Thinking about Clint Eastwood's 31st feature, Hereafter [read my interview with himself, here], a mental montage of movie near-death experiences and afterlife vistas flashed before my eyes.
There are the tunnels of light of Resurrection (1980) and Hereafter, with Ellen Burstyn and Cecile De France respectively pulled back from the afterlife to finish their work among the living.
There's the heavenly tribunals of Cabin in the Sky, (1940), Stairway to Heaven (1946) and Defending Your Life (1991) -- respectively Churchly, Princely and Bureaucratic in design -- that will decide whether Eddie Anderson, David Niven and Albert Brooks deserve happy endings. (Like the heroes of Cabin and Stairway, the Warren Beatty character in Heaven Can Wait (1978) is in limbo between this world and the next (depicted as as place where beings walk on clouds).
There's the infernos, comic, tragic and tragicomic, in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (1997), Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come (1998). and Goran Dukic's Wristcutters (2007). As Allen sees it, the levels of hell are kind of like Bloomingdales, but subterranean and art-directed by Hieronymus Bosch. As Ward tells it, the seven circles of hell are landscapes as imagined by a very melancholy Monet. And as Dukic suggests, hell is the California desert, where rusting service stations and creaky roadhouses punctuate an arid expanse.
And there's the Elysian Fields panoramas of Field of Dreams (1989) and Gladiator (2000). In the former, an Iowa baseball diamond cut into a corn field is the portal between this world and the next. In the latter, the title figure dies and his body levitates above the wheat fields of his native Spain.
Can you think of other movie depictions of near-death and afterlife? I've stayed away from ghost movies like Ghost and Ugetsu, and away from angel movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Wings of Desire, but you can make a case for them. Your favorites? Why?
Does Dogma count? It was certainly Kevin Smith vintage vulgar, but it definitely had some riotous laughs in it!— socialgrace- While Diane Keaton explored HEAVEN in her documentary of the same name, I can't help but think of Gaspar Noe's recently released ENTER THE VOID as a memorable example of life after death.— garyk
- It looks like it does in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. And Claude Rains and Edward Everett Horton are there to help you along. Isn't that great?— ccjroberts
- There's the Afterlife (or at least its foyer) in Lubitsch's "Heaven Can Wait," which strikes me as the lobby of an Art Deco hotel. At the other extreme is the bucolic afterlife found in an episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Hunt," co-written by Rod Serling and "The Waltons" creator, Earl Hamner. Not surprisingly, here the Afterlife is remarkably like the Appalachians. And in another "Twilight Zone" episode written by Serling alone, "A Stop at Willoughby," a Mad Man-esque businessman finds a haven in 1890s-era small town America. By episode's end, it has become this man's Afterlife.— wwolfe
- what was that one with robin williams, It made me sooo depressed, yet it was shot so well and beautifully.— jimmythec
- what was that one with robin williams, It made me sooo depressed, yet it was shot so well and beautifully.— jimmythec
- It's called "What Dreams May Come."— carrierickey
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