In the mythical multiverses in the movie multiplexes, Death is not the end. It’s merely a plot point.
After all, superheroes don’t die. They don’t even need a reboot with a different actor. They merely go back in time and inhabit a parallel universe where they can avoid their nemesis, rewrite history and avoid death.
As a writer, I can’t help feeling that taking death off the table is a major problem in story terms. Characters that can travel through time, alter reality and avoid death are so powerful, it’s hard to see where the jeopardy is coming from. Maybe I’m missing something. These movies all seem to be doing very well.
In fact, we’ve been telling these stories for centuries. The comic book superheroes have been going for decades, but they’re just reimaginings of stories as old as Homer, Gilgamesh and the Viking legends. In fact, they’re now all mixed together, with heroes, demigods and deities living, dying, rising and reliving in all kinds of interweaving ways. Even Westley, the hero of The Princess Bride, was only ‘mostly dead’, revived by Miracle Max.
The Long Tail of Stories
The stories we tell ourselves over and over have an effect. We are not just mythmakers, but mythbelievers. This proliferation of stories confirms our suspicions that death is not the end.
The Bible poetically explains these yearnings. “God has set eternity in our hearts,“ says the writer of Ecclesiastes. It’s probably because right at the beginning of the Bible, when the death sentence is meted out, it doesn’t arrive as expected. In Genesis 3, Eve and then Adam eat the fruit – and don’t die. At least not straight away. In fact, they live on for centuries.
Although Adam is told he will return to dust (3:19), the very next verse announces Eve as the Mother of all the living. The Bible reveals how that story plays out over the centuries, and how we can be in God’s presence, having been ejected from the Garden of Eden, until the New Jerusalem, the great garden city, appears.
People know that death is not the end. It really is in their hearts. Watch any episode of The Repair Shop, in which people say week after week that their ancestor is looking down on them, pleased that a significant object or artefact has been restored.
The Problem of Pain
What people have a harder time processing is the problem of pain. If death, which seems so final, is not the end, can’t we do something about pain?
This speaks into the current drift towards what is called ‘Assisted Dying’ which we discussed at the York General Synod. It revealed some alarming, albeit understandable, misconceptions which we will come to next week.
Do you want to live forever as a thumb drive?
In the meantime, how does a post-Christian society process the unreality of death? Is the human body just a series of data points that can be stored on a thumb drive?
There are all sorts of interesting conversations about how you live for ever, such as this one on the new Church Podmatics podcast.
What if your data can be uploaded into some kind of physical body? Science fiction is at its best when it takes a simple idea, embodies and pushes it to the limit. An episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror does that, making a form of transhumanism both banal and creepy. It’s nearly ten years old, and very prescient – and it’s probably still on 4oD. Here’s a trailer:
Funny Family Christian Car Listening
Ed and I are back with a new summer series of seven sizzling podcasts, and some fun facts about beavers and termites doing things VISIBLE FROM SPACE. Subscribe to the Faith in Kids 4 Kids Stream here, or The Faith in Kids stream which also has brilliant Faith in Parents podcasts.