The Fountain

Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006) is a drama that incorporates historical accounts to develop a fictional story about the possible existence of a magical tree that is also the source of eternal life. The search for the secret of life connects all the subplots of the movie to one place: ancestral lands in Central America that were once part of the Maya civilization. Throughout the movie, Aronofsky merges different cosmologies and metanarratives that explain the origins of life and the efforts society makes to understand (or even control) why and when life ends. In the movie, the development of Western societies and their ideologies are compared and contrasted with indigenous "myths" in the form of a fiction novel called "The Fountain".

The movie is divided into three subplots. The first one relates the story of a Spanish conquistador (Hugh Jackman) sent by the Queen (Rachel Weisz) to the Mayan region of New Spain to look for the Three of Life hidden by God, as written in the Bible. The request is made secret since Mayan traditions and beliefs were considered dark witchcraft in the inquisitorial European society. In the missionary quest, the conquistador arrives at the Guatemalan forest inhabited by barbarous indigenous who have blocked the areas around the abandoned Mayan pyramids with human skulls and deadly traps. Once the conquistador finds the location of the three, he gets killed by a Mayan leader and the scene is transported to a stage of highly spiritual afterlife inside a star and next to the Three of Life.

The second subplot takes place in the present lives of Tom (again, Jackman) and Isabel (again, Weisz). Tom is a doctor researching for a new medicine using samples of a tree found in Central America. While Tom works on the development of the medicine trying it out in a monkey with a brain tumour, his wife Isabel (who has also a brain tumour) writes a fiction novel about Mayan mythology on the origins of life called “The Fountain”. The novel remains unfinished since Isabell dies minutes before Tom discovered that his medical experiment is working. Frustrated of the lost, Tom reads the novel and decides to finish the last chapter as he promised to his wife.

For the next part of the plot which corresponds to the future, Aronofsky takes us back to the beginning of the movie to construct a second timeline. The future starts with Isabel’s death, and the previous subplots were part of the fictional novel that Tom will finish writing. At the end of the novel, the Mayan cosmology wins over other metanarratives that explain the origins of life and afterlife. But outside the novel, scientific knowledge is presented as the most advanced and accepted reality.

Before the novel is introduced as a metanarrative that contextualizes everything into one single truth, it seems like each subplot is part of an ecology of knowledges as the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos would call it. The use of Mayan beliefs, religious convictions, and science to explain life and death are equally important and valid, and they can even work together or overlap creating new viewpoints. Nevertheless, indigenous notions are not really accepted. The depiction of Mayan history as simply mythology that does not go further than being fantasy used for inspiration in a novel endorses Western universalism and shrinks the spaces to share other perspectives or forms of science, especially those that are portrayed as “less civilized”, like indigenous knowledge.

Taking a closer look at the references made about the Inquisition that lasted in Europe until the 19th century, Western societies are portrayed in the movie as a progressive society for having gotten over the belief that supernatural powers like witchcraft exists. Indigenous “myths” are put under the same category as witchcraft for its apparently magical nature. Thus, believing in something that is not explained or proved in scientific terms would mean going backwards not only in history but also intellectually. As the scientific revolution did away with religion in a process of secularization of the state and education, Western universalism (which also includes science) discredited ancestral knowledges of Latin American indigenous communities.