When did angels become such pricks?
Though I would not have predicted it a month ago, some friends and I went to see the movie Constantine last weekend. It was the most recent example of something that has been going on around me for about a decade; everyone I knew was vaguely disdainful of the trailer, just a little too good for Neo Goes to Hell, and everyone had their tickets in hand the day before it came out. No one could muster a kind word for it even as they stood in line to get inside. We have problems of the brain, possibly caused by something in the soda.
So, in a year when I have seen exactly one of the Best Picture nominees, I checked out a movie in which Keanu Reeves fistfights a demon made entirely of angry bees. I spent the money, and it’s gone, and I’m not sorry. It was in fact a somewhat thought-provoking movie in its way, in the way that those Magic Eye 3-D images were in fact pictures of birds and sailboats. All I had to do was lose my focus a little bit.
We make a lot of movies about heaven and hell, I thought, for people who spend more time at Wal-Mart than we do at church. Well, a lot of movies about hell, anyway; for some reason, we have a real lack of interest in heaven in our stories. Maybe it’s because we don’t really see a place of perfect love and happiness, where no one wants for anything and time has no meaning, as the setting for a lot of plot-heavy drama. Not a lot of snappy patter in that dialogue, I imagine. Not a whole lot of comical misunderstandings in heaven. (“Cherubim? I thought you said seraphim! HA ha ha ha ha!”) And the sexual tension is for shit.
When characters go to the heaven of cliché, they usually see dead uncle Charlie playing chess with Sun Tzu, or poker with Lincoln and Janis Joplin. Over in the corner, Socrates is debating philosophy with Ben Franklin. I guess it’s a nice thought, but they never address the question I have every time I see this scene trotted out: if both people are playing chess in heaven, who loses the game? If Ben and Socrates have rejoined the all-knowing universal consciousness and already know how history ends, what do they really have left to talk about?
Maybe heaven just makes bad fiction. Or maybe we have a hard-on for hell. Constantine “walks in both worlds” and can see the supernatural alongside the natural, but all he ever really sees is people’s faces melting off. The guy sitting next to him on the bus never has wings. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was the same way; demons by the thousands were ravenously gobbling up the earth from every square inch of the ground below us, but for seven years God never had anything to say about that. He never does; He leaves it up to Keanu and his trenchcoat to beat back the unholy legions all by himself. “The things we’re scared of fascinate us,” even if it’s true, is a pat answer that doesn’t cut it with me anymore. I think we as a people believe that everything good has been completely swallowed up, and we’re what’s left. I think the things we find interesting and enjoyable to look at (sex, violence, Tom Hanks) are so often the same things printed on the standard one-way ticket downstairs that even people who say they don’t believe in it usually half-seriously think they’re going there. Even on an unconscious level, that’s a lot to deal with.
At best, movie hell is like a traffic ticket you can fight; you ran the light, but you show up in court with a big manila folder ready to duke it out, and if the arresting saint doesn’t show up you just might skate. The rest of the time, the movies make me wonder if we’ve given up altogether on the idea of living good enough lives; we’ve resigned ourselves to perdition and are now settling for convincing ourselves it won’t be that bad. Sure, there’s the eternal fire, suffering, and blood-drowning, but they have cars down there. It looks a little like California, see? Even if you don’t stop masturbating and go to confession before the bus hits you, you can still have the satisfaction of kicking your demons’ teeth in when you get down there. That’s what happened to Keanu, and he’s basically a good guy. Hell: whaddya gonna do, eh?
We do leave room for angels, but we don’t buy into them. The idea of a being who just loves God and loves you and knows everything is going to work out gets on our last f—ing nerve. The only reason the angel is in the story is to fall. Inevitably, movie angels are complete pricks, and the more time they spend in the movie the crazier it drives them being around people. No one seems to have told movie angels they get to go home to heaven when they punch out. They’re like smug, molting ghosts. This, too, is a way of making us feel better: absolutely, I’m a sinner, but have you talked to the archangel Gabriel? Total a-hole.
Though they grapple with issues of life and death and what comes next, movies like Constantine are patently made by and for the very young, people who have never lost anyone or thought seriously about it. Characters don’t say, “Your sister who just died is in hell. I saw her there. Sorry about that,” when the screenwriter has been to a lot of funerals recently. As it happens, I have been to a lot of funerals recently. A lot for me, anyway. I’m not living in Fallujah or anything, but I have been to two this month with the promise of a third this week. Every few years (months?) I enter a period when every ringing phone holds news of another serious illness, another bad spill, another trip to the mortuary. My tires seem to have gotten stuck in the mud while driving through one of those periods. Keanu and his trenchcoat haven’t shown up to stomp on the Reaper yet.
