I would like to call it a conceptual film. Director Aronofsky uses a visual language full of metaphors and symbols, as well as interspersed mysteries. Fantasy montage provides the viewer with an open text. 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, belief, meaning, etc., make the film. There seems to be some kind of revelation and meditation hidden behind every picture in the book. It seems to be a wonderful Rubik's cube. Although the movie itself has only one structure, it allows you to understand the intricate hidden messages hidden behind the structure through different ways, and here are just a variety of real or illusory possibilities. one of sex.
(1) Narrative
films, through parallel and intersecting narrative methods, combine the three stories of Spanish conquistadors, pharmacological scientists, and spacewalkers in different time and space with the common theme of love and death, forming a certain sci-fi image style . I don't think Tommy the pharmacologist has an odyssey that spans millennia, and that neither Thomas the Conqueror nor Tom the Spacewalker are fictional characters based on their husbands in Izzy's books. What the film is really trying to tell is Tommy's journey from pain, fear, ecstasy, to final realization as he confronts his wife's impending death. Here, the Conqueror is the storyline depicted in Izzy's book, while the Spacewalker symbolizes Tommy's spiritual world.
The real starting point of the story is that in 2001, Tommy, who loved his wife deeply, was afraid of losing Izzy, who was in the late stage of brain cancer, and led his scientific research team to conduct drug experiments almost frantically, eager to save his wife by a miracle. life. However, the fickle illness in reality and the possibility of death at any time made Tommy more and more anxious and more and more frightened. He concentrates on his own experiments and ignores the last company and love for Izzy. Of course, all these manifestations are purely out of love for his wife, out of that strong feeling of wanting to be together forever. Izzy, who also loves her husband deeply, fully understands Tommy's mood at this moment, and she can't bear it or can't 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 to continue a brave life, she adopted a method similar to philosophical enlightenment, that is, her own expectations or wishes through novels form manifested. The pen and ink she prepared for Tommy, hoping that he would help him complete the finale of the story. When Tommy said "but I don't know what the end was", she told him, "You know. You'll know". Tommy was apparently unable to grasp his wife's intentions at first because he was paranoid about his own fears and escapes, but after a difficult spiritual odyssey, he finally grasped Izzy's pains and the life and death she kept telling him. feel.
It can be seen that the film's cross-narrative of the three stories seems chaotic on the surface but is actually logical. After the first telling of Tommy's story, the narrative of the Conquerors and Spacewalkers is closely tied to Tommy's reality. The transition from the real picture to the Spanish scene is through the reading of the book, the text that flashes quickly and fades out of the camera shows us that the story that takes place in Spain is a set of interpretations of the personal philosophical dialogue between Tommy and Izzy Code, 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. Thomas killed his rebellious subordinates in order to fulfill his promise, and the priest who guided him to the tree of life also died because of the rebellion; and the real Tommy disregarded the stipulations of the drug agreement and sent a drug derived from the mystery. The tree's formula was experimented on the macaque. They all encountered all kinds of resistance from their surroundings, and at the same time they ran towards their goals recklessly. And the macaque, as a de facto facilitator, faces the same threat of death as the priest. But the queen in the Spanish story was not constructed by Izzy based on herself. She was the queen imagined by Tommy (Thomas), beautiful and noble at the same time fragile and helpless, in need of someone to save her. In fact, it was Izzy in his eyes. A heart image, because Tommy always believes that once he accepts the ring representing true love, he has the responsibility to guard her and defend her, and when the invasion of foreign enemies (virus) threatens her life, look for the ring that can make her The tree of life for man's immortality is the only way.
