Often in my writing for SuicideGirls I’ve talked about girls, but I haven’t talked a lot about suicide. Last week a friend of mine attempted it, unsuccessfully, thank you Jesus. Twenty-five years ago another friend managed to do it successfully and I’m still bummed about that. When I lived in Chicago my band used to play at a place called Batteries, which was booked by Jim Ellison of the band Material Issue. I was pretty torn up when I found out he’d killed himself in 1996. They played their song "Valerie Loves Me" at a club I went to this week, which got me thinking even harder about suicide and its consequences. I’ve known a couple people, including an uncle and a co-worker, who managed to commit slow suicide by drinking themselves to death. And I myself have come pretty close to doing the deed, too.

We used to get into these long philosophical debates around the kitchen table of the punk house near Akron City Hospital, where nearly everyone on the scene seemed to hang out 24/7. In one debate almost everyone in the room agreed that suicide was a perfectly viable option and that it was up to the individual alone to decide whether to do it or not. I’m not sure I was the only one who disagreed. But I was certainly in the minority. I imagine a lot of “alternative” type people feel somewhat the same way as my friends did; that suicide is an acceptable option.

Intellectually, it’s easy to come up with a convincing argument that suicide is nobody’s business but that of the person who kills herself or himself. But in practical, real world terms, this is never the case. Suicide is devastating to everyone whose life a person touches. No matter how much of a loner you are, there are people who care about you and it’s never easy to deal with someone you care about killing themselves. In the case of my friend Iggy who hung himself in 1983, he seems to have been deliberately trying to hurt his girlfriend who’d recently dumped him. But she dumped him because it was the only way she could think of to make him deal with his alcoholism and general destructiveness. I don’t blame her. I would’ve done the same thing. What he did was incredibly nasty and mean. And I don’t think it really solved his problems.

Most religions forbid suicide and imagine horrible punishments awaiting in the next world for those who take their own lives. If you dug through the Buddhist literature I’m sure you could find some variation on this. There must be a sutra or vinaya text somewhere saying what kind of future incarnation awaits those who commit suicide. But I don’t know about it since I’m a pretty lousy Buddhist scholar. This in itself says something, though. Because even if such a text does exist, it’s not greatly emphasized. There are a number of scholarly articles on the Internet about the matter. Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s one more.

The Vietnamese Buddhists who set fire to themselves to protest the Viet Nam War are well known. For a while there that seemed like one of the most enduring images the general public in the West had of Buddhism. People on this side of the planet had already been taught by their early scholars that Buddhism was a Nihilistic religion filled with talk of suffering and emptiness. So it probably came as no great surprise to hear about Buddhists offing themselves. Buddhism isn’t nihilistic, though. And I don’t think those guys did anyone very much good by going up in flames.

In any case, I’m not terribly concerned with scholarly research or mass opinions. I scanned through those articles I linked to, but I really didn’t read them in depth. It’s interesting to know the history, but not really necessary. Buddhism, as far as I’m concerned, is more about our own experiences than about received wisdom from others. My own experience tells me that suicide is not really a viable option. It ultimately cannot possibly solve the problems it’s intended to solve and it causes a whole lot of unnecessary suffering and grief.

People kill themselves to put an end to their suffering. Ian Curtis did it to end his suffering over his marriage and finances. Pete Ham killed himself because he was suffering over the fate of Badfinger, the world’s greatest power pop band. Kurt Cobain killed himself to end his suffering from all those stomach aches. Of course these are all over-simplifications. But it’s clear that all of these people, as well as anyone else who has ever taken their own lives, did so because they saw it as a way out of suffering. It’s certainly not something you do just for the hell of it.

But the idea that committing suicide will end your suffering comes from the belief that you and the world in which you live are two different things. You believe that you can leave this world and thereby leave suffering behind. But my own sense after years of zazen practice is that this is not true. I’ve spent a long time watching the boundary line between what I call “me” and what I call the rest of the world blur and fade. I’m no longer certain at all where the dividing line is. I’m beginning to even suspect that that guy Buddha may have been right when he said it doesn’t exist at all. In fact I’ve had a few times when this apparently nonsensical notion has come up and bit me on the ass in ways I cannot possibly deny.