My fiancée’s aunt passed away on Super Bowl Sunday when her flu became pneumonia and her pneumonia became septic. A week earlier, she was a healthy, active woman in her mid-fifties with a bit of a cold. In a family where a lot of people still look at me like I’m wearing a shark skin suit and I’ve come to audit them, she was unfailingly kind and inclusive and outgoing. She helped convince me I was part of the family. We were beside her bed singing “Amazing Grace” when they turned off her ventilator; because her casket was closed, that is the way I will be forever forced to remember her. I now read about the Terri Schiavo case with the kind of added understanding I would gladly give back. Everyone in the family walked around like the recipients of a hard gut-punch for a while. The day after the funeral, her husband went to the doctor and found out he had pneumonia.
After 87 years on the planet, my friend Al also died last week. His daughter is my godmother; when she moved away many years ago, my mom became Al’s surrogate daughter, the closest member of the family who didn’t officially have to put up with his crap. Since he lived nearby, I would see him often, and Mom would swing by to say hi whenever she was running his errands with him or checking in on him. In the last year or two, I started to get a lot more of those visits from Mom. I saw Al more often too, but only because he was spending a lot more time in the hospital at the end of my block. Al was always a bombastic, exuberant, larger-than-life Irish stereotype (complicated somewhat by the fact that he was German) who was always a mover and shaker on the go. For years he had been a big muckity-muck in the police department, always chairing a fundraiser or a golf tournament or a banquet where he knew everyone in attendance, and his mind refused to accept his body’s increasing limitations. He didn’t care that he wasn’t supposed to go out anymore and eat all that terrible food; he wasn’t going to let his social life wither just because his legs didn’t work like they used to. The result was a great big man taking a lot of great big falls in his favorite restaurants and my tiny little mom incorporating her slapstick attempts to get him off the ground into the never-ending “I Love Lucy” episode that is her life. Even as he grew weaker, they laughed a lot as he crashed his scooter into yet another grocery display or tried to act like getting out of a car wasn’t as hard as it increasingly was.
Al raised enough money to buy the children’s hospital its first modern blood oxygenator. When his grandkids forgot his birthday, Al was known to mail them blank cards with self-addressed stamped envelopes and a post-it reading, “Please sign and return.” Al tried to convince his lawyer/granddaughter to write up an adoption contract entitling him to custody of my 59-year-old mother. Knowing how much my mother hates Hillary Clinton, Al bought her every book ever written about the Senator and inscribed it personally. And every single time someone asked him how he was doing, even as he sat in his hospital bed undergoing dialysis, Al’s response was invariably, “I can’t complain, and it wouldn’t help anything if I did.” If I ever have anything in common with anyone, I hope to have that attitude in common with Al.
Al was better informed and mentally sharper at 87 than I am now, which means he lived every second of his life but also means he fully experienced every second of his infirmity and death. I’m not sure whether I want that in common with him or not. Very few of us spend our last moments vital and vigorous, fighting off the bee demon.
Well, probably none of us will fight the actual bee demon. But you know what I’m saying.
The more I lose people like Al or our aunt, the more I am bound to take movies like Constantine way, way, way more seriously than anyone involved ever intended. Filmmakers aren’t trying to provoke this kind of thought; they use theology to drive the CGI because aliens are so last year. But the more I see of their heaven and hell, the less it looks like mine. I haven’t double-checked the catechism to see how well I score on my descriptions, but I can’t help thinking hell is actually pretty sparsely populated. I cannot get myself to believe that God treats life like one of those board games with the egg timers, that you screw up and die and suddenly it’s too late to say you’re sorry. (”God always loves you; God always forgives you… except… not now. Just when you’re alive. Now there’s burning.”) Surely when we die we are plugged into the universe, giving us a chance to see every horrible thing we ever did through the eyes of everyone we ever did it to and feel how it felt to them. Only the hardest sons of bitches on the planet will be confronted with something like that and say, “So?” Just about everybody, once they’re able to step away from life and get some ethereal perspective, will straighten up and fly right, and I just don’t buy that God would say, “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!” and throw a f—ing trapdoor switch in the floor. In a dimension of existence where time has no meaning, how can there be such a thing as “too late”?
I’m sure there’s a priest somewhere who would be more than happy to tell me. Maybe these are just my versions of the stories we all tell ourselves for comfort and reassurance. Some people think heaven is a place full of jealous angels. I tend to think of it as a place where I finally know everything and understand other people. Either way, we can all agree on one thing: Keanu Reeves isn’t getting in.