Death at the Movies: Hollywood's Guide to the Hereafter
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Death at the Movies: Hollywood's Guide to the Hereafter
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835609166 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2013 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Tom Davis Genelli cut his media teeth as third base cameraman for the Philadelphia Phillies before ascending to New York to become an independent film producer/director and an instructor in film production at New York's New School for Social Research. Returning to San Francisco for a Ph.D. in Psychology, he met Lyn, married and settled into a twenty-six year career as a therapist and Clinical Director for Conard House, Inc., a large, progressive mental health agency. He now writes a little, cooks and grows cacti. The Genellis share a profound conviction that the purpose of life is self-realization for the benefit of all. In the course of their respective careers, they began writing and publishing articles dealing with the cross-fertilization of film, psychology and spirituality as a way of expressing their joint conviction. Their articles have appeared in journals of psychology and popular culture, including Yoga Journal and Vogue.
Read an Excerpt
Death at the Movies
Hollywood's Guide to the Hereafter
By Lyn Genelli, Tom Davis Genelli
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2013 Lyn and Tom Davis GenelliAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-0916-6
CHAPTER 1
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
Fantasy and Beyond
Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing, and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception.
—Erwin Schrödinger
In his 1978 article "The Film Blanc: Suggestions for a Variety of Fantasy," Peter L. Valenti singled out for exposition a selection of motion pictures containing uniquely specific phenomena found in the popular genre of motion pictures called fantasy films. Playing off the broad popularity of the film-noir genre of the 1940s and '50s, he called his selection "film blanc," suggesting as a specific genre fantasy scenarios embodying the following characteristics: 1. a mortal's death or lapse into dream; 2. subsequent acquaintance with a kindly representative of the world beyond, most commonly known as heaven; 3. a budding love affair; 4. ultimate transcendence of mortality to escape the spiritual world and return to the mortal world.
Valenti's article acknowledges Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film for its theoretical treatment of fantasy, noting that the American fantasy film grew in popularity during the 1930s, peaked during the early 1940s, and declined in the late 1940s. Valenti points out that different sorts of fantasy combined with angels, pacts with devils, mysterious reincarnations, and beckoning spirits, and that during this general period American film seems to have been entranced by the idea of negotiating between heaven and earth, moving from the mortal plane to the spiritual.
In defining his selection of films Valenti was, at the very least, describing a subgenre of the American fantasy film, somewhat confined by his four characteristics and restricted time frame. He published his article just two years before the release of Resurrection (1980), a film that resuscitated the life of film blanc and reflected the spiritual/ consciousness/growth/drug movements of America's 1960s and '70s, opening the screen to a body of film blanctype movies that are the subject of this book. Expanding upon Valenti's four characteristics, we have chosen the term transit as the genre identifier, the better to acknowledge the wealth of Eastern spiritual wisdom, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, that added to our Western culture's understanding of and attitude toward death and the beyond.
The subjects of death, the undead, and the beyond have long been popular staples of cinematic entertainment. The fantasy/horror films Der Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Nosferatu (1922) were silent classics. With the advent of the talkies, coinciding with the Great Depression, came those megahits of horror, Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and their progeny, a flood of films dealing with human-made monsters, mummies, ghouls, zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other physical entities that cannot or will not complete the natural process of dying and/or are kept alive through artificial, magical, divine, or diabolic means. Human consciousness is portrayed as a state of helpless identification with some form of corporeal matter, asleep to any purpose higher than basic survival. Believing that when the body dies annihilation of the self occurs, this consciousness develops a greed for material substance, for flesh and blood. Sensual gratifications, whether in the form of eating human flesh and blood or absorbing another's vital energy, become the only things that produce even momentary feelings of life. This dehumanized identification with the body produces as its ultimate expression a form of negative sex—not to reproduce but to perpetuate itself. Vampires are the archetypal figures of negative sex, draining the vital energy from their victims and promising them eternal life, but only as material beings, possessing neither souls nor wills of their own, unable to exist in the light and all it symbolizes.
