Tommy and Izzi, husband and wife in The Fountain, regard death very differently. When Izzi first reveals her sickness in the
bathtub, she explains why she has delayed in telling Tommy about her increasing
inability to sense hot and cold: “Because I feel different inside…I feel
different. Every moment. Each one.”
The supersensible perceptions of her sickness take precedence over the
literal loss of her senses. As her
cancer progresses, Izzi, unlike Tommy, who becomes more and more desperate,
accepts the inevitability of her passing with eagerness. Speaking of her fall at the museum, she says,
“I wasn’t afraid…when I fell, I was full, held.” It’s clear in this scene that Tommy and Izzi,
while speaking to each other, do not understand each other. In response to Izzi’s reassurance, Tommy
replies, “I know. I caught you. I held you.”
His memory deals with the sensible world, the sight of Izzi falling, the
feeling of lifting her up. Her welcoming
attitude towards death is mental, internal, and places her in the supersensible
world, at odds with Tommy and his goals.
For Tommy the idea of death is terrifying; for Izzi it is
beautiful. To illustrate death’s beauty,
Izzi recounts a story she heard from Moses Morales, her tour guide when she
visited Mayan ruins. The story, which
involves heavy doses of Mayan legend, ends with Izzi paraphrasing a theme:
“Death was his father’s road to awe.”
Izzi experiences death’s beauty in a Kantian sense, as she is able to
view it arguably disinterested, differently than someone with full health, like
Tommy.
We desire that which is agreeable; Kant uses hunger to
demonstrate this idea: “Hunger is the best sauce; and to people with a healthy
appetite anything is tasty provided it is edible. Hence if people have a liking of this sort,
that does not prove that they are selecting by taste.” Tommy, in comparison, desires immortality. Not only does Tommy desire immortality; by
dint of his profession, he believes he will create a means for immortality (in
fact, his last name, “Creo,” means “I believe,” but what he believes is
different than what Izzi believes). What
he desires is physical immortality, and he has a vested interest: his
wife. He wants to prolong his time with
her, as evidenced by the repetitious memories of his sensible experiences: the
sight of a healthy Izzi with long hair, wearing a red dress, beckoning him to
follow, the feel of the hairs on her neck as he leans in close to her. If Tommy desires, or better put, “needs,” to
find a way to immortality, it follows that he fears death. In the three categories of Kantian judgment,
“agreeable” never rises above the subjective.
It is always sensible because it satisfies a physical need, or desire,
which leaves the subject unable to judge the object in an unbiased manner. What we fear, the corollary to what we
desire, is also subjective. The
biological imperative to survive is assumed in most healthy things, but what
does one near death feel about survival?
Tommy meets resistance when he assumes his desire is universal, both
when he informs Izzi of the new discoveries that will help her and when he
fights with his lab partners, the latter frustrated at his attempt to play God
in the face of scientific ethics.
Tommy’s desire to achieve immortality is an attempt at
transcendence, but one does not transcend death by being forever mortal. His self-perception as conqueror (helped by a certain amount of projection in the conquistador
story of Izzi’s book, definitely not an object in itself) of his wife’s cancer
leads him to view her as an object of the sensible realm. Izzi’s body is a vessel, which, although
living, is susceptible to all manner of wear and tear, not unlike a tree. Izzi as tree
does figure prominently in one of the film’s narratives as Tom, bald and
meditative, accompanies her to Xibalba.
In a scene involving Tom and the tree, Izzi/Isabel appears, tying
together each of the three different narratives and leading Tom to his first
feeling of true transcendence, a harmony of the sensible and supersensible. Up to this point, Tom has arguably viewed
death as sublime. His “imagination
strives to progress toward infinity, while [his] reason demands absolute
totality as a real idea.” As he
struggles to conquer the unconquerable, he grows frustrated at Izzi’s demand to
“finish it.” Finish what—the book or the
belief that he will live forever? It is
not death, “the object,” that is sublime, “but the attunement that the
intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective
judgment.” The more Tommy convinces
himself of the possibility of immortality via scientific discovery, the more
terrified he is of death, an object that exceeds the capacity of his
senses. With Izzi’s encouragement, Tom
acknowledges that he will die, which will ultimately reunite them: “Together we
will live forever.” Like Izzi, Tom’s
view of death, not an object in itself, has changed, and it is now beautiful to
him.
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