|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Is There Life After Film?
| Article
# : |
18910 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
2,038 Words |
| Author
: |
Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
In an America obsessed with material gain and earthly glory, Hollywood--that gilded pillar of pop culture--has recently surprised us with a spate of films about the afterlife.
Ghost was the surprise hit of last summer, zipping up to the top ten biggest grossing films chart, tenaciously staying there for months, to become the No. 1 film of 1990. The same season brought us Ghost Dad about a single father (Bill Cosby) returning from the beyond to bail out his three orphaned kids, Eternity about a reincarnated TV executive (Jon Voight) doing battle with his nemesis from a medieval past-life, Jacob's Ladder about a Vietnam veteran (Tim Robbins) with visions of hell in the New York subway, and the flashy Flatliners about five young and restless med students who decide to play dead, quite literally. The latter was a box office success, as well as the most serious of these life-after-death films.
We have seen numerous others in this genre in recent years--from mass-appeal blockbusters such as Always (starring Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter) and Field of Dreams (Kevin Costner) to duds like Chances Are. Actress Diane Keaton made her directorial debut in 1987 with an offbeat documentary called Heaven, in which people from many walks of life told us what they thought about the afterlife. The following year a feature cartoon got in the act--Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven, in which a wayward German shepherd gets another chance to do right on earth so he can get to Dog Heaven.
Why this sudden fascination with the afterlife? Is it because the baby boomers are slipping into middle age and facing their own mortality? Certainly, the AIDS epidemic has brought untimely death to our doorsteps, and urban violence--the cause of death for the hero of Ghost haunts our path.
Is it a sign of our spiritual longing in an age when absolute values have been nearly lost? The proliferation of the New Age religions in the 1980s has pointed to that trend already, and films are just now catching up a little. Of course, Hollywood is primarily in the business of delivering entertainment value rather than spiritual enlightenment.
While these films are far from uniform in their depiction of the afterlife, they do share certain thematic premises. First, they do not depict "the other side" so much as the return of the deceased to earthly life.
Apparently borrowing from
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
