A Failure Of Imagination In Depicting The Afterlife

If Hollywood can’t show me heaven, who can?

If Hollywood can’t show me heaven, who can?

What happens after we die? Our loved ones mourn us, if we’re lucky. But where — if anywhere — do we go, and just as importantly, what do we do when we get there? It depends on what religion you subscribe to. Here at Lizzie Logan Is A Genius, our religion is Hollywood.

Many movies that deal with the afterlife are set primarily among the living, and typically have to do with the heaven/hell question. While Santa Claus can simply intuit who belongs on the Naughty and Nice lists, Saint Peter isn’t so perceptive, and Hollywood is very concerned with who gets sent where, and why.

In 1943’s Cabin In The Sky, gambler Joe is given an extra six months to live and become Heaven-worthy, while Lucifer tries to tear him down. He dies a semi-righteous second death, then wakes up in bed; it was all a dream, and now he’s gonna get his act together. In 1946’s It’s A Wonderful Life, angel Clarence grants George his own dream sequence about what would have happened if he’d never been born, and George decides to find Heaven on Earth and embrace life for being as wonderful as it is (kind of a spoiler-y title, when you think about it). 1978’s Heaven Can Wait is also about an angel giving a man a second chance, though in this case he wasn’t suicidal or in crisis, he just hadn’t met the right girl.

Then there are slightly New Age-y movies about being ready, or not, to go on to the Next Place. It’s not an Up or Down, more like a Forward or Back, and the action is set in the in-between, a way-station between life and the Beyond that’s sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes mystical (in Harry Potter, it’s an aptly metaphoric train station). In Defending Your Life (1991), Albert Brooks has to prove in court that he was brave while on Earth so that he can go…wherever you go. There’s a similar courtroom set-up in A Matter of Life and Death (1946, also released under the title Stairway to Heaven). In The Lovely Bones (2009), Susie is in the “in-between” but is basically guaranteed a spot in Heaven if she wants it. First, though, she has to see her murderer get dealt with back on Earth, and also possess her friend’s body for a sec so she can kiss someone, or something. In The Five People You Meet In Heaven (2004)… you actually don’t meet those five people in Heaven! Though I get that it makes for a more marketable title than The Five People You Meet In Purgatory, which is what actually happens: when you die, you confront five people from your past and resolve your issues, and then you get to go to your heavenly reward.

Sensing a pattern? Die with some shit left to figure out, figure it out in another realm, and on ya go.

Spirited, a bizarre Apple TV musical that premiered last Christmas, combines this idea with A Christmas Carol: in Spirited, when you die, you join like, an office, and your job is to go about saving the souls of terrible but redeemable people on Earth by giving them the Three Ghosts treatment. The people on Earth don’t need to be near death or anything. But then when you have redeemed enough people you go…back on Earth? Or wait, no, first you become good, then you die, then you help others become…I watched this movie twice and I can’t make heads or tails of the system honestly.

1998’s What Dreams May Come has a much more worked-out idea of how you wind up happy-dead or angry-dead: your psyche created your afterlife for you. But the movie still posits that even Heaven isn’t as good as Earth — the characters eventually decide to reincarnate and do it all over again.

Disney’s Soul (2020) plays with a bureaucracy between Here and There (we never get to There, actually, but we see it), and there’s a new place, too: the Before, where souls live before being born. I love that idea…but the movie also has a Spark and a Zone and a…too much going on, is the thing. The moral is carpe diem and protagonist Joe chooses Earth over Heaven. Aight.

It’s obvious why there aren’t many stories set entirely after death or without some Heaven/Hell conflict: eternity seems boring. It’s a problem directly addressed in the Black Mirror episode “San Junipero.” The afterlife doesn’t exist in a spiritual sense, but you can upload your consciousness to a computer and exist there forever after your body has died. However, those who choose to preserve their consciousnesses eventually end up dissatisfied, and we see them resorting to BDSM and drugs to “feel something.” The episode actually ends happily, with our heroines dancing eternity away, and we get the sense that they won’t grow tired of fun. But make no mistake: while much of the action takes place in San Junipero, the central conflict is over whether or not to stay there. It’s not really a “story set in the afterlife,” and the happy ending is so very much at the end that it’s literally interspersed with the credits.

Will we ever get to see something that starts post-mortality? And not in a Dead Like Me way where they’re dead but they’re walking around Earth. I mean like Twilight Zone-level All Beyond All the Time. Is anyone creative enough to figure out how you could tell and interesting story in a consequence-less dimension?

Once, I thought so.

In September 2016, a show premiered that was poised to really get into the nitty gritty of the afterlife: NBC’s The Good Place. In the pilot, the series sets itself an incredibly lofty goal: create an entirely fleshed out universe after death.

The first scene takes place in, yup, an office. Newly dead Eleanor (Kristen Bell) asks Michael (Ted Danson), an afterlife “architect,” which religion was “right,” and he answers, “Hindus are a little bit right, Muslims, a little bit right, Jews, Christians, Buddhists...every religion guessed about five percent.” He then explains that from the moment a person is born, he or she is tracked by an almighty counter which assigns a negative or positive point value to their actions, and only those with a sufficiently high total at the time of their death get into The Good Place, where they get everything they want forever. Otherwise, they go to The Bad Place, where they are tortured for eternity.

I will point out that this is…not five percent of different religions. This is straightforward Christian Heaven and Hell, minus Jesus, plus math.

