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Popular Culture Review
quasi divine status” (243). The earlier myth here refers to the older Babylonian
emanations of a tree of life. Here, it is clear that the Tree of Knowledge, among
other things, provides for physical union between male and female—the crux of
the film—and thus the film focuses on that union, one which is superior to and
ultimately surpasses a union/reunion with the divine.
When Queen Isabella imagines recreating Eden with Tomas, this is a
conception of immortality that bypasses Christianity as being too limiting, yet it
is also not the pursuit of corporeal immortality that finally plays out in the film.
Isabella and Tommy are obliterated when Xibalba finally dies, but in so doing
they will “live forever”—but together, entwined as one, not in reunion with a
Christian deity, but with one another. E.O. James argues, Adam “had been
created a living soul by the Creator breathing into him the breath of life.
Therefore, his descendants were not permanently excluded from His presence
and revelations” (244). While this is true to some extent, this seems to make true
reunion/atonement impossible, as the expulsion was specifically done out of fear
that Adam and Eve would become god-like—so humans are the same but not
the same as the divine, according to the Christian system. With its emphasis on
Izzy and Tommy seeking acceptance of death and solace in one another, The
Fountain argues that this is a far more meaningful existence.
The film opens with a line from Genesis written across the screen,
“Therefore, the Lord God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and
placed a flaming sword to protect the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). This line
becomes the central and conflicting image with that of the tree of life as guarded
by the Maya in the film. That tree can ultimately be reached, presumably with
the proper intention in one’s heart. This proves a stark contrast to the permanent
edict barring Adam and Eve and all of their descendents from ever gaining
entrance back into the garden. Access to the Tree of Life is forever cut off. What
essentially becomes the journey of Tommy Creo in all his incarnations—is a
moving toward the acceptance of his own mortality fully and completely. It
becomes, then, an important point that Tomas seems at first to succeed by
getting past the Mayan guardian, but then greedily drinks of the tree’s sap. He
fails at this point, but the film ends with Tommy ultimately succeeding through
his acceptance of death. Aronofsky focuses his film on the idea of knowledge as
redemptive and this particular knowledge as being the source of freedom. The
biblical story of Eden becomes limiting, and limits the Queen Isabella and
Tomas in the film.
The film, as its plot does not unfold in chronological sequence, then focuses
on Tomas as he makes one final push to reach the Tree of Life. He says simply
to his men, “Let us finish it.” Not only is this a theme resonant through the entire
film and evocative of both Izzi’s plea for Tommy to finish her book and Tommy
and Izzi finally dying, it also calls to mind Jesus’s final words as recorded in the
Gospel of John, “It is finished” (John 19:30).This parallel reflects the film’s
dialogue with Christianity. The film puts forth no theories at all as to whether or
not Tommy and Izzi go on to a form of heaven or are reincarnated, and thus