Exploring the Afterlife in Fantasy: Therapy Sessions for Your Soul tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Afterlife fantasies from Dante’s
Divine Comedy to Pixar’s
Soul have always been a unique way to look at society. In this short series, I’ll be looking at the film tradition of afterlife fantasies, and discussing the recurring themes and imagery across a century of cinema.
Last time I set sail with
Outward Bound and
Between Two Worlds, two films that followed a group of souls on a journey between life and death. Today I’m wrestling with four interrelated films, three starring a personification of Death, and one starring…the Devil!
Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Angel on My Shoulder, Heaven Can Wait, and
Afterlife fantasies have always been a unique way to look at society. Since death is a fairly impenetrable wall, it gives us an opportunity to imagine all kinds of stuff on the other side. Visions of heavens and hells can be used as carrots and sticks to critique people while they’re still alive, hence Dante’s
Divine Comedy, Faust’s terrifying trapdoor, and Jacob Marley’s chains.
When I watched Pixar’s
Soul, I was reminded of a couple of afterlife fantasies most immediately,
Defending Your Life and
A Matter of Life and Death. This got me thinking: is there a tradition to afterlife fantasies? Are there recurring themes or imagery? (tl;dr: YES, YES, and YES. That third “YES” is the surprising one, as I’ll discuss.) Wouldn’t it be fun to rewatch all these movies, and write about them? (tl;dr: SOMETIMES. I hope it’s fun to read?) And thus this miniseries was born, as I went back about a century and worked my way up through twelve (12) movies and one (1) music
Dear Care and Feeding,
My siblings one sister and two brothers, with nine kids between us and I have a problem. Our mom, who is in her early 60s, has recently become a crazed conspiracy theorist, spouting the whole QAnon/Trump/Bill Gates BS that’s been going around (with even weirder stuff that I’m pretty sure she makes up). She’s seen a doctor who said she isn’t insane and doesn’t have dementia, so there’s nothing we can do except try to ignore it. But here’s the thing: despite my siblings and me having a wide range of political views, none of us wants our kids hearing this stuff. We love our mom and she’s a wonderful grandma, but this has gotten out of control. She won’t stop talking about it. It’s impossible to change the subject, and somehow she finds ways to bring it up during every conversation. If someone’s talking about getting a new computer, she responds, “Oh, well, I hope it wasn’t a MICROSOFT because lizard people and mole children and blah, bla
President Biden has repeatedly called on Congress to pass an ambitious policing overhaul, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, by the anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death.