Tommy returns home to look for Izzy, and when the priest appears to lead Thomas on an adventure for the Tree of Life, When Tommy walked from the hospital to the laboratory after Izzy fainted, when Tom felt that the vitality of the tree was declining, when Tom cried bitterly while holding the withered tree...and so on. By contrast, scenes involving the Queen, Izzy and her phantoms are mostly shot in more saturated light, with Rachel Weisz's character dominating the shot every time the heroes and heroines appear together. , the close-ups of his face are always illuminated with a soft light. This arrangement is obviously not arbitrary. It distinguishes two different states, one is optimism and calmness, the other is sadness and contradiction; the other is tranquility and tranquility, and the other is hesitation and helplessness.
Finally, when the two show dazzling bright colors at the same time, it actually represents their ultimate transformation from claustrophobia to openness, from darkness to light, and from fantasy to reality.
After reading Finally, I burst into tears.