A week ago I saw a screening of the new movie, Eternity, which was a decent enough romantic comedy set in the afterlife.¹ I’m not going to write a review of the film itself, but instead there were two aspects of the afterlife as presented in the film that really captured my attention:
First, the idea that one spent eternity at the age that one was happiest. I think for me, this would end up being the time of my early twenties. I was fresh out of college, living on my own in the college town where I’d gone to school, with a new social circle of mostly people I’d met through church (I was also a new Catholic at the time). I was still very much Figuring Things Out at that point in my life, often frustrated by my lack of a love life (I think this happy period actually would end before the time when I had my tragic love affair of my twenties, which was nice while it lasted but left me rather shattered emotionally in its aftermath). I often feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to recapture that feeling of living at that stage of my life.
The second was that you got to spend how you spent eternity, but you only chose once and that was where you spent, well, eternity. The waiting area had the feel of a grand bazaar with different eternal afterlives on offer: beachworld, Catholicworld, smokingworld (“you’re already dead—the cigarettes can’t kill you twice”), etc.
My world was not depicted on the screen at all. I think what I would want more than anything else would be a world where I could devote myself to art, both creating and consuming. To be able to write without blocking, make music without fear, draw, paint sculpt. This, to me, would be heaven, literally.
- I saw it as part of the Classified Cinema series at my local theater so I didn’t know anything about the movie (including the title or genre) when I saw it, so a protagonist’s death and subsequent awakening in the afterlife came as a surprise.
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