Lost in space, dying of spiritual thirst: Looking back at Darren Aronofsky's Fountain

On the eve of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, I thought it would be fun to look back at a review I wrote for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a film almost unanimously dismissed upon its appearance at TIFF 2006, and which might have torpedoed the ambitious young filmmaker's career if it weren't followed by the much celebrated The Wrestler, which had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. Aronofsky's Black Swan is among the most anticipated films playing at this year's festival.

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Six years after Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain finally arrives with a hefty load of extra-filmic baggage –an infamously protracted and tumultuous production, boos at the Venice Film Festival– and a premise so dazzlingly pretentious as to guarantee responses even more polarized that those that met its predecessor. Yet if this finds the right audience –probably small, probably fans of Ken Russell films, Herman Hesse novels, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell and psychotropic substances– it will in its peculiar way be embraced as the sort of wildly flawed, improbably ambitious gem that comes along only rarely, a phenomenon akin to a comet, the sighting of some endangered beast, or a functioning health care system.

The Fountain’s structure is tripartite and intrinsically circular. In one strand we find Thomas (Hugh Jackman), a genetic scientist desperate to shrink a tumour in a monkey’s brain while his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz) dies from some terrible illness and composes an enigmatic novel in laughably immaculate calligraphy. In the second, Tomas (again, Jackman) is a conquistador charged with finding the Mayan tree of life in the New World for the lovely Queen Isabel (Weisz). In the third, Tom (yep, Jackman) is the lone inhabitant of some hermetic ball adrift in space, haunted by voices and doing kung fu against the stars. These narratives dove-tail and are compressed into 96 minutes, an impressively taut running time that renders two of these strands, not inappropriately, into virtual cinematic haikus. Visual dynamics dominate: long-shots press up against extra-tight close-ups; gaseous portals seep through the jaundiced glow of space, recalling old sci-fi paperback covers; terrifyingly fecund jungles give way to stark wintry plains. The aesthetic is alternately seductive, chillingly lonely and somewhat oppressive.

Dialogue tends to be awkward, scenes contrived and characters more symbolic than recognizable. What’s of substance here is the fluid realization of deeply primal themes, thus Aronofsky thinks nothing of having a scene where Jackman stabs a tree and out flows the juice of immortality! Which looks suspiciously like cum. Weisz is required mostly to be beatific, yet Jackman’s unruly performance somehow ascends to operatic heights, matching Aronofsky’s lofty themes with vivid romantic fortitude. For every scene that courts ridicule there’s another that, call me crazy, is strangely, profoundly moving. In his desire for everlasting life and love, Tom sacrifices immediacy, and his is a tragedy written in glyphs, not naturalistic gestures.

Because it aspires to fuse images and music into an expression of abstract spiritual and mythical concepts, The Fountain will, for some, invite only mockery and dismissal. But against my more sober criteria, I found myself kind of swept up in it, beguiled by its preposterous beauty and over-earnest transcendentalism, its inarticulate fatalism that finally speaks to our innate sense of eternal return. I can accept or even welcome whatever jabs at its abundant silliness others might make, but I still can’t deny that I left the film feeling eerily connected to that guy sitting cross-legged in his little ball.

Barry Hannah's Ray: A country doctor's self-examination slides into chaos and reverie

Does anybody here remember Barry Hannah? I’m sad to say I was not even aware of this celebrated Mississippi author until I’d heard of his death at age 67 this past March. They ran an archival interview with him on Fresh Air, and I was enchanted by Hannah’s voice, his vaguely ornery pauses, and his conversation with Terry Gross about guns and religion and the habits of bad men. Wikipedia offers this quote from the author, which seems to tell us a lot about Barry Hannah: “Sometimes you don’t want to arrange your memory. I love the pure chaos of it and just the reverie of it for its own sake.” I’ve just read Hannah’s slim but utterly arresting and often appalling 1980 novel Ray (Grove, $15.50). The chaos and reverie breathes on the page.

As with Daniel Clowes' Wilson (see the preceding post), Ray’s eponymous protagonist slides back and forth between ecstasy and despair and seems to have trouble adapting to the modern world, to avoid becoming another “casualty of the American confusion.” He sees his country as fundamentally ambivalent, representing “rage and gentleness together.” Perhaps this is part of the reason why Ray sometimes fantasizes that he’s a veteran of the windswept battlefields of the Civil War, where he delivered many men unto death, as well as of Vietnam, where he, for real it seems, flew a Phantom. Ray is a resident of Tuscaloosa. Ray is both a doctor and a sick man, conducting on these pages a precarious and wildly deluded self-assessment that bleeds into self-re-invention via Hannah’s eloquent and rigorously subjective first-person prose. Ray’s a drunk and foot-fetishizing womanizer of insatiable lust. Hannah tracks Ray’s most recent stab at marriage to a blue-eyed woman with a “small friendly vagina,” and his observances of his similarly unhinged and even murderous friends’ misadventures. Ray is a frequently disgusting man and just as frequently charming and hysterically funny and audacious—at least within the confines of his fragmentary self-portrait.