In The Wolf Man (1941), Lon Chaney, Jr., after receiving a hex from a gypsy/witch/shaman (played by the ever-marvelous Maria Ouspenskaya), suffers the bite of a lycanthrope, or werewolf, a human capable of assuming the form of a wolf. True to legend, at the next full moon, Chaney transforms into a werewolf and uses his animal body, not to create another human, but, out of some mad compulsion, to create from an existing human a lunatic replica of himself. In White Zombie (1932) and Val Lewton's classic I Walked with a Zombie (1943), we see again consciousness trapped in devitalized bodies, without will, controlled by external forces and compelled to take life in order to maintain its own substance. That master of the macabre Boris Karloff, as the Egyptian prince Im-Ho-Tep, is buried alive for committing sacrilege in The Mummy (1932). Accidentally brought to life when an unwitting member of an expedition reads aloud the Scroll of Thoth found with his wrapped remains, Im-Ho-Tep kills anyone standing in his path to finding his reincarnated princess and perpetuating their line.
Of interest here is the correlation between high periods of vampire, zombie, and other undead entities in both movies and television and the socioeconomic conditions accompanying their popularity. As one film commentator observed, the two major events of the year 1929 radically affecting America were the Wall Street crash and the arrival of the talking motion picture. Throughout the 1930s gangster and horror movies dominated the screen—unscrupulous robbers and thieving bloodsuckers. Vampires and zombies provided perfect metaphors, covering as they do Wall Street capitalists and their seemingly mindless victims. The best of today's versions of this dynamic, wrapped up in the cloak of the 1-percent-versus-99-percent scenario, are to be found on television, most pointedly with HBO's True Blood and AMC's The Walking Dead. Not that it can't be found in motion pictures—George Romero reset the bar for the genre in 1968 with his Night of the Living Dead, shattering the conventions of horror and metaphorically paving the way for our current national 1 percent-99 percent dialectic.
Angelic, diabolic, and other personified messenger entities such as Death, Time, or Christmas Past traverse multiple planes of existence and interpenetrating worlds for the sake of some grand or horrible design. Often this fantasy variation projects our inevitable confrontation with death in the most conventional of circumstances. Death Takes a Holiday (1934), Green Pastures (1937), and On Borrowed Time (1939) personify death as a humanlike character, an entity we may attempt to reason with, turn toward our point of view, or even outwit. Death is seen as just another consciousness much like our own, and as such is demystified into something more familiar, less threatening. An angel in the form of Jack Benny visits Earth in order to utilize his weapon of mass destruction, Gabriel's trumpet, in The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945); another, in the form of Cary Grant, comes to restore Bishop David Niven's faith in The Bishop's Wife (1947). And then there is Clarence, angel second class, from It's a Wonderful Life (1946), possibly filmdom's best-known and most beloved angelic visitor. Playing from the dark side, we have Walter Huston's perfidious Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Claude Rains's delightfully malicious Nick, otherwise known as Mephistopheles, in Angel on My Shoulder (1946).
Ghosts, another popular variation of the fantasy genre, are spiritual entities that, because of a curse or some unfinished business, are condemned to or choose to maintain their existence on the earthly plane in order to seek redemption or salvation in the resolution of some problematic condition or situation. Trapped in the same existential setting until they awaken to what must be done to break a seemingly perpetual pattern, they cannot complete the process of dying and move on to rebirth in a different situation. Consciousness, instead of being attached to the body, is here attached to the feelings and ideas by which it, when in a physical body, had identified itself as a personality; or it is attached to the people and place it was most comfortable with or to the rectification of some evil deed. Classic examples are a family patriarch's return from the dead to rectify deeds that could cause his daughter suffering in The Return of Peter Grimm (1935); Cary Grant and Constance Bennett's unfinished need to help a friend in Topper (1937); Veronica Lake's dominating attachment to gaining revenge for perceived wrongs in I Married a Witch (1942); Charles Laughton's undying shame about acts of cowardice in The Canterville Ghost (1944); a woman's need to reveal vital family secrets to descendants so she can peacefully move on in The Uninvited (1944); a dead wife's mischievous desire to hang around to interfere with her living husband's new married life in Blithe Spirit (1945); Rex Harrison's realization that even if dead he can provide guidance to another in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947); and Jennifer Jones's desire to fulfill her need to be loved in Portrait of Jennie (1948).
