Queen of Swords

This evening at a group meeting, one person referenced a story she had heard from a professor, which she believed had been taken from Celtic lore: that when returning from battle, warriors stopped to bathe at each of seven pools, each of which was cooler than the one before it. The idea was that by the time they reached home, their battle rage had been cooled.

Does anyone have an actual reference for this story?

Yesterday, kateri_thinks invited me, uncrowned_king and _storyteller_ to see "The Fountain." It's a movie I had heard of, but not one I would have gone out of my way to see. However, opportunity to go out with both Kateri and L&L was not to be passed up.

Three stories are interwoven in this movie: the story of Izzy, a young woman dying of a brain tumor, and her husband Tommy who is a medical researcher frantically searching for a cure; Queen Isabella of Spain and the Conquistador she sends to South America searching for the Tree of Life in order to combat the Inquisition; and a mysterious bald man wearinng what looks like prison jammies floating through a nebula in a bubble with a dying tree.

Because Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play the main characters in each scenario, and because I had read a review that suggested it, I watched the movie thinking that they were the same two souls manifesting over time. It was only this morning that _storyteller_ pointed out the truth: only the story of Izzy and Tommy is real. The story of the Queen and the Conquistador is the book that Izzy is writing, and the man in the bubble with the tree is Tommy in his dreams. I realized that the movie isn't about Death, as we all had been discussing the night before, it is about The Fear of Death.

Izzy starts out afraid of her own impending death. She copes with that fear, wrestles with it, by writing her own story as myth. Tommy expresses his fear of her death in his dreams, where he has a close relationship with a dying tree but keeps pushing away appearances by both Izzy and the Queen. He is so afraid of Izzy's death he is incapable of facing it with her. He pushes her away again and again. Sometimes it is so he can go to the hospital and continue his research, but some of it is that his anger and denial and helplessness prevents him from offering her any real support. He won't accept that she's dying, so he can't stand beside her as she needs him to.

Visually it's a beautiful, dream-like film. More dream-like than any other film I've seen. But as uncrowned_king pointed out, it wasn't able to do any of the three stories justice. It was a long film, but none of the stories went as deep as they could have, and so the overall impact of each was lessened.

I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in myth-making as a response to spiritual struggles, or who has an interest in death and dying -- and it's definitely a movie to see on the large screen, or the impact of the visuals will be lost, further reducing the effectiveness and emotional impact of the film.

I classify this one as a Noble Failure.