Three Unique Depictions of the Afterlife
Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks in "Defending Your Life"
Regardless of individual religious beliefs, the concept of some kind of existential state after death has been a fixture of human culture since before recorded history. The most common motif in this, if I may use the term, genre of human storytelling is some approach to justice. People want their lives to have meaning and maybe just as importantly, they want to exist in a universe that has some kind of central value, a moral core that keeps everything from being chaos and meaninglessness. In the 20th century, when atheism and agnosticism became a major fixture of new philosophical thought, the concept of the afterlife didn't so much disappear as transform into a powerful narrative device. Here are three unique imaginings of life after death from some of the greatest minds of the last century.
Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit
Of all the existentialists, the works of French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre are among the most enduring and affecting. One of his most famous products is the play No Exit, a dark work that can either be played straight for maximum angst or as a sort of absurdist comedy. The premise is that Hell resembles a spartan hotel with no fixtures other than a single door leading in and out of each room. The room in which the play takes place gradually fills up with three recently dead people who await an unknown torture while they needle one another with questions and accusations about their regret-filled lives. No Exit's most famous line, "Hell is other people", is a pithy reference to Sartre's own philosophy of individualism and personal responsibility. For Sartre, a declared atheist, the most hellish condition is to be crippled by the need for approval by others.
Vladimir Nabokov's The Eye
In the same vein as Sartre's Hell of human judgment, Russian author Vladimir Nabokov put the protagonist of his excellent novella The Eye (also known as Eavesdropper) through a purgatorial afterlife of plumbing other people's opinions through bits and pieces of conversation. Smurov, a depressed tutor who lives among other exiled Russian nobles in Germany, puts a bullet in his heart then spends an increasingly surreal stint in the afterlife floating around to the parlors and homes of those who knew him in search of a clear understanding of what kind of person he actually was. In the process he doesn't learn much about himself but ends up seeing all the equally absurd social anxieties of his neighbors. Left alone to contemplate the silliness of his wasted death, Smurov does little more than sulk and try to convince us that he's actually happy.
Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life
In 1991, comedian Albert Brooks wrote, directed and starred in an endearing, deceptively philosophical movie called Defending Your Life that puts the afterlife in the context of modern-day corporations, courtrooms and restaurants. Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a perpetually nervous, ineffectual man who dies in a car accident and finds himself in Judgment City, a cosmic stop-over between this world and the next where people have their lives put on trial. Those who are ruled to have lived courageous, carpe diem kinds of lives get to "move on" to an unexplained next step, while those who lived lives of fear and trepidation have to go back and try again. Defending Your Life, while by no means meant to suggest an actual metaphysical model, is an interesting reflection of its time. Comfortingly agnostic and primarily just without being strictly moralistic, the afterlife Brooks imagined for his movie keys into the modern drive for self-actualization. That all this philosophical content comes wrapped in a package of romantic comedy and glib pop culture references is just gravy.
