Looking Through the Veil: The Theology of Movie Afterlives
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What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics. From a theological perspective, it’s not the descriptive details that matter but rather the functions played by these portrayals. What we expect to happen after we die affects how we choose to live.
In other words, most concepts of the afterlife are really all about this life. (What isn’t?) Despite the infinite horizon of eternity, which from a quantitative standpoint shrinks our earthly threescore-and-ten into insignificance, almost all popular images of immortality hang from the framework of our brief mortal lives. Perhaps our ultimate destination is determined by our deeds or moral standing: the compensatory afterlife, wherein just deserts possibly denied or escaped during life are executed eternally in heaven or hell. Or the reverse: the wheel of karma deposits us back into existence, over and over again, at the level to which we managed to rise or fall in our last go-round. The questions we tend to ask about the afterlife are revealing: Do people in the next life remember their earthly existences? Recognize those they knew? Watch us from the great beyond? The hopes and fears of believers have never stopped revolving around the relationship of this life to the next one.
That’s also true about films set in the afterlife. Although they reflect the particular time and place of their making, movies that take us through the veil typically find some way to keep their feet firmly planted on Earth. After all, it’s the finite resource of time that makes human life precious. If you’re going to tell a story with characters who change and grow, and real stakes, you either need that valley of the shadow of death or some extradimensional re-creation of it.
That’s why the most prominent afterlife movies involve the newly dead arguing that they need to go back. Call the subgenre Heaven Can Wait, because that’s (a) the title of the 1938 play by Harry Segall that provides the source material for a handful of them and (b) a succinct description of the plot outline these movies follow. Someone dies right before the big fight (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, 1941) or the big game (Heaven Can Wait, 1978) or the big slot at the Apollo (Down to Earth, 2001) or the big gig at the jazz club (Soul, 2020). They need to return to Earth so they can fulfill their destiny.
Conveniently—and this is a theme for many movies about the afterlife, including Albert Brooks’s sublimely pleasurable 1991 comedy Defending Your Life—the Heaven Can Wait movies only have to show the antechamber to the great beyond. This enables them to elide most of the big theological questions about what actually comes next. No judgment, no eternity—just an in-between where the newly deceased are sorted and sent on to their “final destinations.” The first glimpse of the afterlife we see in both Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Heaven Can Wait is the dead queueing up to board a plane while a transport manager checks names against a manifest. The initial conflict in this plot comes when our heroes (the boxer, quarterback, stand-up, musician, whatever) argue that there has been a mistake. That it wasn’t their time. That they need to go back.
Two themes emerge from this well-worn plot. First, the dead are souls. They are spirit selves who have left behind their bodies like a suit of clothes. This is convenient for cinema, because when they go back, they can inhabit a different body and still be themselves. In Here Comes Mr. Jordan and its remakes, the afterlife manager scours the world to find a suitable replacement body for the soul that wasn’t supposed to be taken. Romantic subplots in these movies posit that, even though the mistakenly dead protagonists look like someone else, their spirits still shine through.
Another commonality about the afterlife, in these movies about getting back to Earth, is bureaucracy. The films imagine the complexity of a worldwide stream of the dead arriving for their eternal lives, and kick off their plots by introducing some mistake—or at least allowing the protagonist to protest that there has been one. Perhaps the greatest afterlife movie of them all, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), centers on an error that allows a World War II British airman (David Niven) to somehow survive a plane crash and fall in love with a radio operator (Kim Hunter). Before the judge, jury, and opposing counsel, the pilot’s advocate argues that this failure to collect the soul in a timely fashion means that new obligations have arisen—that the life of an entirely different person, the radio operator, is now entangled in the matter. At the climax of the film, the court descends a giant staircase to the operating room where the pilot is undergoing surgery, to hear from the supposed-to-be-deceased and his newly beloved directly.
Such accommodations are quite unprecedented in the annals of the afterlife, these movies always emphasize. Yet precisely because we only see these transit lounges or training grounds, we can accept that their functionaries aren’t infallible. As long as the films keep the deities that reign over our ultimate destinations hidden backstage, stories about human foibles, dreams, and conflicts can still be told.
Wartime gave fresh urgency to the Heaven Can Wait subgenre; as young men died, their communities wrestled with the implications of lives cut short, potential unrealized, relationships severed. In Here Comes Mr. Jordan and A Matter of Life and Death, the heavenly queues are filled with men in uniform. (Powell and Pressburger show them receiving full-size sets of wings, replacing the metal ones that so many rode to their deaths.) This plot depends on the idea of unfinished business, a rise interrupted—something we can’t help obsessing over whenever an athlete or artist leaves us early.
