Sorry folks, but I never saw that Darren Aronofsky made available his commentary track for The Fountain available all the way back in July. However, thanks to a heads up from an article at JoBlo I can tell you that you can find it right here, or right click here and select “Save As” to save it directly to your hard drive and add it to your iPod. You will be happy to see that once you throw it in iTunes it automatically pulls up the artwork and fills in the information. It takes only a few seconds to do and you will be up and running.
I just got done listening to the commentary and if you are looking for any clues as to the story or what it all means I will say I am sorry, it doesn’t happen. Darren remains mum on the specifics and sticks to back-story and the making of. He offers up a lot of info on what inspired him when creating the story, but as for the details you aren’t getting anything.
This now brings me to something else JoBlo points out, and that is an explanation to the story recently posted by Roger Ebert on his site with the aid of one of JoBlo’s occasional writers Matt Withers. Spoilers follow so stop reading now if you don’t want to know anything about the story.
Ebert and Withers basically come to the conclusion that the story of Tomas the Conquistador is fiction. This is obvious since it is the lead character in the story Izzi is writing and never finishes. They also come to the conclusion that Tommy (this is the future Tom) is also a work of fiction. They go on to say that he is in fact the final chapter of Izzi’s book as written by present day Tom, which then means that he is a transported version of Tomas the Conquistador. This is justified by saying that is because it is a different tone than the Conquistador’s story, which it would be since it was written by a different person. They also say it is done because it keeps Izzi’s memory, and Tom’s dedication to it alive, by transporting him to a future where there is still a chance to save his beloved.
THIS is what makes The Fountain so good, because I have to disagree.
One thing that Ebert briefly touches upon, and then dismisses, in his commentary is the possibility that present day Tom and future Tommy are in fact the same person. Ebert and Withers dismiss this notion, I don’t. Also, with their explanation they never seem to resolves the Conquistador’s death.
I have always kept my personal opinion of how The Fountain‘s story to myself, but since Ebert is going to lay it on the line I figured why not throw my idea out there. Let’s dig in…
We have space Tommy, a version of the man that remembers both Izzi and Queen Isabel. This is enough for me to say that there is no way this is Tomas the Conquistador teleported into the future since Tomas did not know present-day Izzi and would therefore not have any memory of her. This means I am completely disagreeing with Ebert and Withers, but you will soon see there is one turning point in the film that guides our opinions, and you pretty much have to go right or left… I chose right, they chose left, no pun intended.
This means only one thing in my mind. This means that future Tommy is indeed present-day Tom, but not an actual physical manifestation in as much as a metaphorical one. Let me explain my rationale.
First off, the seemingly present-day scenarios shown in the film are technically the past. The metaphorical future sequences are the present-day Tom’s way of dealing with Izzi’s death. He is eating the bark of the tree because he is still carrying her with him as he travels to Xibalba. He is still trying to save her despite Izzi’s acceptance of death, something she wishes he would do, and will as we will soon see.
Izzi’s other wish was that Tom finish her story as the last chapter was never written. The last thing Tom is going to do would be not to fulfill Izzi’s last wish.
Tom sets out to finish her story, this is the story of the Conquistador we have been seeing and Tom must supply the final chapter. As he reads the story of the Conquistador he begins to understand and realize it is he and Izzi’s story that he must finish. She asks him to finish the book and she asks him to accept her death, both are tied together and both get the same response from Tom, “I don’t know how.” At the same time future Tommy is answering the same way when told to “Finish it.”
“I don’t know how,” is his answer, but after reading the book up until he must supply the last chapter he finally realizes how the story must end.
The reason future Tommy sees both Izzi and Queen Isabel is because while present-day Tom is trying to come to grips with his wife’s death he is also finishing the story of the Conquistador. I have always seen The Fountain as a story about the acceptance of death and a belief in the circle of life. We must die to be reborn, and present-day Tom’s struggle to come to this realization and Izzi’s attempts to help him accept it are how Darren chose to tell this story. This is why Izzi smiles and cries when Tommy says, “I’m going to die.” He has accepted it and she is happy.
When Izzi dies, the Tree of Life dies, this is the visual representation of Tom actually accepting death. Future Tommy floats out of the bubble ship independently toward Xibalba and leaving the spirit of Izzi behind. Tom has accepted the fact that everything dies, just as Xibalba is about to die. If you are wondering why Tommy was traveling to Xibalba in the first place you have to remember that Izzi said it was a place the Mayans said you go to be reborn. In other words, his journey to the nebula began as present-day Tom was still trying to save Izzi and was not accepting her death. Yet ultimately he accepts death, Izzi dies and at the same time he is “reborn” into a “new” Tom, the Tom we soon see planting a seed at Izzi’s grave. Taking this into consideration Tom’s planting of the seed at Izzi’s grave should make a little more sense now since everything else was fictional. Planting a seed and the growth of its plant is one way of showing the real world’s way of creation and rebirth.
This explanation is realized in Tom’s ending to the Conquistador’s story. The Conquistador drinks from the immortal Tree of Life and dies. Yet in his dying life springs out of the ground and ultimately out of him. The word “reborn” surfaces in my mind once again, how about you?
Thus, the journey of present-day Tom and Tommy ultimately serves to be Tom’s acceptance of death outwardly and inwardly.
Where Ebert and Withers decide that Tomas the Conquistador is in fact Tommy from the future is in that Tommy physically appears in the ending of Tomas’ story. I really wish Ebert had put “physically” in quotes in his article. I believe this plays back to when Tom says to Izzi, “I thought your book took place in Spain?” Izzi replies saying, “That’s where it begins, but it ends there,” as she points to the nebula. I see the scene involving the floating future Tom and the Lord of Xibalba being the one and only time in the film that Tom allows his inner struggle to find its way into the story.
What the Lord of Xibalba saw, what the reader sees and what Tom writes are all going to be different things because reading books involves imagination. However, what we do know is that Tomas was destined to reach the Tree of Life to be reborn. With the Lord of Xibalba looking at Tomas and referring to what he saw as the First Father I believe it was at that moment, the moment Tom wrote of the Conquistador dying, he was accepting death. Because remember the Conquistador had just been stabbed.
By accepting death the Conquistador transcended boundaries between the material and spiritual worlds and was manifested as a metaphysical representation of himself to the Lord of Xibalba. In this case he resembled the future Tommy, something Tom’s imagination definitely would have seen while writing the book.
I would have been more likely to believe the Ebert and Withers theory had it been that future Tommy was the one doing the transporting. If that had been the case then we would have had to actually say that future Tommy was an immortal version of present-day Tom who had reached a level of enlightenment that enabled him to not only change the Conquistador’s story, but also his own, which would have been evidenced by the scene showing Tom chasing after Izzi out the door when earlier in the movie he didn’t and continued his work.
However, this doesn’t even jive for me, because then there would be no reason for three different names and it doesn’t explain at all why a real entity would then be placed inside a fictional story.
This final piece was the one part of the movie that had me fooled the most, and it took a little research into Mayan culture for me to put my theory together. Of course, Darren Aronofsky and plenty others will probably read this and tell me I am all wrong, but once again, that is the magic of this film. I am in no way saying mine is right, I am just saying this is how I saw it, but there are plenty of other ways to hash this flick out. It is one of the greats.
Darren plants a few seeds of his own with his commentary, and if you own the movie and want to revisit it for another 96 minutes click here to get your hands on the commentary and enjoy. If you don’t own the movie yet then that is a problem too, click here to get a copy.
