Still too Shebulba

Eleven years ago on this blog I wrote a piece called "Too Shebulba," which was inspired by Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. It was about movies, like The Fountain, that span generations if not centuries, and feature mystical/sci-fi concepts that are presented as is, without much attempt to explicate them -- leading to expressionistic narratives that are better appreciated emotionally than cognitively, if it they're appreciated at all.

Of course, the concept of "Shebulba" was my mishearing of the actual word from the movie, Xibalba, the name for the Mayan underworld. It's also the name of a nebula with a dying star in the movie, though that's not a real thing. Having said in that piece that the movie never tells you what "Shebulba" means clearly shows how little I was paying attention to Aronofsky's film, or that I checked out earlier than I thought I had. There's a minute's worth of dialogue about it and then a couple other references over the course of the narrative. Given the movie, you can't really blame me for checking out. 

The correct spelling "Xibalba" was pointed out to me, very helpfully, in the comments section of that post. There were four unique commenters on that post, as a matter of fact. In a development befitting of a movie like The Fountain, those commenters have all disappeared into the ether over the decade since then, either gone on to other things (most likely) or possibly gone on to meet their maker (less likely but technically possible). Blogging has become almost an archaic form of mass communication, so it's placing me in a very Shebulba frame of mind this morning as I think wistfully about times past. (I should say, one of the commenters is actually one of my best friends and he is alive and well.)

Even though I know now the word is "Xibalba," "Shebulba" remains a useful way of talking about the thing I was talking about 11 years ago -- movies with their heads so far up their own asses that even superlative filmmaking technique or performances cannot really redeem them.

And I'm sorry to say, The Fountain is still an example of that type of movie.

Saturday night, I watched Aronofsky's third feature for the first time since I originally watched it on video back in the summer of 2007. It seems hard to believe that I would not have prioritized seeing this in the theater -- however Shebulba it looked, it was still from the guy who directed Requiem for a Dream, and deserved to be reckoned with. My viewing mentality has become much more completist in the 14 years since.

It also seems hard to believe this was only Aronofsky's third feature. He released Requiem in 2000, and though it was polarizing to say the least, it should have earned him a follow-up movie pretty quickly, given the evident talent on display. Instead, it was six more years before The Fountain came out, likely because that's just the type of movie it is -- it's hard to direct a movie quickly while your head is up your ass.

Given that the majority of Aronofsky's four subsequent films have been big hits with me, including a #1 movie of the year (The Wrestler) and two top 20 finishers (Black Swan and mother!), I thought it was definitely worth going back and watching The Fountain through the lens of the career that would follow. Actually, both Noah and mother! have been a bit Shebulba to varying degrees, the former an occasional success for me and the latter an unqualified one. In the context of the career Aronofsky would go on to have, The Fountain might seem less like a square peg.

Yeah nah.

This was pretty much just as difficult to sit through the second time as it was the first. I may have been a bit more engaged, as I did notice the Xibalba references this time (probably because I was looking for them), but I simply could not extract any additional emotional resonance from the film. Aronofsky clearly thinks of this as a centuries-spanning love story, but that just doesn't land with me.

And it should, because I am susceptible to that type of project. I've just reminded you on Friday, in my post about the new movie Long Story Short, that I love stories that deal with the uncontrollable slippage of time, particularly those where characters age at different rates from each other, leading to exquisite melancholy. As Hugh Jackman's character is immortal here, and may have witnessed everything from the death of his love to the death of the entire planet earth, he fits this description to a T, as does the movie.

Even though I definitely see what Aronofsky is doing more this time, the execution of it is just too scrambled, only fitfully successful, for me to really improve my perception of the movie. I still end up asking myself if the two characters played by Rachel Weisz actually bear any relationship to one another, or if one just reminds him of the other physically, which is why he fell for her. I still have more questions than answers about how he lived his life for hundreds of years (if not thousands, we can't tell how far in the future the version of himself enclosed in the bubble floating in space is actually living) as essentially an undead vampire, such that he'd become a respected medical doctor without any record of him having attended medical school, or even graduated high school.

I guess you are not supposed to think about these things in The Fountain if it is working for you. That's the expressionistic part over the cognitive part. And the key is believing the love between the two characters, without which you don't really get the sense that they have a centuries-spanning connection that defies logic. I didn't, so the movie falls flat for me.

Since we are talking about matters of eternal life and lack thereof, I guess this will probably be the last time in my life I watch The Fountain. Saying you will probably never watch a movie again shouldn't, but does, seem fatalistic somehow. I mean, realistically, you will never again see 75% of the movies you have seen, if not more. 

But maybe in this case I have the nagging feeling there's a nut in The Fountain I still haven't cracked, meaning the potential still exists for me to do so at some point. After all, one of the commenters in my 2010 post said he thought it was this generation's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it took until my third viewing of that one for me to really appreciate it. Now it's in my top 20 of all time.

Maybe on my own death bed, when my life is slipping through my fingers, and these themes have a maximum possible resonance for me as I stare eternity in the face, I will watch The Fountain a third time, and it will finally not be too Shebulba.