The Table

Conversation Meeting Place, Date & Time: Sunday, 12/15/2024 @ 6:30 PM – Black Walnut Cafe, Coppell, TX.

So, how does it all end? In a previous post, Jenny followed her dreams and ended with a nightmare and Lt. Dan’s destiny went off the rails. In the end, both came to terms with themselves and reality. In the movie Jenny dies and we assume that Lt. Dan will someday too. What then?

What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife?Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? These questions have nagged at the core of humanity since the beginning.

Like the question of origins (“why is there something rather than nothing”), there are at least two possible answers to the question of “is there something after all of this?”

For those with a materialist worldview the answer is no. Since there is nothing but the material universe there simply isn’t anything beyond it as well as British philosopher Bertrand Russell famously quipped, “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” The end of life is the end of everything.

For everyone else, there may be some sort of heaven or hell awaiting. In the 1998 film, What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams plays Chris Nielson, a pediatrician who is killed in a car accident and begins his journey to the afterlife.

After lingering on earth in a ghostly fashion trying to comfort his grieving wife Annie, he eventually gives up and winds up in heaven.

The scene depicts heaven as an idyllic place that resembles one of his wife’s paintings. He is joined by his dog and his children who had died tragically years earlier and is greeted by Albert Lewis, his old friend and mentor (who we met briefly in a previous scene), who explains heaven to him.

In her grief, his wife Annie, however, has since committed suicide and winds up in hell. Despite warnings, he journeys to hell to try to save her and eventually finds her in a decrepit version of their home.

The rest of the story is about his decision to remain in hell with her and their eventual redemption and journal back to heaven where they are reunited with children.

This is what might be called the generically religious view of eternity. Good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. But God is never mentioned in the movie.

Although not eternal in the religious sense of the term, there are a sort of heaven and hell in secular visions of the future that fall along the lines of a divide between utopian bliss and dystopian misery. There are usually a privileged few escaping to a blissful utopia on another world or in space itself with the rest just fodder to dwell in what is left of an earthly dystopian ruin. Movies like Avatar, Oblivion and The Day After Tomorrow depict the struggle of those left behind.

In the 2013 movie, Elysium, Matt Damon plays Max Da Costa, a parolee who is accidently exposed to radiation at his job in a Los Angeles slum and is given five days to live.

His only hope is to travel to Elysium for life-saving treatment. Elysium is a utopian world aboard a space station circling the earth occupied by the elite few where such treatment appears to be as simple as a session on a tanning bed but which is restricted to citizens of that world.

As the story unfolds we watch as Max fights his way through to Elysium along with childhood friend Frey and her daughter who is suffering from leukemia. In the final scene, Max, who has the source software code for the Elysium world stored in his brain, sacrifices himself so Frey, her daughter, and the others who came with become full citizens of the utopian world.

There are some commonalities to the genetically religious and secular views of the future. In both movies, the future is depicted as being a reward or punishment for actions in the past or present. In other words, past and present actions have future consequences.

There is also community. Heaven and hell are not for loners. Both seem filled with others like us — however good or bad we might be.

Conversation Starters

• In popular culture, heaven and hell are often depicted in cartoonish terms — heaven filled with winged angels sitting on clouds playing harps; and hell filled with horned demons stoking eternal fires and jabbing the dammed with pitchforks. Did these images have any impact on your thinking? Did they seem real? Or, something to grow out of like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? What, is anything, has replaced these images? How does one make it through the pearly gates or the gates of hell?
• In the modern world, heaven and hell falls into either the utopian and dystopian view of what the future holds. How does one make it into the utopia? How does one avoid the dystopia? And which way are we headed?

References For Further Inquiry