So what I’m saying here goes a little further than just the old “the show must go on” type thing, where people say you have a responsibility to your friends and family not to go off and shoot your brains out in the greenhouse. You also have a responsibility to yourself and even to the universe as a whole not to do that. Even if committing suicide solves the immediate problem by ending a poor relationship or making it so your stomach doesn’t hurt anymore, the suffering you thought was yours alone spreads out like a wave to those parts of the universe you’ve been taught to think of as separate from you. It’s impossible for me to believe that even the person who dies does not, in some way, continue to suffer just as greatly after suicide as before. I no longer believe it’s possible to leave this world. And that’s as far as I want to speculate about that. Anything I might say about the mechanism involved in how this happens would just be a load of stinky brain farts. Still, I have a very deep and unshakable feeling that this is true.

Anyway, please forgive the grimness of this little piece. What my friend did last week got me thinking hard about the matter. So SuicideGirls readers, don’t kill yourselves! Life is beautiful, so why not eat health foods instead?*


*This title of this article comes from a punk rock compilation album put out around 1979-80 by New Underground Records. The Descendents and Red Cross are featured. I’d love to find a copy of this or its sequel Life Is Beautiful So Why Not Eat Health Foods.



Brad Warner will be at the Young Buddhists Retreat in Montague, MA from August 28-31.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

You can buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex (0DFx) at CD Baby.

George Carlin, the legendary comedian who was once arrested for obscenity for his "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" skit (the case went all the way to the Supreme Court) has died. He was 71.

Do I even need to say anything about him? I'll just leave it to everyone else to share their own thoughts on his landmark comedy routines and add my own: I was a sophomore in high school when I first heard one of Carlin's full shows, "You Are All Diseased." Aside from laughing to the point of tears, my perceptions on the world were forever changed. I had never heard anyone speak so profanely and yet so eloquently. I immediately scrambled to find more albums from the guy I had previously only known as the comedian who played Rufus in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Carlin's humor had the same effect on me as Lenny Bruce's sketches had had on Carlin.

I'll close with some classic clips:








George, you will be sorely missed.

A buncha stuff has happened since I wrote my last Suicide Girls article two weeks ago. When I wrote that piece I was in Ohio, which is where I was born and mostly raised except for three years in Africa. I went to Ohio because I had some speaking engagements and gigs playing bass for the mighty 0Dfx (aka Zero Defex) and also because my grandma had been in the hospital and I wanted to visit with her. The gigs all went super. But not so much grandma. As it turns out she not only died, but she did so right before my very eyes. I’ve never seen a person die before. It’s a pretty life-changing thing to witness.

The doctors hadn’t given grandma a very good prognosis when they sent her home from the hospital. But when I arrived she seemed OK. Not great. But certainly not a week away from dying. Grandma lived in southern Ohio near Cincinnati, whereas my gigs were up in northern Ohio in Akron and Cleveland. So my plan was to visit her for a few days, go up north, do my stuff , go back down to Cincy, visit some more and then head home to Los Angeles. But right when my Akron/Cleveland stuff was over I got a call saying grandma’s condition had suddenly worsened and I’d better haul ass down south to see her. So I did. By the time I got there, she was in a very bad way. She died at 4:55 in the morning, the day after I got back down to where she lived.

I’d only just gone to bed about an hour before the hospice nurse woke us all up to say we might want to come into grandma’s room because she could go at any time. We all sat with her. She was in and out of consciousness, but couldn’t talk or move very much. I chanted the Heart Sutra for her because she liked hearing that when I chanted it after grandpa died. We talked to her, held her hand, all that stuff. And then there was a moment when she just gave up the struggle and slipped away.

I already gave my schpiel on death here earlier this year after my mom died. So I’m going to pass on that. I’ll just say that even though grandma’s dead, there really isn’t anywhere she could go but here. I’ll miss her even so.

Two major deaths of important women in your life in the same year is bound to have an effect on you. It’s made me a total asshole. What I mean by that is that I just don’t give a shit anymore. I’m gonna pretty much say and do whatever the fuck I want from now on.

Of course there are limits, obviously. I’m not gonna go out and rape, pillage and plunder. I’m not gonna be like a drugged out hedonist or nothin’. But I’m not gonna pull punches with people anymore. I’m gonna say what needs saying and do what needs done, and if people don’t like it, tough titty for them.

Still, I am a Buddhist. So I’m turning into an asshole with 25 years of Zen practice already under my belt. This may make me a slightly different type of asshole from an asshole who hasn’t done that stuff.

One of the things that I think gets lost in the way Zen is presented these days is that the whole idea of Zen in the beginning was to answer the question: How can we live a truly happy life? These days in America Zen stuff always gets all caught up in religious ideas of righteousness and holy-ocity. Fuck that shit. What Buddha wanted to find wasn’t something holy, he just wanted to live a life that wasn’t a fucking drag all the time.

