really puzzlingly shitty: The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky
so, I was in ye olde corporate bookstore the other day and checking out one of those "master plots" books - actually, it was called 20 Master Plots. I have been passing these books by with a scoff for years, but on this occasion I was willing to humor the whole idea for a bit. I actually ended up reading about it after I'd gotten home, in summary form, on some forum page I found through google, which turned out to be part of this ayn rand worship website, which was a hilarious way to read about it. apparently, a lot of these plots support objectivist ways of living.
I discovered that the guy writing the book was not coming from a standpoint of "write a story like this and it will make you money," although obviously he profited from the book. but after poking around in it, it was clear to me why a book like this should exist: it should exist so that shit movies like The Fountain do not get made.
okay, but let's look at the good example first. Virgin Spring, which came out in 1960 but looks like it was made in the middle ages, was based on a 13th century Swedish ballad. it can be seen as a pretty conventional "revenge story" (which is one of the chapters in "20 master plots"), as its central plot revolves around a young girl getting raped and killed, and the family's subsequent reactions. the screenwriter, ulla isaakson, added some innovations that make it quite a bit more complex. there's a "dark" sister, who's already been raped (great parallelisms there), who sees her sister die and thinks it was her fault for praying to a pagan rather than a christian god (really interesting questions raised about religion in this film as well, especially since bergman doesn't try to make either side seem better). then there's a little boy who lives with the thieves who rape the girl, who watches all the shit go down and doesn't interfere. these two characters alone make for enough conflict and drama for an entire film, because of their shifting positions between good and evil. is the little boy an accomplice, or is he innocent? can you really blame the "dark" sister for wanting her good sister to fall into bad hands, after she herself was raped?
and somehow, even though the virgin character is completely one-sided and we know nothing good will come of her in the forest, her death is completely horrifying. I'm not quite sure how bergman managed to do that. it probably has to do with the quality of the acting, but it's also because, I think, this event is placed strategically in the plot, where it should be, after our expectations are already set up and we've seen the family dynamic and we definitely don't want her to die. the character gradually comes to represent everything that's good and desirable in the world. for me, this moment came when she was going up the hill on the horse and sang in a very clear, melodic voice and the shot was just of the countryside and it looks like the fucking garden of eden.
the horror over her death leads wordlessly to the classic question, why do bad things happen? which is taken up in a stirring sequence with max von sydow near the end.
then take The Fountain. both of these films are trying pretty openly to engage with a mode of storytelling that is highly mythic, but only one of them, I think, truly knows why or how to do this. Virgin Spring achieved this kind of mythic quality first of all by being set in the pretty distant past, rather than in a setting where we'd be able to judge whether this story was likely to happen or not. The Fountain is set in three times, and basically the only plot complexity it has comes from interweaving the threads. if you laid it out, the plot for this one would be extremely simple: the Quest Plot. and which quest? only the most obvious one, the Search for Immortality. some dude named Tommy is trying to find the cure for his wife's cancer (this was the plotline that most audiences, I think, latched onto).
I'll say right here that I loved Pi, and even admire Requiem for a Dream, though I'd rather eat a cactus than go through the wrenching experience of watching it again. but these interviews with Aronofsky about The Fountain are just astoundingly dumb. this quote comes from here:
In some ways, we saw science as being like a religion, and how you can become dogmatic with it, and you can forget its relationship to the larger world. And for me, that’s reflected in a critique of how in the West, with the power of modern science, we’ve become detached from a major part of our spiritual existence. Because the reality is, no matter how much we fight death and put it in the corner and make believe it doesn’t exist, we all die. And the thing that makes us human is our mortality. But I think we’ve become disconnected from our mortality by hiding the fact that it’s part of our spiritual journey. In that way, science has its blinders on for trying to create immortality. There is nothing wrong with extending life. It’s incredible that you can be 75 and active and alive. But I had a 95-year-old grandmother who they tried to resuscitate three times, breaking her ribs. And there is something wrong with that. It’s a hard line to know where to draw. But there’s this fighting to keep people alive, even people who don’t want to be alive anymore.
I mean, all of it is like this, with this like ninth-grade-level philosophical background. what is with my favorite directors trying to make films about death and falling on their faces into philosophical schlock? really, the thing that makes us human is our mortality? where did you hear that, oprah's book club?
but honestly, I think a lot of artists would fail with these kinds of gargantuan ideas. there's a reason that myths take years upon years to develop; they don't just spring up when you sit down with a pen. in this film, aronofsky's got the germ of the myth, the quest for immortality, but he's got nothing else. he seems to think that just using that idea itself is going to make a good story - that, and about a dozen plot elements that every story falls back on when it can't give us something original. e.g., the guy's wedding ring gets lost early on. this is so cliche it makes me want to smack myself, but on top of this, throughout the rest of the film the character is constantly staring intensely (that's one of the three things this character does, along with sob and push things off of flat surfaces) at his finger w/absence of ring. also, there's a story within a story because the woman character is writing a book (NEVER HAVE I SEEN THIS BEFORE IN ANY MOVIE WOW). in longhand, with a fountain pen, of course.
aronofsky has no idea how to set up a story so that we care, so the only time I really felt like I might actually give a shit was two-thirds into the story. after that it promptly descended into kooky adolescent sequences involving meditating inside bubbles that shoot into outer space.
adding insult to injury, there's this maddening attitude that if you don't like this movie, you "didn't get it." aronofsky has actually made obnoxious comments about how, to watch it, you need to "suspend your disbelief" or else you, like, fail as a viewer. also, he says this film is like a rubik's cube - either you can sit there and puzzle it out, or you can throw it against the wall in frustration. both of which are incredibly condescending ways to treat your reader/viewer. who the fuck compares their art to a rubik's cube, except arrogant teenagers? convince me I should be suspending my disbelief, and I will.
my point is that you can't just achieve the level of myth that Virgin Spring had by reaching out and grabbing these mythic elements. I mean, it makes little to no sense to associate all the women with the tree/life imagery and motifs (which is done all the time in legends) if you aren't going to have her in some kind of setting where she actually gives life. (even worse if she happens to be the embodiment of death.) it only shows that aronofsky pretty much ignored most of the nuance of older legends, and just took the symbols and archetypes he thought were "deep," while adding absolutely nothing to them.
this is the sad thing about american film, for me - it seems to have no awareness of what has come before it, in terms of story. with the bergman film, you get the strong sense that he's in touch with the most basic legends of the human race, has thought about them, and is honoring them by redoing them in his own way. with aronofsky, it was just some kind of misled, self-aggrandizing thing that totally ignores all the other stories that have been created with the same ideas, thinking it's the first to try all this.
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