Hollywood And Heaven: What Did Al Pacino See When He Almost Died?
(ANALYSIS) In Hollywood Heaven, good people get good things because love is all that matters. You know?
Bad people get something else, maybe.
Yes, mass-media “signals” on this topic rain down on mass-media consumers day after day, year after year. World without end. Amen.
Long ago, I had a chance to interview Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for the classic romantic drama “Ghost,” which was the definitive Hollywood Heaven epic of the late Baby Boomer (heading into Generation X) era in multiplexes.
The hero, Sam Wheat (biblical overtones there) is murdered before he has a chance to openly pronounces his love for his astonishing beautiful live-in girlfriend Molly Jensen. This unfinished business turns him into a ghost with work to do, before he can head into the heavenly white tunnel of light.
Rubin is a convert to Buddhism. When I asked him why, near the end of this film, demons arrive and yank the villain into hell — a tricky plot twist in a Buddhist worldview — he gave a simple answer. He said that he knew he was writing a movie for ticket-buyers in a predominately Christian culture. Thus, he needed good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell. That’s that.
The bottom line: Rubin knew his audience and that changed how he “preached” to them. How many pastors (and seminary professors) are willing to think through that process when considering how mass-media products shape the thinking of the churched and unchurched people in this culture?
Meanwhile, the “life after death” movies keep coming. Here is an Internet Movie Database list of 40 movies that, to varying degrees, fit into the Hollywood Heaven niche. There are many, many more. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is the latest — I think. Maybe another flick of this kind as dropped in the past week or so.
The key is that, in Hollywood Heaven, there are all kinds of things that can happen after a person dies.
What isn’t going to happen, however, is an encounter with Jesus Christ and discussions of salvation by grace.
However, notice that players in Hollywood know that the screen cannot simply “go black” and that is that (unless we’re talking about “The Sopranos”).
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.