Ghosts loved to populate the always-welcome subgenre of haunted-house movies. Same situation, a ghosts or ghosts trapped and unable to move on, but now comfortably ensconced in a rundown, dark, and creaky residence. James Whale, director of Frankenstein (1931), set the standard for the sound- picture archetype of the haunted-house movie with The Old Dark House (1932). With the sterling cast of Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, and Ernest Thesiger, Whale launched a wave of movies utilizing the haunted-house theme, sometimes for thrills and chills, but often for laughs, like the enormously popular Bob Hope-Paulette Goddard vehicle The Cat and the Canary (1939). The film was remade, again with Hope and Goddard, as The Ghost Breakers (1940), and yet again as Scared Stiff (1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the helm (and there were literally dozens of haunted-house movies in between each of the above). By the 1980s property values on haunted houses had risen to such heights that we were treated to Ghost Busters (1984), the first multimillion-dollar scare comedy about removing ghosts from potentially high-valued properties in a major American city.
Judging by the vast, ongoing proliferation of films about demons and demonic possession, this category might accurately be described as the most fruitful of the various fantasy genres, showing consciousness fascinated by the demonic projections of its own repressed sexual and aggressive feelings. Something in the ostensibly pragmatic American character seems more than fascinated, perhaps obsessed, by the possibilities inherent in being possessed or dominated by such forces— perhaps a form of denial of responsibility for exercising our darker desires and fantasies. Here human consciousness can lose faith and abandon or deny its spiritual will. Feeling controlled by forces outside itself, it uses those feelings of possession or domination as an excuse to act out projections that are too cruel, too lustful, too hopeless, or too heinous for the mind to accept as its own. The early classics here are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim (1943). Progeny of this category, such as The Devil's Advocate (1997), seem to dominate the screen today, as though malevolent forces external to ourselves have proliferated to keep pace with ever- growing levels of narcissistic greed and neurotic anxiety.
Rounding out this brief review of the early fantasy/undead genre, we offer the category of those most topically appealing, emotionally dynamic, and humanly relevant movies that address the deepest mystery conceivable, the universal and inevitable journey of human consciousness from one state of existence to the next—the beyond. In the following chapters we will use material grounded in both Western and Eastern religious and philosophical/spiritual teachings to examine some of the motion pictures, from Outward Bound (1930) to Hereafter (2010), that address issues of life and death common to all human beings. We find these films, beyond conveying ideas rooted in the deepest perennial wisdom of our planet's various cultures and beyond being sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and often uplifting, to be simultaneously enlightening and just plain entertaining.
CHAPTER 2FILM BLANC OR TRANSIT
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
—Isaac Asimov
Hollywood's earliest and most charming and curious explorations into the "beyond" were those films dealing with that twilight zone of time and space in which the human spirit, just departed from its body, seeks its place in some cosmically ordained scenario of existence. Such scenarios, showing contemporary humans "successfully negotiating a return to the real mortal world after a trip to the twilight region between life in the physical world and either death or an altered state of existence in another, spiritual world," were described in Peter L. Valenti's seminal 1978 essay, "The Film Blanc: Suggestions for a Variety of Fantasy, 1940–45."
Just as the better-known genre film noir depicts the dark, cynical underside of human motivation, oriented toward death, film blanc portrays the upside of human nature, our profound attraction to the spiritually transcendent, to the luminous. Among the films Valenti cites are Beyond Tomorrow (1940), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Between Two Worlds (1944), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946)—seen in America as Stairway to Heaven. For Valenti, the importance of these films is historical. They represented the public's (and therefore Hollywood's) need to accept the war-caused deaths of so many loved ones and the desire to be assured that some essential aspect of the person could survive physical death. He points out that these films, while heavily moralistic and sentimental, were mainly of humanitarian value, helping to pacify a public grief. However, humankind's deeper concern about what happens after death is timeless and universal, and film blanc has continued to exist outside the World War II time frame. Every culture posits a myth of transition from death to rebirth on either a higher (heavenly) or a lower (hellish) plane. Since Hollywood movies inevitably reflect humanity's concerns, one can expand upon Valenti's thesis to find a more contemporary and universal significance for the film blanc.