Hannah endows Ray with a poet’s linguistic facilities: “I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny.” Hannah takes equal care to render Ray a probably hopeless misanthrope-asshole on the verge of total mental collapse: “I don’t feel that good about women anyway, nor gooks, nor sand-niggers, nor doctors, nor anything human that moves, with its zealous raving habits.” Already a published author of scholarly medical studies, Ray has threatened to write a paper on women, who, he muses, “enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.” Yet Ray has his moments of surrender to all those less offensive things he most deeply cherishes: “To live in delight of healing, flying, fucking.” Ray is the music of a terrifying id, and Hannah neither glorifies nor condemns his subject. Rather, he recognizes something ugly and fascinating in Ray’s DNA that is common to more of us than we might care to admit, and not just racist sexist sociopaths from below the Mason-Dixon line.

Hey, you guys just gonna throw that away?: F. González-Crussi and the strange, chaotic story of medical science

In J.G. Ballard’s superb new memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, the author describes his abbreviated study of medicine as having an unexpectedly formative effect on his distinctive powers as a writer of fiction. Ballard particularly covets his memories of pathological research, the subjects of which were routinely cadavers of other doctors. “Dissecting the face,” Ballard writes, “revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost bringing them back to life.”

This passage has stuck with me, partly because it serves as a vivid reminder for those of us with no special interest in medicine to recognize its role as a source wonderment, and its inherently human foundations—what is medicine but a science wholly driven by the dictates of human life in all its strange and unwieldy patterns? I was reminded of this further still when I recently discovered a terrific book by an author I’d never heard of. There’s a moment in On Seeing, introduced with a certain, provocative brio, where F. González-Crussi, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine—not to mention a witty, unfathomably knowledgeable essayist—directs our attention to how deeply our tendency to see only what we choose effects even our most critical historical endeavours. He refers here to the always awkward, not-at-all orderly story of medical science in general, and anatomy in particular:

“Historians of science have wondered why the systematic study of anatomy did not originate sooner than it did. And as puzzling as the when is the where of its origination. Several ancient cultures left proof of keen intelligence and extraordinary powers of observation. Many learned men in ancient times performed dissections on cadavers or somehow became acquainted with the interior of the body. Yet, knowledge of anatomy, as we now understand it, remained unexplainably rudimentary.”

No matter how many hearts were ripped from decidedly unlucky Aztecs as a method to placate gods and stave off catastrophe, how baffling, writes González-Crussi, that this society, the authors of exquisite poetry and astonishingly accurate astronomical observations, revealed no interest in the actual functions of said organ. Likewise, the ancient Mesopotamians produced impressive codes of law, an admirable literature, and practiced a sophisticated form of divination involving the study of entrails, yet they appear to have developed no anatomical knowledge. Such willful ignorance is found repeatedly in cultures the world round.

The way González-Crussi conveys this feature of human history, our selective perception, is fascinating, fun, clear, and kept me happily distracted for days after reading it. It was with great anticipation then that I awaited the arrival of his newest book, its appeal made plain in its title: A Short History of Medicine (Modern Library, $29.95). Though not quite as conducive to weird anecdotes, literary analogues or philosophical playfulness as On Seeing, this compact yet breezy doctoring-for-dummies is a chamber of insight, careful research, scientific basics and wide-ranging anthropological interest. Finally, while pulling no punches with regards to the abundant failings of medical science, the book nonetheless inspires tremendous respect for the way medicine in all its forms has changed almost every aspect of human life.

Chief among A Short History’s most colorful passages are, naturally, its quick dips into biography. González-Crussi tells of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) the hugely influential iconoclast who was so obsessed with knowledge of the body that he kept rotting corpses in his bedroom and encouraged students to hover over terminally ill patients; of Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), who was tragically fired from his post and driven from Vienna for having the gall to suggest that the practice of hygiene on the part of doctors would drastically diminish cases of puerperal fever in pregnant women; of Alexis St. Martin (1794-1880), the French Canadian trapper and all-around tough motherfucker who after surviving a musket shot to his abdomen spent the rest of his life having his conveniently exposed digestive system studied by William Beaumont (1785-1853); of William Halsted (1852-1922), who pioneered the radical mastectomy through the injection of cocaine into nerve trunks, only to fall victim to cocaine’s addictive powers; of the two-man Franco-Prussian War fought between the flamboyant Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and the more reserved and historically underappreciated Robert Koch (1843-1910). These and many other profiles emphasize that the story of medicine is also a story of politics and personality.

Dividing his broad subject into sections—anatomy, surgery, procreation, disease, diagnosis and therapy—González-Crussi breaks medicine down into its essential components, rendering its evolution into a jargon-free, easily digestible network of interrelated fields of study. He ends each section with some reflections on where this evolution has brought us; what we may have lost on our path toward longer, less painful lives; how a surprising number of folkloric or instinctive remedies have proven to be effective (did you know: swallowing semen does help to induce childbirth!); how and whether or not the eradication of pain is a plausible or even desirable goal. In short, A Short History of Medicine asks numerous questions while answering others. And it does what any such volume should do: it presents history as something relevant, alive and ongoing.