In India in Buddha’s day, just like in ours, there were two basic ideas about how you can live a happy life. One camp said eat, drink, fuck, curse, and do whatever the hell you please because the only real thing in this universe is matter. There’s no God, there’s no Eternal Reward, all that shit is bupkiss, so do whatever makes you feel good right now. The other camp said that the material world was an illusion, that the spirit was the only true reality, so you should mortify the body in order to experience spiritual bliss and make a better place for yourself in the life hereafter.

Buddha tried both of these approaches, but he wasn’t satisfied with either one. The eat, drink and bed down with Mary approach seemed to hold out the promise of pleasure and plenty, but it never really delivered. You got fat, got hung-over and Mary gave you the clap. So he checked out the spiritual stuff and found that you could get pretty blissed out with those practices, but that whenever you weren’t getting some kind of spiritual high you felt like total shit because you hadn’t taken care of your basic bodily needs. So he founded what he called the Middle Way.

The Middle Way was not some kind of spiritual path designed to make us all holy with shiny pink haloes on our noggins. It was a way to live a life that wasn’t a piece of shit. It was a way to find happiness and stability in an unhappy and unstable world. That’s really all any of us are looking for, when it comes down to it. The stability of the Middle Way comes in our practice of zazen, which is the actual physical/mental practice of stability and happiness. A bit of zazen in the morning and a bit in the evening radiates throughout the rest of the day and makes everything better. That’s all there is to it.

Morality is an important aspect of the practice because we are all interconnected. I can’t be happy if I make the people around me miserable under the mistaken impression that they are not intimately connected with me. So I need to behave morally towards everyone I encounter. I don’t think a lot of the Buddhists in America these days really get that, though. They imagine Buddhist morality has some kind of supposedly “higher purpose,” that we’re moral in order to satisfy some ideal, or to avoid the wrath of a vengeful Buddha -- or at least avoid the wrath of vengeful Buddhists who’ll get on your case if you don’t act like they think you ought to.

But another aspect of Buddhist morality is that you have to do your part. You’re not here just for yourself. You’re here for everyone and everything you encounter. Your role is to do and say the things that need doing and saying from your unique perspective. God is too far removed from the Universe to see himself clearly without splitting himself into a bazillion eyes and ears that watch over all aspects of himself. Whatever perspective you have is the most valuable thing in the universe. You need to be fully yourself. At the same time, you need to completely forget any idea you have about yourself. Or, if you can’t forget it, at least just ignore it, secure in the knowledge that whatever you think you are isn’t what you really are.

Doing and saying what needs doing an saying has to be handled carefully. But being careful and being timid are two very different things. The folks who confuse Buddhist morality with the religious variety think Buddhism is about being timid. This is because they are all a bunch of fuck heads. It's a fine line sometimes between being careful and being timid, so watch it. But erring on either side is equally as bad.

Watching my grandma die, I felt like we all have a limited time in this place to do what needs doing. Even if I get a good 86 years like she did, that still won’t be enough to get it all done. So I’d better get my ass in gear and at least do a few of the things I was put here to do before I bite the big one.

If I seem like an asshole for that, sorry. If you don’t like it, bite me.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Some random facts: The original Halloween is the perfect horror film. I've seen Halloween at least a hundred times. I hate remakes of movies.

Because of the above reasons I wanted to hate the Halloween remake. In fact, I still might, but for right now I'm gonna try to be something I've never been before. Open-minded.

I really enjoy Rob Zombie's first two movies. The Devil's Rejects is kick-ass violence and mayhem and I actually liked House of 1000 Corpses even more. And his Grindhouse trailer for Werewolf Women of the S.S. was also great. And maybe the fact that they've churned out sequel after crappy sequel over the past 30 years makes this move less blasphemous.

No one should be remaking this movie. However, regardless of whether or not it turns out okay, they at least appear to be going about it the right way. The thing they shouldn't be doing... they're doing... well... I guess...

Though, I gotta say, the Zombie version comes out on the losing end of the trailer battle...



vs.



The battle continues August 31st.

The 9 Coolest Things About Halloween

1) The John Carpenter score. Terrifying. Picture the most harmless image you can possibly imagine. Puppy frolicking with a chew toy, leaf alighting on a gentle pond, whatever. Picture it. Now add the Halloween theme. Now picture me squealing like a sissy.

