“Is this hell?” a woman named Joan asks in the movie “Eternity.” Her question is reasonable: She is suffering from a terrible case of winner’s despair. After dying at a ripe old age, she has found herself in a brief clerical period that sits between death and everlasting vacation, the soul’s final and irrevocable destination. Here she must make a difficult decision. She can choose to spend forever with Luke, her handsome first husband, who died in the Korean War and has been waiting for her ever since. Or she can choose to spend it with Larry, her handsome second husband, with whom she shared a long, contented life. (In this afterlife, people revert to their happiest ages, which conveniently allows these members of the Silent Generation to be played by Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner and Miles Teller.) She could also choose to spend eternity alone, presumably, but won’t.
Far more hellish than Joan’s love triangle of hot dead men, though, is the consumerist fever dream in which she must navigate it. The dead awaken as they approach a train station called the Junction, where they immediately face a swarm of vendors who peddle eternities like home goods on QVC. There are afterlives upon afterlives to choose from. There are Beach World and Yacht World and Celebrity World; Marxist World has been decommissioned, but Wellness World is doing fine. There is a world that looks like Ireland in the 1840s (minus the potato famine and, I assume, the English); there is another world in which there are no men (already at capacity). In addition to the salespeople hawking these options, there are also Afterlife Coordinators, an administrative staff, service workers — you can imagine them seeing fit to unionize. The resemblance to life on Earth disappoints new arrivals, who had expected to transcend this sort of tedium.
That transcendence, they are assured, will be found in the “eternities,” which are engineered to provide boundless satisfaction. Not so: Beach World seems to be a single beach, overcrowded with umbrellas and children. Mountain World is cold all the time, and staving off loneliness involves joining “couple friends” for dull après-ski conversations. You’re left with a sinking feeling about all decisions, not just Joan’s — that the pressure to be certain about a choice can nullify whatever pleasure you might glean from it.
This kind of afterlife — one that’s not a cosmic surprise but a comic near match for the world we already live in — has natural appeal for filmmakers. It is, for one thing, much easier to film. It’s also reliably funny, even subversive: Life beyond death, this great and unimaginable unknown, turns out to be as boring as the most banal parts of modern life, full of ads and customer-service agents and compromise.
Albert Brooks did this with the 1991 movie “Defending Your Life,” which pictured the afterlife along similarly bureaucratic lines. His deceased protagonist, Daniel Miller, is shuttled into Judgment City via tram, passing billboards for a nightclub, a steakhouse and a bowling alley. He is lodged in a hotel that he learns is not the city’s best; there are, as in life, nicer options that he has no access to. He and all the other dead are free to spend their leisure time enjoying activities, gorging themselves at restaurants without worrying about their health or standing in line to see holographic glimpses of their past lives.
The afterlife is much like life, only stranger — a gag that can be repurposed again and again.
But this, too, is just a brief clerical period. Daniel’s life is being subjected to a four-day trial, complete with a prosecutor and an appointed defense counsel. If it is determined that he reached the supreme achievement of overcoming his fears, he will “move forward” from life into the unimaginable; if not, his soul will be sent back to try again. The premise calls on the dead not just to reflect on their past behavior but to reckon with its significance — it matters enough to change their supernatural course and permit genuine transcendence. Daniel is not expected to secure an eternal romantic partner, but he does happen to find one among his dead peers. This is as close to optimism as we might hope for in a movie about judgment.
Almost every period of filmmaking has its movies about the afterlife. Some critics think the genre standard is “A Matter of Life and Death,” a 1946 end-of-war drama that shows the scorched earth in color and a surrealist afterworld in black and white. In the decades since, countless stories have traveled from one side of the firmament to another for the sake of moral instruction, often using quasi-religious images of splendor: white robes, pearlescent gates, filtered light. By the 1970s and ’80s, a certain formula had been established for where such stories were headed. The leading man dies, much before his time, in some gruesome fashion that usually involves traffic (as in 1978’s “Heaven Can Wait” and 1989’s “Chances Are”) or heroic sacrifice (as in 1987’s “Made in Heaven”). He learns of his death among the creatures in heaven, and the heaven is one you might expect a child to draw. Characters emerge from beds of clouds; angels have nowhere else to be. An idealized heaven exists, but reaching it is not final: There are loopholes and provisions to ensure that no person is held under imperfect circumstances. The leading man is reincarnated, given new life to resolve his lingering emotional issues. After escaping the clutches of death, he is better and wiser, though not so evolved that he can avoid entering into new romantic conflicts. Memories of a previous life grow dim, but love tends to endure.
Other films prefer the grunge of the underworld — and they, too, like to echo the agonies of ordinary life, making them seem hellish and whimsical in equal measure. “Orpheus” in 1950, “Beetlejuice” in 1988, “The Corpse Bride” in 2005: Each presents death as leading to dark but not altogether unfamiliar places. “Beetlejuice” features a take-a-number waiting room for the departed, like a macabre D.M.V. or dentist’s office, and a brusque, cigarette-wielding case worker for struggling ghosts. In “The Corpse Bride,” no one has trouble finding a dive bar in the land of the dead. The afterlife is much like life, only stranger — a gag that can be repurposed again and again.
There comes a point in these films when the action takes a sharp moral turn, setting the audience up for a lesson in virtue. We hear that fear is a useless emotion, that life is short and precious, that the man who puts himself second is the true love. Each movie ends up being a parable of its time, capturing the moral of the moment and offering it to us as though it were a revelation. But when it comes to what an afterlife could be, how we imagine the place itself, we seem to have whittled down the possibilities. Characters are constantly arriving in the beyond expecting to be enchanted; instead, their earthly disenchantments are dragged along as eternal souvenirs.
In “Eternity,” there is no hell. Its worst-case scenario is “the void” — a state where consciousness remains but is suspended in pure nothingness. There is nothing more frightening, the movie suggests, than a soul estranged from the people and places it knows. But film has also given us a darkness that inspires far less terror. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” angels consult on the well-being of the living while embodied in distant galaxies. (For astronomers: Stephan’s Quintet.) These galaxies are so far from us that the picture is imprecise; we see shapes, but details are vague. And so the audience is trusted to settle into disbelief and imagine, for a few hours, something films sometimes don’t: an afterlife that is meaningful but resembles nothing of the world we’ve known.
Scout Brobst is a writer based in New York. She has previously written for the magazine about bad Southern accents in movies and Victoria’s Secret “Angels.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Screenshot from A24. Opening page: Warner Brothers/Everett Collection; Paramount/Everett Collection; Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images; The Print Collector/Getty Images; Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images; Philip Faraone/Getty Images.
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