BARDO FILMS CINEMA OF THE AFTERLIFE by JIMI BERNATH 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction “Carnival of Souls” : Familiar Nightmares …………………………………………………..………...43 Bardo Blockbusters : “American Beauty” & “The Sixth Sense” ……………….……...…..85 “Jacob’s Ladder” : Search for a Guide ……………………………………………………..………….102 “Enter the Void” : Escape Velocity …………………………………………………………..…………. 49 The Dharma of Lynch: “Mulholland Drive” & “Inland Empire” ……………….……….108 “Vera” : The Underworld ………………………………………………………………………..…...……….106 Escape from Hell : “Diamonds of the Night” …………………………………………….………. 26 “Le Quattro Volte” : Elemental Change ……………………………………………………..…………..7 “Beetlejuice” : Guide as Huckster …………………………………………………………….…………..78 “Defending Your Life” : Purgatory as Shtick …………………………………………….…………90 “Ink” : Remembering Who You Were …………………………………………………………….…….59 “The Bothersome Man” : Not Bad As Purgatories Go …………………………….………….64 “The Lovely Bones” : Avenging Angel …………………………………………………………….….55 Following Robin : “Being Human” & “What Dreams May Come” …………………...22 Following Downey : “Chances Are” & “Hearts and Souls” ………………………………..46 Death at an Early Age : “Donnie Darko” & “Wristcutters a Love Story” ………….94 “Samaritan Girl” : Saint or Sinner ……………………………………………………………………..126 “The Life Before Her Eyes” : Headline Bardo ……………………………………………….…….75 Dia de Muertos : “Macario” “The Book of Life” & “Coco” …………………………..……..9 “Waking Life” : All Our Guides …………………………………………………………………….……...68 Japanese Ghost Stories : “Pitfall” & “Kuroneko” ……………………….…………….………..29 Crossing the Big Ditch : “Between Two Worlds” ………………………………………………..34 “Stairway to Heaven” aka “A Matter of Life and Death” …………………..….………100 “After Life” : Memories to Go ……………………………………………………………………….…….83 “Holy Motors” : Ghost in the Machine ……………………………………………………………..121 “Samsara” : The World We Live In ……………………………………………………………..……….93 Bardo Thodol 101 : “Heart of a Dog” ……………………………………………………………..….61 Earning Hell : “The Devil in Miss Jones” ……………………………………………………..…….67 “Tibetan Book of the Dead” & Ishu Patel : The Straight Dharma ……………………..20 “Dead Man” : Manifest Destiny …………………………………………………………………………..17 “The Saragossa Manuscript” : The Never-ending Story ……………………………………36 “Angel Heart” : Walk on Gilded Splinters …………………………………………………………..82 Streaming Bardos : “The Good Place” “Russian Doll” & “Forever”……………….129 3 INTRODUCTION The first movie I ever saw about the afterlife, or an afterlife was Between Two Worlds, in the late 1950s or early 1960s—on a local Houston television channel, either an afternoon matinee or the “late show,” after the nightly news. Local stations ran a lot of movies back then, especially of ‘40s and ‘50s vintage. I ate them up. In Between Two Worlds (1944), a ship has left London during the Blitz, bound for America and safety. But it soon becomes apparent that the small group of people on the luxury ship have indeed perished, and are bound...outward. (Between Two Worlds was a remake of Outward Bound, a 1930 Leslie Howard film.) As an adolescent searching for the unusual and challenging in art, I was trans- fixed, right through the heartfelt but not “corny” ending. I have always held it dear, in a shrine room reserved for movies of the otherworldly kind. I’d seen John Garfield before, but as a preteen had yet to grow into the standard beat adora- tion of the man—his mystique and the failings of tough, complex characters. He is the star of Be- tween Two Worlds but, as death would have it, an equal part of the ensemble—a mixed bag of char- acters being ferried across the Big Ditch on a ghostly ocean liner. On the journey, each must deal with the letting-go of their very selves, to death and its judgment. The viewer sees them as they were in life—their physical appearance, personalities, hopes and fears. Viewing as a kid, I saw these characters as people that were recognizable and who WERE NO MORE—the ultimate mystery. But death had been a plot device in almost every movie I’d ever seen that wasn’t a comedy. Most usually a Big Death at the end, of one of the principals—for moral rectitude, it was usually the villain, the force of darkness—while minor characters and extras may have been falling left and right all along. So many cinematic deaths, fictitious and biographical. (A bio-pic like I Want to Live! im- pressed with the added weight of recreated history). Sometimes one of the heroic figures died, in- spiring a kind of confused melancholy that demanded further reflection. I remember being particu- larly disturbed at fourteen by the death of Ira Hayes, as played by Tony Curtis in The Outsider. It seemed that deaths were just a part of the dramatic equation, of surrendering to the cine- matic world. Feeling the vicarious loss of a friend or loved one, or, more often, satisfaction at the death of a two-dimensional “bad guy” and then going about one’s daily life. I began to wonder, vaguely, what happened to this particular character, to their soul or spirit or lifeforce, now that the body had been rendered inoperable? With a haphazard, halfhearted