2) It's the best of the admittedly pathetic group of holiday-themed horror films. Sure, My Bloody Valentine, Silent Night Deadly Night and Father's Day aren't exactly top of the line projects, but Halloween beats them all.

3) The moment when, after impaling a dude to the wall, Michael Myers stares at his victim and then slowly tilts his head, like an animal would. Whoa.

4) Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper." Laurie and Annie listen to it while getting high in the car. Awesome song, which, to this day reminds me of Halloween.

5) The fact that the most terrifying mask in horror history, the one worn by Michael Myers aka "The Shape," was fashioned out of a William Shatner "Captain Kirk," mask. Yeah. Be glad they were all out of "Sulu" masks.

6) Dr Loomis played by the late, great Donald Pleasance. When a freshly-pummeled Laurie asks Dr Loomis if, "that was the boogie man," he replies, "As a matter of fact, it was." See, that's just cool.

7) The fact that the whole "unstoppable killer" gimmick was invented here and so, it's not quite as out of hand as it is later in the genre. Meaning, for the most part, all the damage done to good ole "Double M, " is realistic and it's conceivable he could've survived it. Sort of.

8) After the rampage, the part when the neighbor runs out and in response to the noise says "I've been trick-or-treated to death tonight," and Loomis snaps, "Death! You don't know what death is!" I picture the exchange continuing with Loomis also challenging the neighbor's knowledge of "police," "lunatics," "knife-wounds," and "Funyuns."

"Funyuns! You don't know what Funyuns are!"

9) Um, the fact that Michael Myers actually drives a car in the movie. What? And, somehow, it doesn't make him less scary. Does he signal? Buckle-up? Merge well? Who knows... Jason Voorhees couldn't get away with that shit.



TheCoolerKing admits he actually loves Halloween 3: Season of the Witch

Once again it's time to celebrate that most popular of all God's killing machines... the shark. That's right, Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week.

Would sharks be as popular if they had the ability to follow us onto land? I doubt it. If apes started randomly punching people their popularity would drop as fast as... well, the people they were hitting.

But, we have legs and can use them to leave bodies of water and for that reason they are somehow still super-popular.

The following video features a shark hypnotist. I wasn't aware that hypnotism had been perfected on humans yet. In fact, I have a smoking uncle who's living, coughing proof that it hasn't been. Hmmm... Maybe wait until it's 100% effective on creatures you can reason with before trying it out on unstoppable engines of death and misery? No? Okay...



This man has just given up his right to our sympathy when a shark inevitably eats him. A day, a month, a year, whatever... It will happen, and when it does... he had it coming.

I'll go even further, ANY freak accident that befalls him, lightning strike, anvil crushing, quicksand, whatever the case may be. The moment you feel bad for him, say to yourself, "Well, there was that time he tried hynotizing that shark and nothing bad happened to him... I guess he was one up."



Shark Week? There needs to be a "this poor woman" week. Holy shit. Is it a little exploitative to have her tell her shark-attack tale, film a re-enactment of said attack and then let the camera linger on her for seconds after the revelation that her leg was bitten off, all in service of a week devoted to the sharks? I'm not sure either but it was creepy to watch.

Boy, I sure hope you hate sea-turtles.



Don't worry, I have it on good authority that that turtle was a racist. Maybe he should've been allowed to use a gun or something cause that was a one-sided blowout.

Admittedly, my grasp on evolution isn't iron-clad but... I'm guessing that if that shark kills hundreds more turtles, while wounding a few, and then the few who lived breed, and then some of them are wounded while hundreds more are killed... And the few that are left again breed and so on and so forth... In about 2 million years there's gonne be a 25-foot long sea-turtle who's pissed off, impervious to shark bites and ready to get some revenge.

I bet he'll even have an eye patch.

TheCoolerKing looks forward to one day yelling at a shark from the safety of a steel boat.

Peel away the sinister connotations movies and metal bands associate with the concept of death and what's left? The painfully slow act itself. Barring accidents and freak forms of expiration, it would likely be a slow descent; an uncomfortable and frightening transition for the one about to succumb and a long, painful process for his or her loved ones. Beyond that, the tedious day-in-day-out slipping away would be maddeningly boring, and certainly not something others would want to watch… or would they? Spiegel Online reports:

To a lot of you the idea is probably a little off-putting, if not downright disturbing, but there's an interesting logic behind EosTV’s impending inception. It seems that Germany, despite having around 82,000,000 inhabitants, has a very low birth rate compared to other parts of the world; last year almost 150,000 more people died than were born. Besides causing a decline in overall population, what this does is cause a shift in the television viewing demographic.

