Y Si, Yo Creo: Thought, Belief, and the Search
for At-one-ment in Darren Aronofsky’s The
Fountain
Darren Aronofsky’s underrated 2006 film The Fountain explores a tripartite
narrative comprised of text and metatext. The film’s main narrative thread
concerns Tommy (Hugh Jackman) and Izzi Creo (Rachel Weisz), a married
couple facing the death of Izzi from progressive brain cancer. However,
spiraling off from that main thread are two other narratives. The first projects
Tommy out into a very distant future, one in which he has found the key to
extending life by consuming the bark of a tree with which he is traveling. He
seeks rebirth for himself and Izzi by traveling to the heart of Xibalba, imagined
in the film as a nebula, but existing in ancient Mayan mythology as the
underworld. The tree is understood to be the Tree of Life, biblical bestower of
immortality and a reincarnated form of the long-dead Izzi. The second narrative
serves as metatext, a novel written by Izzi that imagines the couple as Tomas, a
Conquistador, and Queen Isabella of Spain. She deliberately leaves the book
unfinished, leaving this task to Tommy. Enfolding this three-part story structure
are Izzi and Tommy themselves, whose names represent the two conflicting
worldviews that must find reconciliation within the film’s narratives. Izzi
believes—her name itself sounds like a homophone for the Spanish “y si creo,”
properly written as “y si yo creo”1-that death is both necessary and a stepping
stone leading to “the road to awe,” as she asserts in the film. Tommy’s name
holds the other meaning of “creer,” the infinitive from which “creo” derives.
While it does mean “to believe,” it also means “to think.” This is where he
becomes both the thinker and the doubting Thomas. For him, death is a
“disease” to be conquered and cured, physical immortality the prize to be
attained. It is in regards to this point that the idea of atonement comes into play,
not as it is commonly thought of as one making amends to another for a wrong
done, but thought of instead as the word divided into its pieces. This leads to the
idea of at-one-ment, of bringing together that which was once separated or
divided. As the two negotiate mortality, Tommy must atone, moving away from
his initial stance and away, even, from a Western, Judeo-Christian conception of
mortality and the afterlife to join Izzi on a path to at-one-ment.
Lene Sjorup’s research focuses on experiences of the divine as felt by men
and by women. He describes men’s experience of the divine, in terms of how
they relate these to interviewers, as being told with the purpose “to rationalize,
systematize, number, and interpret their experiences” (54). Tommy certainly
tries to use his medical knowledge to defeat death, but his divine is a physical
immortality that stems from both his fear of losing Izzi and of his own death.
With regards to women’s experiences of the divine, Sjorup argues that these