It makes sense that the guy behind The Office and Parks and Rec, both about the comedy of bureaucracy and mundanity, infused The Good Place with a lot of workplace-type stuff. There are a lot of rules and puns and different levels of jobs. We go to offices and see presentations and eventually end up in a classroom, but first, the twist: Eleanor was supposed to go to The Bad Place, but because she shares a name with a Good person, she lucked out.

Plenty of comedic potential here! Eleanor has to learn how to be good, and fake it in the meantime, and she’s paired with a soulmate she can barely stand, and she has to try not to get caught. And every time she does something “bad,” the “neighborhood” she’s in goes haywire. And it turns out there’s another impostor, a Florida bro who has to pretend to be a monk. FUNNY. I think they could have done a solid 60 episodes with these elements.

Alas, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

At the end of the first season we find out that, super twist, the whole thing has been set in The Bad Place, and what we thought was comedic conflict was actually a special kind of torture. But instead of dealing with this reality, Michael “resets” everyone’s memories and keeps torturing them over and over with versions of the same experiment. Oh, but also, now Michael is caught in a lie, because his afterlife boss thinks he never had to do the reset. And every time he does, the all-knowing Janet becomes more powerful and thoughtful, which can also be triggered by pressing a button on the beach.

If this sounds like complicated season ten shenanigans, yeah. The premise got real messy, real quick. They do The Trolley Problem a dozen times and the show keeps its Aesop’s Fable-y quality to, in my opinion, diminishing returns. It’s hard to infuse the afterlife with “stakes,” but making the world more convoluted just fills every episode with exposition instead of discovery.

My main gripe with the show, for the first three seasons at least, was that they often made it complicated for no reason other than to be cute. Time is measured in “Jeremy Bearimy”s and it’s just hard to watch adults say “Bearimy” so many times with a straight face. The portal between realms is guarded by a doorman who loves frogs. The “awesomesauce” brand of comedy that should have gone out with the second Obama administration.

Eventually, we realize that the world is too complicated, and life is too short, for anyone to get it “right” the first time. That’s why it’s been centuries since anyone got into The Good Place. After a bit of trial and error, the characters come up with a fix: let people live their lives over as many times as they need to get it right and earn their way into The Good Place. Taken lightly, this is Groundhog Day. Taken seriously, this show posits that a blonde from Arizona invented reincarnation, a central tenet of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.

Another thing that happens in the series is that Michael, who hasn’t been able to get on board with ethics lessons (the amount of times they say “ethics” on this show drives me ba-na-nas) confronts mortality. If you live forever, nothing matters, including how you treat other people. But humans have to be good, and also death gives life meaning. Michael has a midlife crisis and then learns a lesson. It’s pat, but it works. We also learn that there is “death” after death — Michael can be “retired,” which means blinked out of existence, so there’s stakes there, sorta, though this possibility is not dwelt upon much.

In the final season, the characters get to the real Good Place, there they can do whatever you want and talk to all the other Good people who’ve ever died and generally chill eating ice cream for eternity. The show only lasted four seasons, and the fact that it was ending had been announced before the final season started, so I foolishly held out hope that maybe this was the resolution. They get to the Good Place and…party forev! Since the show was wrapping up, it didn’t actually need to solve the problem of “Heaven’s boring,” but also, I hoped that the very capable minds behind the series might be creative enough to crack it.

LOL NOPE. In the final episode, Michael becomes a human. Some of the other characters decide to chill in the beyond doing tasks, but they also…yeah, they create The Door for spirits who have grown weary of a frictionless existence and want to just stop Being. They say they don’t know what happens when you go through the door, but it’s peaceful and permanent.

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Death. They invent death.

It’s optional, which I guess distinguishes it from regular death, but it is still death. Nobody could figure out, I guess, how to resolve a story that takes place at the absolute end of the line, so they just created another, further end.

Am I a bitch for thinking this is a cop-out? The series was, I thought, supposed to answer the question “what happens after you die?” and it gave us four seasons of an answer, then at the last minute said, “well, there’s a death after death, and what happens after that…we don’t know! Big mystery. Unknowable.”

Make something up! It’s your show!

The series establishes that death gives life meaning. So life without death is meaningless. To remedy…add death? We knew that already! Not exactly satisfying.

Neither was, according to reviews (I didn’t watch it) Amazon’s Forever, another recent series set in the afterlife. It was co-created by two former Parks and Rec writers, one of whom also wrote on The Good Place. These guys keep trying to crack the code and can’t and I’m just thinking maybe before they commit a buncha time and money to these projects, come up with something? IDK.

Ultimately, The Good Place was never about life, or death; it was a little bit about ethics and mostly about delivering philosophy lessons, which Schur all but confirmed when he gave the series a coda by writing a book of philosophy Cliffsnotes.

For my money, the series was at its best when it explored the Just OK Place of Mindy St. Claire (Maribeth Monroe, who should be a bigger deal). It was unpretentious, existentially silly, and Mindy was a coked-out horndog with a computer-angel for a boyfriend. At Mindy’s, the show could Llean into the boring. Embrace the banal. It doesn’t have to be so complicated.

Because the best depiction of the afterlife is in the straightforward, poignant but unsentimental Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town, where the dead watch the living. It’s simple to the point of obviousness, but that’s the trick with true originality: suddenly, it seems that this thing has been there all along, you can’t imagine a world without it. And done so spartanly. No need for time in funny shapes or Complicated Punny Rules. Emily feels…we see…the Stage Manager talks…we understand. A worked-out and thoughtful consideration of what life on Earth might look like to beings in the realm beyond. That’s how it should be done, if you’re going to do it.

I mean, it’s just like, the most famous American play of all time!!!!!!!! WHAT IS SO HARD ABOUT THAT????

Alive for now,

Lizzie