Some of the programming ideas for the channel include documentaries about cemeteries, helpful tips about finding retirement homes, and explorations into the changing ways in which we cope with death, as allowed by the advent of modern technology and the internet. The channel even plans to offer their own modern take on mourning: TV obituaries.

It may not be a necessary innovation, but I suppose someone might be interested in getting teary-eyed over a clip of dearly departed Uncle Fritz. But if I were actually old and ‘on my way out’, I’m not so sure I’d want to sit around and wax depressive watching death all day. The programmers at EosTV are surely aware of that, as there will also be shows about retirement homes, nursing care, and installing a stair lift in your home. Stair lifts, as you may not have known, make for compelling viewing.



Ok, so my idea of “Death TV” may be more akin to “Elderly TV”, though something tells me by focusing a little more on the gloomy side of things EosTV could tap into Germany’s ever-present goth scene, which is very much alive. And now that I think of it, I wonder if the founder of the network isn’t the one with the unnatural fixation on death:

It’s his, uh, breathless excitement that has lead to the inclusion of "entertainment programs" and documentaries about famous cemeteries. But programming aside, when the dirt hits the shovel, so to speak, Germany will have an interesting addition to their cable lineup… and it's one that may be headed to other shores soon.

'Til then, the morbid and the elderly will have to wait with bated breath, contenting themselves with Six Feet Under reruns.

In a story that can only be called fucking insane, it seems that a startling percentage of Russian men not only live up to the stereotype of being drunks, but that they are actually rampaging, fearless, super-drunks who will consume anything. Like cologne.

New Scientist reports that, according to a new study, 43% of deaths amongst men between the ages of 25 and 54 are related to drinking non-beverage alcohol, such as cologne, antiseptics, cleaning agents, and other horrific shit. Researcher David Leon explains:

I guess it makes sense that there’s such a high percentage of deaths among the truly gung-ho poison-drinkers, but apparently the problem is widespread. According to the study, 8% of the men in the control group admitted to drinking the toxic spirits. That’s like, 1 in 12 -- not soooo bad, right?

Oh. Well, if you're still unsure that poisonous substances are unhealthy, or that Russia is wild about booze, I’ll leave you with some additional depressing stats:

• Men who drink non-beverage alcohol have a five-times greater risk of alcohol-related death.
• Men who drink only non-beverage alcohol have a 20-times greater risk of death.
• 72% of murders and 42% of suicides in Russia are related to alcohol.
• Due to a high death rate and a low birth rate (both related to alcohol), Russia's population is set to decline by about 30,000,000 people in the next 40 years.

Bottoms up!

There’s nothing that says you’ve lost that loving feelings like, well…death. But just because one has gone to the Great Jazz Joint in the Sky, doesn’t mean that one doesn’t still want to look fierce.

Enter Sunset Tan, the E! network’s latest documentary-style look at the golden brown underbelly of Los Angeles glam. When the scantily clad, blonde Olly girls are called to the James Mortuary for their first airbrush job, they encounter Frankie, an unlikely client, ready for his close up.

Check the link for a longer clip.

It's a rough week in entertainment for the cult wonders. Today, Hawaii state (and, dare I say, national) treasure Don Ho made his way to the great Coconut Grove in the sky, leaving Wayne Newton and Tom Jones to fend for themselves as the last of a dying breed.

I don't quite know what to say at times like this, so I'll go with personal anecdote. See, back in the 1970s, my parents lived for a time in Hawaii. One time a bunch of my mom's relatives flew out to visit, and on a lark she got her two grandmothers a pair of tickets to see Don Ho. It was far and away the highlight of their trip, and they talked about it with wistful fondness for decades. Both of them passed away within the last year and a half, and now this. I've never exactly been into his music itself (nor do I expect many of you to be), but the man lived a great life and made a lot of elderly ladies very happy. So if it's all right with you, I'm going to go ahead and suppose that there's some spectacular astral luau going on right about now, and my great-grandmas are all up in the Mai Tais and wine like there's no tomorrow, tiny bubbles everywhere.

Two British parents who used their prescribed methadone to keep their infant from crying were told yesterday that only one of them will face prosecution.

Given her plea the court decided no action would be taken against the father, despite blood samples proving Mitchell's sedation was not a unique event and had been happening "regularly over a protracted period."

