Death, afterlife, and the eschatology of consciousness: themes in contemporary cinema

Abstract

Definitions of death and the experience of dying have signally changed in the last half century; a change resulting, in part, from the sequestration and medicalization of quotidian death. This article explores the consequences of this for cultural representations of death (and its transcendence) in contemporary film. A critical commentary on Mike Nichol's film Wit, Pedro Almodovar's Talk to her, and Vincent Ward's What dreams may come demonstrates how such films express the complex collision of long-standing philosophical and religious debates about human essence with utopic fantasies and dystopic fears about the nature of consciousness; fears and fantasies shaped by the medical reinvention of death. In becoming discursively “locatable” (through the concept of brain death), death has gained a novel symbolic anatomy that privileges the head, the face, and an imagining of the brain and its workings. Current screen representations of dying, death, and its transcendence evidence the preoccupation, culturally, with mechanisms by which individual identity may be preserved. Such texts conceptualize the nature of identity, and of human essence.

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