Defending Your Life departs from the Heaven Can Wait model in several ways, but most striking is that returning to Earth represents failure, not success. As befits a peacetime vision, almost everybody we see died at a ripe old age, aside from a few accident victims like Daniel (Brooks) and Julia (Meryl Streep), whose romance provides the film with its central drama. And everyone accepts that “moving on” to a more advanced and enlightened life is desirable; none of the film’s characters pine for what they’ve left behind (although they will talk your ear off about their pets). The improvements of Judgment City—amazing food, comfortable unisex clothing, Disneyland-esque trams—over its earthly model suggest the wonderful things to come. And its familiar aspects—strip malls, bowling lanes, hotel televisions—are just pedestrian enough to make a dead person realize (or remember) how dumb Southern California was.
No single movie could explore the afterlife as thoroughly as the Michael Schur sitcom The Good Place, which ran for four seasons. As in Defending Your Life, the human characters learn about the possibility of moving on—or going back. Demons masquerading as angels oversee an off-brand heaven (bottomless frozen yogurt but no ice cream) that tortures its human victims with their own particular earthly inadequacies. Unexpectedly, the humans respond by trying to become better people, studying ethics and even winning over their demon overlord in their quest to go to the real Good Place (or at least improve the system that makes it nearly impossible to get there). Here the dead encounter not a bureaucracy that makes a rare mistake but a Kafkaesque nightmare of secret rules, opaque accounting, and no right of appeal—far closer, I suspect, to what we actually fear awaits us when the hammer of eternal judgment falls.
While the British A Matter of Life and Death wrings drama out of the very idea of stepping out of line and protesting the judgment from on high, Americans tend to believe that an exception always ought to be made in our case. Kristen Bell’s Eleanor in The Good Place has gone through life making herself obnoxious enough to avoid the consequences of her actions, and at first she approaches heaven the same way. In Defending Your Life, Daniel is certain the whole process is unfair, and Brooks gets a lot of comedy from both his aggrieved protests and his resignation to getting screwed over in the afterlife, just as he felt he was on Earth. Because he’s wrong. The system works; he just doesn’t understand it. (“Still don’t get the big-brain bit, do you?” his posthumous guide and defense counsel Bob Diamond comments.)
Although these bureaucratic processes mirror the banality of our own reality, the hereafter’s cinematic qualities can be quite spectacular. Computer-generated imagery aided director Vincent Ward and screenwriter Ronald Bass in bringing to the screen the Orpheus riff What Dreams May Come (1998), an adaptation of the 1978 Richard Matheson novel of the same title. Following the book, the film offers an unfettered vision of an afterlife created by its inhabitants’ minds. The protagonist’s heaven is a glorious mountainous landscape from one of his wife’s paintings, a place they dreamed of growing old together; when his wife commits suicide, she goes to a twisted nightmare version of their house, a CGI hell birthed from her own imagination. In a famous reversal of the usual contrast between the drab world and the glories of heaven, A Matter of Life and Death goes monochrome once we leave the earthly plane, reserving its vivid Technicolor for the vibrant experiences of the living. Cleverly, Defending Your Life makes a virtue of its more pedestrian imagery; the staff of Judgment City claim that it looks like Southern California in order to reduce the shock for the West Coast dead.
The same year as What Dreams May Come, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life took the opposite approach to a cinema of eternity. Rather than a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which whatever the soul imagines comes to be, Kore-eda shows the newly dead reviewing their lives as if they are watching a home movie unfold. Their task is to select the moment where they want to spend eternity. In contrast to subjective afterlives (where individual consciousnesses continue their adventures), humans have often located their ongoing existence in memory—as when descendants dutifully maintain memories of their ancestors. Kore-eda plays on this aspect of Japanese culture, institutionalized in thousands of Shinto shrines. He explores whether memory could be a kind of home (or prison) for the dead. Film, like life, inexorably unspools in time; at the end, Kore-eda posits, there is a freeze frame. What will remain of us, written in light and burning forever? The drama here isn’t in our continuing adventures, but the weight of the last decision we will ever have the chance to make.
And that is the paradox of movies about the afterlife. In theological terms, this realm is almost always devoid of life—of time, change, and growth. Yet it is nonetheless commonly portrayed as a realm where humans are at home—disembodied souls, resurrected bodies, carriers of karmic burdens, either experiencing eternity or passing through to the next stage of existence. The existentialists seized on this incongruity: we long for certainty, to know and be known completely, yet the inescapable conditions of existence make that impossible. Can we remain human if those conditions are lifted? If the on-screen depictions of the afterlife discussed here suggest an answer, it’s a negative one. In order to give us people we can relate to and circumstances we can understand, they import existence back into the equation, lingering where the final reckoning has not yet been made.
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