A Complete Solution to The Fountain (Warning: Spoilers)
I can’t think of a film that’s more visually beautiful and conceptually challenging than this. It took me three weeks of analysis and multiple careful viewings to resolve all of the questions I had about it.
For starters, it’s clear that The Fountain is a cinematic puzzle. Aronofsky stated this in an interview, he said that the film is like a Rubik’s Cube – there are many permutations, but ultimately there’s only one complete and correct solution. But I think he was too close to the solution, because it’s so incredibly difficult to figure out the hidden meaning, that almost nobody seems to have accomplished this. And this is probably why he’s talking about reworking the film and re-releasing it some years down the line – I think he wanted more people to be able to see it the way he meant it.
So here’s the basic outline of what happened in the film, and what it means. It’s important to bear in mind that if any component of the film doesn’t fit with the interpretation, then the interpretation is wrong. And don’t be misled by the graphic novel – it’s a different version of the story and so it can’t help us figure out the film.
The story that Izzi wrote for Tommy, which she called ‘The Fountain,’ is a work of fiction that she came up with to send her obsessed husband a message about the ultimate futility of seeking immortality in this life. Tomas the Conquistador is how Izzi sees her valiant though single-minded husband. At the end of Chapter 11 of her book, we find Tomas the Conquistador about to be killed at the hands of the Mayan priest. If you study the frame by frame of the book you’ll see this to be true.
The present day story of Tommy and Izzi is ‘real,’ which, thankfully, few people dispute. But what really confuses a lot of people is the fact that at the very end of the film, we see a second version of events – in this version, Tommy goes after Izzi and catches up with her in the first snow. So naturally the question arises ‘which version -actually- happened?’ The answer is ‘both,’ which we’ll get back to shortly.
The future Tom is also ‘real,’ which most people seem to have big problems with, which is sad. Aronofsky mentioned in an interview that he discovered self-sustaining eco-spheres as part of some NASA program, and he based Tom’s ‘bubble ship’ on that idea. You have to ignore a lot of obvious facts to conclude that the future Tom in the space sphere isn’t real. You have to ignore the glaring fact that Tommy discovered an immortality drug while striving to save Izzi, and the fact that he told his boss and his co-workers that they were out to defeat death. And you have to ignore the rings on his arms which measure the chasm of centuries between Izzi’s death and Tom’s journey through space. And you’d also have to ignore the visual language of the film, which shows that the future scenes are ‘the present’ and the events in 2000ish are future Tom’s memories. So Tom in space is the immortal Tommy whose bittersweet conquest of death has actually prevented him from joining his beloved wife in death, a conundrum which torments him. Thus, his quest to the dying star Xibalba, so he can be reunited with his wife by dying at the nebula that she thought of as a metaphor for rebirth through death, ‘death as an act of creation.’
So all of that’s pretty clear, up until the last 15 minutes or so, when so many seemingly irreconcilable things happen in all three timelines that most people just get lost and frustrated, and settle for the first crappy explanation that comes to mind (which usually entails reducing the entire future timeline to a dream or metaphor…which doesn’t actually make any sense). But if we take the final scenes one at a time, they all actually converge on a fantastic and deeply satisfying, if fairly ‘far-out there,’ solution. That shouldn't put anyone off, though, because Aronofsky calls this film 'a psychedelic fairy tale.'
So the first real shocker, aside from Izzi’s ghost haunting Tom and generally being cryptic, happens when Tom finally accepts his own death and Izzi’s admonition to ‘finish it.’ Suddenly we’re back at the pivotal moment when Izzi asked Tommy out to the first snow – except this time, we see a moment of realization pass over his face, and he goes after her. Wtf, right? What just happened? Here’s what happened: The future Tom, whose consciousness is finally complete and enlightened, has sent a kind of message back in time, to himself, to correct the blunder of letting her go off on her own during the first snow. Enlightened Tom has created an alternate timeline, which closes the circle between the moment he screwed up and let Izzi go, and his death at Xibalba. Aronofsky is conveying a marvelous idea here that our consciousness is timeless, and he shows us the consequences of this in practice through this film. More proof of this comes in the subsequent scenes, which we’ll get to shortly.
Next we see future Tom break free of the bubble ship to be enclosed by his own mini-sphere, where he imagines the end of Izzi’s book, 'The Fountain.' The Chapter 12 he imagines reveals the divine aspect of Tomas (which is in fact his future, enlightened self) appearing to the Mayan priest, who then surrenders his life to this vision. The priest sees the divine in Tomas, even though Tomas can’t see it in himself. Regardless, Tomas the Conquistador fulfills his ultimate divine destiny to sacrifice himself to the cycle of life – it’s not the immortality he bargained for, but it’s precisely what the real enlightened Tom is up to in the future timeline, so their ends are the same even if their intents are different. Therefore, completing the circle of his destiny, Tom regains the ring he lost when he went astray by fearing the loss of Izzi, rather than embracing his love of his wife by joining her in the first snow. Reunited with his ring, death now reunites him with Izzi’s spirit. And as his ashes mix with Xibalba’s to flow over the Izzi tree, their deaths bring her tree back to life in a moment of foreshadowing, revealing that they will indeed both live together forever through the cycle of death/rebirth.
Then we get to see some more of the alternate timeline that Tom created through his enlightenment in the future. We see Izzi pick the seed and hand it to Tommy, and we see Tommy plant the seed over her grave. We see that this Tommy never lost his ring, because he never chose to work on Donovan rather than go traipsing in the first snow with Izzi. We see Tommy say goodbye to Izzi at her grave, because -this- Tommy has the benefit of the insight of his enlightened self in a future alternate reality, and we see Xibalba explode in the future, but from the vantage point of Izzi’s grave, because this Tommy never goes to Xibalba…he found his peace with Izzi’s death while on Earth.
Well, those are the broad strokes anyway. Not an easy puzzle to solve, by any means. But the idea that our future state of enlightened consciousness can retroactively alter our reality in the present…that just made all the puzzling worthwhile to me.
I hope you enjoyed my analysis, and that for some of you, it enriches your experience of the film.
"The observer is the observed." - Jiddu Krishnamurti