Heaven and Earth

Gerald L. Zelizer

Religious leaders regularly include the film industry on their most wanted list of twentieth century culprits that have corroded the sacred values of Western religion. Reverend Billy Graham, for example, has more than once expressed this opinion: "…it was apparent that America was making a deliberate turn toward the new, the modern, the materialistic, and the shocking. The music, the movies and the media of the day reveal the degree to which this change was taking place." The comments of the National Council of Bishops is a more balanced: "The media's dark side continues to obscure the value of their contributions," listing the internet, talk radio, video games, television and movies as among the conveyers which require greater self-scrunity.

To depict the entertainment industry as undermining religious values is sometimes justified. But not always. The conclusions of the sacred and the screen are frequently at odds. But entertainment and religion also approach similar subjects with a a shared methodology. The description of heaven by both is a good example.

The new film "What Dreams May Come" starring Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Jr. is the most recent illustration. As in religious traditions, the film's image of heaven is a grander canvas of the most sacred and pristine values of a particular culture here on earth. In this case, the canvas is literal, as Robin Williams, freshly dead, experiences heaven as a visual magnification of Monet's Water Lillies, with the coloration of Renoir. Western Art is to secular culture what sacred scripture is to religious communities, and within that artistic tradition, Monet and Renoir reside in the seventh heaven. The mode of projecting into heaven our dearest values is exactly what religious traditions have done in painting their depictions of this place.

In the Five Books of Moses heaven as a place for life after life is never specifically mentioned. This notable lacuna to those of us in contemporary faiths, was reasonable to the likes of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Aaron. The ancient Israelites did not regard reward and punishment as personal and individual but corporate. It was the destiny of the Israelites in being released from bondage from Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, receiving the Torah at Sinai, and dwelling in Zion which demonstrated God's providence, rather than the personal immortality of an individual. That is also why no prominence is given to the burial place of Moses, or his path after death.

New Age Religion today stresses reincarnation. A best selling book of this genre, Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss M.D., tells of the hypnotic regression of his patients into former lives, assuring the reader that his soul too will be born over and over again into new bodies. This view of heaven naturally flows from the preoccupation of moderns during life with the self. Earth reveals heaven.

Classical religions too developed this same connection between our lives before and after death. In Judaism's earth the most sacred task while living is to sit and study Talmudic interpretation of Biblical passages. In Judaism's heaven, then, the faithful will sit at the feet of great rabbis and continue this same holy dialogue. Similarly, because Jesus is central to Christianity, the believer will forever share the presence of Jesus in heaven. Islam is religion of hadith, laws which govern the specific and routine details of daily life including food and drink. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Koran's image of heaven includes gardens, rivers, dates and pomegranates, carpeted floors, and non-intoxicating white wine. Paradise consists of the most sacred earthly goals to the tenth power.

"What Dreams May Come" is not the first foray by Hollywood into the subject of heaven utilizing this shared methodology.

Stanley Kubricks classic "2001", produced in l968, ends with an astronaut leaving the solar system and finding himself in a spotless hotel room. Roger Ebert interprets this whimsical ending - the room was a laboratory in which humans would feel at home while a superior alien race would study him. In the turbulence of the l960's. heaven was understood as a place in which humans were coddled and their foibles upgraded by a master species which did not share this worlds confusion. The 1990 film "Ghost" with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, had the male protagonist dying in a violent robbery, but remaining behind in spirit to literally protect his beloved from the malevolent designs of a co-worker. That strong earthly love reaches beyond the grave has been a perrenial assurance of the after life, shared by both religion and cinema. The Song of Songs in the Bible earlier wrote "Love is as strong as death," and in "What Dreams May Come" Robin Williams, in an act of self-sacrifice, beats the odds by descending into hell and plucking his wife Annabelle Sciorra back into heaven.

A different cinematic understanding of heaven was transmitted by the 1991 film with Albert Brooks, "Defending Your Life." The notion that there is a courtroom trial and a verdict passed on the life of the newly dead person is a longstanding image of religion. This film though, understood the heavenly evaluation in an original manner. It was not good or bad which was the litmus test, but rather an individual's self acceptance of who he or she was. Meryl Streep, who Brooks meets and romances in heaven, helps him to achieve this self-acceptance and be elevated to heaven. In an era when self- therapy books like I'm Ok-You're OK assisted the living towards self-understanding, it was logical that these values would be magnified and aggrandized as the passport into heaven.

The God who loves each of us in life can love us after death too. Exactly how that love manifests itself depends on each religious and secular tradition.Will shared methodology prevail in the future of both cinema and religion? Perhaps our technological society will depict future heavens as a place of thought activated communication and computer company technical assistants who never keep you waiting on hold? Judging by the past, the future may conceptualize life after life in just that way.