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Popular Culture Review
imminent death. Indeed, her whole story of Queen Isabella feels a bit like
wishful thinking about a world in which she and Tommy could remain together
forever, both terrestrial and immortal. Izzi further concedes to Tommy, “I’m
afraid” in response to her body’s decreased sensitivity to heat and cold, a sign
that her brain tumor has progressed. But in the next moment, as this scene
continues, she admits to having kept these physical changes private, “Because I
feel different. Inside. I feel different. Every moment. Each one.” While Tommy
and Izzi ultimately share together the experience of death, Izzi here reminds the
audience of the fundamental difference between them at this point. Tommy’s
logic, his tendency to try to think through the unthinkable, cannot follow her
into her private experience of a dying body, and she cannot completely share it.
She can only follow the journey, believing in its value and its rightness.
Tommy is repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to conquer death and cure
Izzi. The film, in its present day Tommy and Izzi storyline, depicts Tommy and
his fellow researchers trying to distill a cure from what is described as old
growth timber samples. The viewer understands that this is another correlative to
the Tree of Life. When one of the lab monkeys is treated with the bark, he
experiences a resurgence back to youth. However, his tumor remains as it was.
Tommy takes this as a failure and refuses to investigate the matter further. He
receives notification that the treatment does eventually begin to shrink the
monkey’s tumor, but this information reaches him only after Izzi dies. The film
never states whether or not the monkey becomes immortal, but this seems
unlikely given everything else that occurs. Instead, the monkey seemingly
restored to life and some degree of youth exemplifies the idea that mortality can
only be held off for so long. Tommy refuses to acknowledge any lesson in this,
instead insisting that this evidence can be used to “Stop aging. Stop dying. Stop
death.” Later, hundreds of years into the future, Tommy has staved off death by
eating of the Tree, but it has not restored him to full youth. E.O. James describes
the thematic and symbolic purpose behind the image of the World Tree:
“Arising in the first instance in the urge of life these dynamic creative and
rejuvenating functions have given expression to one of the most deeply laid
strivings of mankind in the induction and impulsion of ever-renewing vitality,
and the riddance and expulsion of barrenness, aridity and sterility” (245). The
Fountain twists this somewhat in that the viewer plainly sees that the tree is
dying because Tommy has been taking its bark and presumably also because it
knows it is time to die. The tree’s new season—its new spring—comes with
death.
The Grand Inquisitor (Stephen McHattie), villain of Izzi’s novel, is first
seen onscreen flagellating himself. The head of the Spanish Inquisition is
envisioned by Izzi as the chief nemesis of Queen Isabella who has declared her a
heretic for seeking the Tree of Life. This theme of bodily punishment and denial
surrounds his character. Anne Waters’s research deals with indigenous women
and their role in terms of bridging the spiritual and the physical. Waters writes,
“Native women continue to respect the earth as an indigenous manifestation of