Farther down the galaxy, the story is more closely related to Tommy's mood than the Spanish plot. Tom was always quietly guarding the big tree, feeling her vitality, and kept telling her "don't worry, we'll be fine" and "I'll stay by your side forever". The director has repeatedly used symbolic continuous montages to connect the real and space world scenes. For example, through the flickering changes of light and shadow, the lightly stroked tree trunk in the camera becomes Izzy's smooth body; the wooden whiskers on the trunk become her The hairs on the skin; the golden flowing nebula becomes the circular pattern on the hospital ground; and Tommy and Tom's similar body movements, such as turning back, looking up, screaming, etc. are often juxtaposed in the transition of the shots . At the beginning, the vitality of the tree was "still very strong"; when Izzy fainted in the museum, the tree's whiskers began to droop down; finally, when Izzy died due to ineffective rescue, the tree eventually shrank and withered. . Obviously the big tree here is a metaphor for Izzy's physical condition, and the glass globe-like star is a metaphor for Tommy's mentality and thought. Here, Izzy always seems to be by Tom's side, but never really shows up. Tom was afraid of confronting Izzy's apparition, of her reminding himself over and over to finish the novel's ending, and all he had been doing was studying Nebula, how to keep the tree alive. When the real Izzy dies, the nebulae begin to gather, and the phantom beside Tom becomes Queen Isabella, who tells Tom like Izzy, "You can free the new Spain from slavery, you can do it." This time, Tom listened to Izzy's words, "Let's do it", and he finally left the sphere that he had been waiting for for many years to make up the final conclusion of his wife's novel. And Tom also disappeared into the universe with the big bang of the nebula.
In this way, the film begins with a Spanish and space plot as a flashback, but it is not just a narrative. In fact, the plight of Thomas and Tom described at the beginning of the film is the plight that Tommy faces in reality. Although Thomas found his way to the tree of life after his ordeal, he was stabbed by a Mayan warrior guarding the road, and his life was hanging by a thread. This is the last plot in Izzy's novel, and it is also a mystery code she sets for her husband. How will it end, whether it will end there, or continue searching with pain, or whatever, everything is done by Tommy. In Tom's world, there are several kinds of voices, one is made by Tom himself, he said to the big tree "you can do it, I don't want you to die"; the other is made by his wife in memory, she Saying "Come out for a walk with me", "First snowfall"; the third comes from the phantom of the wife who surrounds her and she says "Finish it!". These three voices are intertwined and represent Tommy's painful and contradictory mood. He longed for miracles, longing to find a cure for cancer. However, he knew how slim that hope was, and he "didn't know how to accomplish it". He was annoyed 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 that last wish. He looked at the tattoo on his finger, "Okay, I believe in you, take me away, point me." It's a pity that Izzy left without leaving any instructions, and he still needs to understand everything himself. At the end of the film, Tommy gave up the pursuit of eternity and accepted the death that human beings will face, thus finally
liberating himself from the fear of death .
(2) Themes
"So he drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, and installed there cherubim, and a flaming sword that turned in every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life." This is the "Bible" quoted at the beginning of the film The words about Genesis in the book, which hint at the storyline and tell us what the film wants to talk about. 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 dualistic world, life and death, poverty and wealth, Sadness and happiness, goodness and evil... what is the meaning of life? What 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 imagine the ending of the novel. The guardian of the tree of life saw Adam, the "father of mankind", at the moment when he started. He put down the flaming sword in his hand and was willing to die for his sins. Thomas got his wish to see the tree of life, but he was not immortal because of it. When he drank the resin representing infinite vitality, he fell to the ground in pain, and green grass and flowers burst out from his body. It was buried next to a big tree. And Tom went through the nebula calmly to the center of Shibalba, and turned into a dust in the universe with the explosion of the star.
From the point of view of the story and the ending, "The Fountain of Preservation" mainly wants to explore the view of death, and from this, it leads to the thinking about the meaning of life. Tommy finally broke through the glass sphere of fear and escape, and achieved some kind of spiritual detachment. Accompanied by bright and spectacular images and fast, melodious drum music, Tom the Universe walks away peacefully with the Shibalba Nebula, a religious nirvana-like scene that actually expresses the spiritual pleasure of eternal liberation from fear. And what helped Tommy achieve this liberation was a renewed understanding of love and the meaning of life. In the beginning, Tommy was vulnerable and sensitive at heart, and he was reluctant to Izzy talking to him about anything involving death, actually for fear of losing her. So he declared war on fate, to "stop aging, stop dying", he believed that to get rid of pain, we must conquer death, "death is a disease, like any other disease, there is a cure", he wants to find it . However, his resistance or contempt was not due to Sisyphus' simple attachment and happiness, but his subconscious helplessness and despair. As the Mayan Guardian said, with him, "Death is the road to fear."