Christian upbringing of the Sunday School variety, I arrived at a nebulous belief beyond Pearly Gates and Brimstone: there is something inside these bodies that animates us, and is probably imperishable. So what about all those movie deaths? Was that really “the end of Rico” in Little Caesar? And if not, what happened to that vivid villain in his own passage through the afterlife? The Devil with a pitchfork seemed unlikely. There were a few movies that felt otherworldly, ambiguous or surreal—perhaps the nightmare 4 of a sleeping person, but not the “big sleep”—films like The Wizard of Oz, Vanilla Sky, Time Bandits, Invaders From Mars, and The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, to name some notable “it was all a dream” films. In the Buddhist teachings, those two bardos—dreams and the afterlife—are closely related. David Lynch is a creator of films that depict both states. He has made two (or three) death bardo films, dealt with in this book, while others convey the nightmares of a specific character who will wake up soon, e.g. Blue Velvet If a movie ends with a character’s death, as Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Inland Empire do, that is a big clue that the preceding two or three hours have been about that Subject’s passage through their particular transitional state. As envisioned by Lynch, a wildly original writer-director whose creativity is rooted in Eastern religion and quantum physics, those three films have inspired this book as much as any others, exploring in surreal non- linear ways the mystery that we may all face at the end of our current gig. Some Dharma then, from a layperson: The word “bardo” comes from Tibetan Buddhist teachings dealing with the changes that we experience, both in this life and “the next.” The Tibetan Book of the Dead1 is the English title of an ancient text, Bardo Thodol, which means “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.” Composed in the 8th century by Padmasambhava and written down by a student, it was buried in the Gampo hills in central Tibet until discovered by a Tibetan terton, Karma Lingpa, in the 14th cen- tury. The Bardo Thodol describes six states of being: three that we experience in this life—waking life, meditation, and dreaming—and three that our consciousness traverses from the death of the body until either the next rebirth or the liberation of the soul. These three are the Bardo of Painful Death, followed by Luminosity, where liberation is possible, and finally the Bardo of Becoming, of re- incarnation. The after-death state is said to last 49 days, during which the soul is guided by divine beings, subjected to karma-cleansing radiations, and confronted by wrathful deities that are projections of the ego-mind being disintegrated. It is during these 49 days that the “liberation through hearing” is performed by a lama or other high practitioner. A daily text is read to the departed soul, near the corpse for as long as possible, and then to pictures and objects on a shrine. The goal is to guide the spirit through the “labyrinth,” to the ultimate goal that Buddhists call liberation, the Clear Light or Nirvana, and thus escape forever the wheel of birth, death, and rebirth. A documentary film which deals directly with this teaching and practice, called The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is discussed begin- ning on page 20. I have not been practicing Buddhism for many of my 73 years, but in the last 20 have been drawn to the end-life teachings of the Tibetans, as well as Western writers who have explored and translated the Bardo Thodol for the public. Foremost of these is E.J. Gold’s American Book of the 5 Dead (1975)2 which had a powerful effect: I recited Gold’s version of the daily readings for my moth- er and brother after their deaths. I am not a trained reader, and can only hope they were guided by my voice and loving intention, to liberation or at least an auspicious rebirth. Most cultures have their own conception of an afterlife, from the Norse heroes’ Valhalla to the Lakotas’ Happy Hunting Ground, from Christian visions of Heaven and Hell as varied as Dante, Bosch, Revelations, and Pearly Gates, to a materialist belief that consciousness ceases with brain activity, and the energy of the dead body is transmuted into other forms of life. The films in this book, com- ing from many cultures and highly creative minds, have a broad range of conceptualizations, of what the consciousness may experience after leaving the body and how “it” may interact with the world of the living. My aim is to analyze these visions in Buddhist and other cultural and philosophical contexts. My hope, as a cinephile, is to generate interest in these wildly diverse films, and provoke some con- sideration of their spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical themes. And I expect and welcome healthy doses of skepticism and downright dismissal when my interpretation of one of your favorites contradicts your own. Many of these movies inspire deeply-held belief and affection.