Of the above-mentioned films, Between Two Worlds is most literally about journeying in that twilight region between life, death, and beyond, a condition of passage or state of mind that Tibetan Buddhism refers to as the bardo and that we refer to as transit, as in "transition" or "transitory." A random gathering of people, waiting to board a ship from London to America is hit by a German bombing raid and subsequently experiences a journey to another world. At first, the passengers of the mist-shrouded vessel do not realize they have died. Trying to manipulate reality as they always have, they gradually begin to comprehend their actual situation, despite their various attempts to deny, forestall, or avoid their destiny. Eventually each of them is seen by a kind of judge (Sidney Greenstreet), who assigns to each the particular existence that affords true justice and the opportunity to redeem his or her past mistakes.
The charmingly sentimental comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan portrays a crucial transit-related theme: that an individual has a particular destiny to be fulfilled in a given life, and until that is fulfilled the individual consciousness cannot complete its natural cycle of life-death-transit-rebirth and move on with its development. A prizefighter (Robert Montgomery) crashes his private plane and is taken to heaven, where it becomes clear that a cosmic error has occurred; he was destined to survive, win the championship, and live another forty years. Through an intercession of the heavenly bureaucrat Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), the prizefighter arranges a return to his body, but finds that it has been cremated; he is offered instead the body of a recently murdered millionaire. Following a traditional Buddhist precept, "Work with what you have," he trains his new self to win the championship. His all-too-human self also proceeds to fall deeply in love. After winning the championship that was destined to be his, the prizefighter is informed by Mr. Jordan that he will now totally fuse with his new identity and remember nothing of the recent celestial error and its subsequent rectification. He is panic stricken that he will no longer recognize the woman he loves (Evelyn Keyes). Minutes later, his consciousness erases of all that has just passed, the lovers meet, and their mutual recognition is achieved instantly through their eyes—the windows of the soul. The film plays lightly and charmingly on the idea that part of what happens in transit is the completion of the previous life's unfinished business. The departed is helped to go on to rebirth and the recognition of the soul's, or self's, true nature, which continues independently, body after body. Its most-reassuring message is that everyone's destiny must be fulfilled and that the cosmic game is fair and trustworthy, even when life seems not to be. At its culminating moment, the film asserts that we are immortal beings passing through different bodies, so that we may eventually arrive full circle, look into each other's eyes, and recognize our eternally journeying selves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Death at the Movies by Lyn Genelli, Tom Davis Genelli. Copyright © 2013 Lyn and Tom Davis Genelli. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 1
1 Between Two Worlds - Fantasy and Beyond 5
2 Film Blanc or Transit 12
3 The Light and Dark Sides of Our Situation: It's a Wonderful Life and Dead of Night 20
4 A More Informed Vision? Resurrection 28
5 The Popcorn Bardo-Tibet Meets Suburbia: Poltergeist 37
6 The Bardo of Dying: Jacobs's Ladder 45
7 Loves Labor Found: Ghost 52
8 The Bardo of Grief: Truly, Madly, Deeply 62
9 The Corporate Bardo: Defending Your Life 71
10 Recurrence, Salvation, and the Bodhisattva Way: Groundhog Day 81
11 Guardian Angels at Work: Heart and Souls 95
12 Sympathy for the Devil: Interview with the Vampire 101
13 De Profundis: The Sixth Sense 109
14 Short Takes: Purgatory, The Others, Passengers, and a Bit of Empty Luminosity 119
15 The Bardo of Existence: Birth 130
16 Sentimental Journey on a Spiritual Path: Hereafter 144
17 Our Next-to-All-Time Favorite: Casablanca 152
18 Our All-Time Favorite: The Wizard of Oz 161
19 Ending Up at Suchness 168
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Filmography 197
Index 201
About the Authors 215