Unlike Tommy, Izzy, who has been suffering from illness for many years, has an aesthetic interpretation and identification with death. She told Tommy that the golden nebula was actually a collection of dying stars that one day would explode and give birth to a new planet. And she found her place, it's called Shibalba, a world where those souls who died can be reborn. She also told him that, according to the Mayan Genesis myth, life was created by Adam, the ancestor of mankind, with his own body. His body became the trunk of a big tree that stretched out to the earth, his soul became branches that stretched to the sky, and Shibalba It was created in heaven by his children. Of course, Tommy was so focused on therapy at the time, he didn't care what his wife said. But Izzy has always used his religious fantasy to teach Tommy 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 the Mayan tour guide told her. After the tour guide's father died, a seed was buried in his tomb and grew into a big tree. The tour guide said that his father became part of the tree, and his soul flew away with the foraging birds. The film does not mention the tour guide or the origin of the story, but it is clear that Izzy is always enlightening Tommy with a cosmic thinking beyond the outer form, trying to make him understand that death is not an end, but a new beginning.
In fact, Tommy's final comprehension and detachment are precisely because of this truth. He arranged the end of death for Thomas, Thomas' body turned into flowers and plants, but was actually reborn in another form. And Tom finally came to the center of Shibalba, where Izzy said he was, where the nebula, as previously mentioned, gathered and exploded into another planet, and the tree of life came back to life. It can be said that Tommy accepted Izzy's point of view on life in his mind, so Tommy who represented trouble and escape also disappeared with the rebirth of Izzy's soul. Of course, Tommy's realization is still the result of his true love with Izzy. Before Tom finally decides to rush out of the glass sphere, images of his wife continue to appear, and Queen Isabella, who symbolizes Tommy's inner mirror, also appears. Finally stood with Izzy's mirror image. It's her (their) love and trust that Tommy has the courage and strength to "get it done". So, when the recurring scene in the film where his wife invites him to go out for a walk reappeared, he did not go to the laboratory, but to the snow, to his wife, and to Shibalba's "heart". There, he found his lost wedding ring, which he put on his middle finger, covering the ring of tattoos that he had carved out of pain and longing for eternity, and he no longer had to swallow the bark of a tree to overcome his inner turmoil. Fear, and no longer need to lean on his arm to carve the growth rings to travel through the pain of time, because he knows that Izzy is not really gone, she will be with him forever.
In the snow-white cemetery, we saw Tommy planting a warm seed, which we believe will soon grow a lush tree there.
"Farewell, Izzy."
"I've done it for you."
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, everything is fine ."
(3) Visual language
The theme of the director's fear of Tommy's death is realized through the change of lens color. In film, we can see the image in the shot is constantly changing between color and black and white, shadow and light. This color change is related to the protagonist's experience and mood. The scenes involving Tommy, Thomas, and Tom were basically shot in the dark, before bursting into bright whites at the end. And every time the shot transitions from color to black and white, the protagonist is almost in a state of confusion, anxiety or pain, such as when Tommy returns home to find Izzy, when the priest appears to lead Thomas on an adventure for the tree of life, When Tommy walks from the hospital to the laboratory after Izzy faints, when Tom feels the vitality of the tree is fading, when Tom hugs the withered tree and weeps...and so on. In contrast, scenes about the Queen, Izzy, and their apparitions are mostly shot in saturated light, while Rachel Weisz's character is always in the spotlight every time the hero and heroine appear on the screen at the same time. , the close-up of its face is always lit with a soft glow. This arrangement is obviously not arbitrary, it distinguishes two different states, one is optimistic and calm, the other is sad and contradictory; the other is tranquil and peaceful, and the other is hesitant and helpless. Finally, when the two show a dazzling bright color together, it actually represents their ultimate transformation from claustrophobic to open, from bleak to bright, and from fantasy to reality.
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