The case rather raises the question as to why two recovering heroin addicts, both on a prescribed heroin substitute, were allowed to remain caring for a young child.

Gemma Fennelly will be sentenced on May 3rd.

On 11 April 2007, a walking piece of meat with a mop of curly hair and a propensity for Pall Malls (the "classy way to commit suicide") stopped puttering around this little blue and green rock.

So it goes.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is a film that has been long in the making. Bringing this existential epic from script to screen took more than six years and was a personal obsession for the director who launched his career with Pi at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. Brad Pitt was so moved by the screenplay, he broke down and cried after getting to page 40 when he called Aronofsky to say that he was definitely “in.”

After scheduling conflicts and delays, Pitt was out and the movie in limbo. With the fate of the film unknown, Warner Bros. enticed the director with other projects to helm including Batman, but Aronofsky remained steadfast in his intention to make The Fountain. Once imagined as a nearly $100 million dollar epic spanning thousands of years, Aronofsky downsized the project to a modest $35 million dollar studio film to get it to the screen—Hugh Jackman came aboard to star alongside Aronofsky’s love in real-life Rachel Weisz and the film was a “go.” The kind of struggle to get a film as unclassifiable as this one to the screen always says something about the creative minds who will not give up on bringing their ideas into reality. And the reactions, as one might expect, have been mixed. (Read on, but be warned—SPOILER: You will die.)


...what is most interesting is not the “story” but the subtext...

Perhaps you’ve read reviews that have attempted to explain the movie’s plot describing it as “...three parallel stories about love, death, spirituality, and the fragility of existence as told through the odyssey taken on by one man in his thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves.” Sure, it’s about that and much more. But taking a step back from the surface level story synopsis put forth by the studio marketing department, what is most interesting is not the “story” but the subtext and, more importantly, the reactions to the journey by viewers. Some say the film is difficult to understand as Aronofsky tells his non-linear story, sometimes bouncing between the three time periods within the same scene, but for me, it worked. It’s also the kind of movie that requires a second viewing to get the most out of it. The last movie that I felt required this attention was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—a movie whose story unfolds backwards.


Aronofsky tells his non-linear story, sometimes bouncing between the three time periods within the same scene...

For myself, I was moved. Put simply, the film is about the acceptance of death and reaching a place where one can think of death as an act of creation, not destruction. Tomas/Tommy/Bald-Future-Yoga-Man (Hugh Jackman) will not accept death and works tirelessly in all three parallel stories to conquer it. Isabel/Izzi/Tree-Woman (Rachel Weisz) has come to terms with death as she accepts her own. We experience the film through the eyes of Tom as he finally learns to accept his own death, becoming one with the universe. It’s somber, odd, engaging, beautiful, and it’s the one film I’ve seen this year that moved me to tears. Call me a sap, but it wasn’t just the experience, but that so rarely does a film as unique as this one come along. But how could anyone be surprised coming from the director behind Pi and Requiem for a Dream?

And my interpretation of the film is the right one…for me. While we all have different reactions to movies based on our experiences, The Fountain is one of those rare movies that acts as a cinematic Rorschach test saying volumes about the individual based on their response. And the experience and each individuals’ reactions to it, no matter how vastly different, are all completely valid.


It's not about medical experiments, conquistadors, life-giving trees or monkeys.

When I discuss movies with friends and colleagues, there’s a consensus measurable on a scale of brilliant to crap, and there is generally agreement about where most films fall on this scale. But The Fountain transcends this as the reactions are so across the board, more than any other film in recent memory. Some say they “love it” while others say they “hate it.” I’m most interested in the opinions of those who disliked it. A good friend well-versed in film was captivated by the imagery but was confused by the subplot involving the use of experimental compounds on monkeys. That plot thread completely threw him off the underlying themes. He was as confounded as the character of Tommy in the film—so driven in his work-life that he fails to notice the importance of life’s moments in the present. And that reaction is completely valid. Having seen The Fountain more than four times now (yes, I get that way when I see a film I truly love) I imagine that my own feelings about it will alter as I see it differently based on where I’m at in my own spiritual growth.


Put simply, the film is about the acceptance of death...

So, I hope that others will be open to experiencing The Fountain multiple times as they struggle to unravel the message(s) they discover for themselves. The benefit is that, along the way, you may find yourself gaining more than just an understanding of a movie, but of yourself.

Gore gone.

Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker, the creator of Film Threat, and plans to see The Fountain again.