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Popular Culture Review
entertain, focused as he is on corporeal reality. Izzi instead represents what the
film depicts as the right view of life and death: these two experiences of human
life exist in harmony with one another, free from the dictates and tenets even of
organized religion, most heavily Christianity and its teachings in the context of
the film. Izzi sees instead a continuing movement of life and death, a cycle in
which all things are essentially one. By the film’s climax, as Izzi and Tommy
face death, her words, “Together we will live forever” come to their fullest
meaning. Where Queen Isabella once used similar words to describe a reintroduction of Eden and immortal human life and Tommy fought against
mortality, Tommy and Izzi collapse into two (as opposed to all their iterations in
the film), then finally into one. They will, no matter what awaits them after
death, whether they will be reborn and know each other again or not, share the
same essential foundation of being, of life and death.
Izzi, then, both in her bodily form and later in tree form, seeks to lead
Tommy to this knowledge, to marry his thought and belief. She encourages him,
at several points in the film, to “Finish it.” While this most obviously refers to
her book, which she deliberately leaves unfinished for him, the words possess
larger ramifications. Tommy’s answer is always a variation of “I don’t know
how it ends” to which Izzi replies with a variation of “You do. You will.” She
allows him time—in this case hundreds of years—to come to the fullness of
knowledge, to come to a place where he can let go of his control, of his need to
reason and think the world the way he best sees fit. Lillian (Ellen Burstyn), the
head of Tommy’s research unit and a friend to Izzi, says at her funeral that “She
saw her fear, her hope, and her death as essential parts of life.” This is what Izzi
encourages with her admonitions that Tommy finish the book. All the disparate
pieces haunting Tommy—the loss of Izzi, the fact that the tree is dying, his
obsession with reaching Xibalba in the mistaken belief that this will provide
physical immortality—must find at-one-ment. Tommy, late in the film and alone
with the tree and manifestations of Izzi, finally breaks down, crying “Please!
Please! I’m afraid.” It is only at this point in the narrative that Tommy can begin
to write the final chapter of the book, his story and perhaps humanity’s.
He flashes back through his memories of life long ago with Izzi and finally
smiles, understanding, “I’m going to die!” He now rewrites his story, going back
to a day early in the film where Izzi tries to get him to enjoy the first snowfall.
At that early stage, he declines, focused as he is on curing her cancer. As the
story now rewrites itself, Tommy decides instead to be with Izzi, to live, for
however long that option is available. It is only in the story, in Izzi’s story, that
one last vestige of wishful thinking takes place. Tomas finally reaches the Tree
of Life and drinks its sap. His wounds are instantly healed and, with a
combination of greed and wonder, he gulps greedily from it, tearing into it to get
at more sap. Instead of gaining eternal life, plants and flowers erupt from his
body, obliterating him. Tomas is now the way Izzi spoke of First Father: a part
of every living thing. From this point, the film moves to Tommy and the
tree/Izzi reaching Xibalba and being obliterated. Of Xibalba, Michel Graulich