I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits.
—David Copperfield, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
Hereafter (2010) begins with a relentless and indifferent surge of destruction and death. A tsunami sweeps over the landscape of a tropical resort, and the near-death experience of a vacationing journalist (Cécile de France) provides the ostensible thematic context for the film. Her narrative parallels and eventually converges with those of a San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon) and a boy whose twin brother (Frankie McLaren and George McLaren) was killed when he was hit by a truck. The existence and characteristics of a life after death will prove of less importance, however, than the profound sense of abandonment that death necessarily brings to the living and the struggle to discover meaning in a world intrinsically mutable. Quite appropriately, images of the afterlife provide the least imaginative visual elements in the film. The “hereafter” of the title refers less to a realm beyond the phenomenal, a promised land that awaits the living after death, than to the life that lies ahead in this world and the responsibility of the living to fashion meaning and authenticity in the face of absence and abandonment.
One can easily imagine the wry grin that would form on the face of Clint Eastwood upon being told a volume of essays devoted to his “philosophy” was about to be published. Eastwood has cultivated a laconic persona characterized by plain speaking and an insistence upon his being a storyteller, not an abstract thinker. In discussing Hereafter, Eastwood has commented, “the story is everything, the story is the king.”1 One could argue that Hereafter is effective precisely because it avoids being philosophical, if one means by philosophical a process of abstract thought. I will argue, however, that telling the stories of individual characters who struggle emotionally to discover answers to difficult questions concerning the human condition does constitute a form of philosophical inquiry. Moreover, storytelling is itself a medium within the film to which one of the central characters turns when confronted by the problems of life. George, the San Francisco psychic, finds solace at moments of despair or confusion in listening to recordings of David Copperfield. Near the end of the film he makes a pilgrimage to Dickens’s residence in London and correctly identifies a painting entitled Dickens’ Dream in which the author is depicted sleeping with the figures of his imagination floating above him. Hereafter is Eastwood’s dream. I do not mean to associate the medium of film with the landscape of dream images, but rather to argue that, like Dickens, Eastwood is intimately bound to the characters of his imagination. And it is through their struggles in coming to terms with the conditions of life, especially its ephemeral and transitory nature, that he explores philosophical issues. We care about the lives of Eastwood’s characters not simply because we feel empathy for them or are curious about how their narratives will be resolved in the unfolding of the plot. We care about them because they have been forced to discover ways to live meaningful lives in a world that is not of their making. Facing his own personal loss, George listens to a recording of David Copperfield’s expression of despair. In a chapter appropriately entitled “Absence,” Dickens’s hero confesses, “From the accumulated sadness into which I fell, I had at length no hope of ever issuing . . . I felt its own weight now; and I drooped beneath it, and I said in my heart that it could never be lightened.”2 It is fitting that David Copperfield should have a significant presence in the film. Dickens’s novel is filled with moments of abandonment not only in this passage but throughout its narrative. Until the very end of the novel, David repeatedly finds himself leaving someone or someplace behind. His struggle to find a way forward in the face of loss mirrors the struggles of the central characters in Hereafter.
This understanding of philosophy as a process not of arriving at universal truths through logical analysis, but of discovering a way to live is described by Alexander Nehamas in The Art of Living: “But apart from philosophy as we most often conceive of it—as an effort to offer systematically connected answers to a set of independently given problems—another tradition, equally philosophical, is concerned with what I have called the art of living, the care of the self, or self-fashioning.”3 Nehamas is in part trying to place so-called continental philosophy within a humanist tradition. He therefore begins his book with Socrates and concludes with Foucault. But he ultimately is less concerned with rescuing post-structuralist thought than he is with affirming the intrinsic philosophical value of constructing a mode of being in this world “through the investigation, the criticism, and the production of philosophical views.”4
Although the three protagonists in Hereafter are not aware of themselves as philosophers per se and do not ask and investigate questions in the manner that Nehamas may envision, they are, nevertheless, searching for meaning to fundamental questions concerning the human condition. As I said earlier, these questions have less to do with the existence of an afterlife than they do with the here and now. Near the beginning of the film George is beset by a woman who has lost her child. She pleads with him to use his psychic powers to communicate with her daughter. She hysterically sobs, “I lost everything I had.” Although this character is on-screen for only a few minutes, her sense of loss spreads out over the entire film. She offers in a viscerally intense and emotional way the central question of the film: How does one find enduring meaning amid the ephemeral and transitory impermanence of the world?
Nehamas identifies several figures who practice what he calls an “art of living,” ranging from Socrates and Montaigne to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It is perhaps understandable that he would avoid mentioning Augustine, since this church father was ostensibly concerned with arriving at universal theological truths of Christianity. But in The Confessions Augustine places his philosophical inquiries into the context of an autobiographical narrative. Near the end of The Confessions, in book 9, Augustine finds himself in the same position as the bereaved mother in Hereafter. The person most dear to him in life, his mother, has been snatched away by death. Prior to this traumatic event, Augustine had found a way to reconcile the material nature of the phenomenal world with the immaterial essence of its creator, or to put it simply, between becoming and being. In book 7, Augustine recounts how he first thought he had discovered an answer to his problem in Platonic reasoning. But the light of rational intelligence through which he moves step by step from “bodies to the soul” proves dissatisfying. He is still beset by a hunger that reason cannot relieve.5
In book 8 Augustine experiences what he believes will be his final conversion. He finds himself sitting in a garden still struggling with his problem when he hears a child chanting “pick up and read, pick up and read.”6 He opens the Bible and reads a passage from Paul: “make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14). This conversion or turning away from the world is achieved not through willful reasoning. Instead of a moment of rational insight he experiences an emotional revelation. “At once,” Augustine recounts, “with the last words of the sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart.”7 All the shadows of doubt have been dispelled as the absent creator enters his heart rather than his head. At this moment Augustine achieves his goal of shaping his own personal narrative into an idealized Christian model.
This moment is, however, short-lived. Augustine is almost immediately thrown from the universal back into the particular with the death of his mother. This response is foreshadowed in book 4 with the death of a young man to whom Augustine was extremely close. After his death, Augustine is consumed by an unrelenting despair: “everything on which I set my gaze was death. . . . My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there.”8 Similarly, upon the death of Monica, Augustine is overcome by an “overwhelming grief.” It is only by an act of “mental control” that he can stabilize himself. He rationally understands that his mother does not “suffer extinction.” And yet he experiences a “fresh wound caused by a break in habit formed by our living together . . . a bond suddenly torn asunder.” He feels as if he himself had been “torn to pieces.”9 His faith in an immaterial creator to whom one returns in the hereafter cannot sustain him in his time of grief.
Augustine’s traumatic fall from grace, his fall from being an idealized Christian sustained by faith to a particular Christian beset by doubt, necessitates a renewal in his struggle to fashion an art of living in the context of absence. This moment becomes critical for the kind of philosophizing that Nehamas describes. I would argue, for instance, that both Montaigne and Sartre in their autobiographical works of philosophy struggle, at least in part, with the same set of issues concerning the impermanence of the material world with which Augustine struggles in The Confessions. For Montaigne and for Sartre, however, the struggle shifts from the need to achieve a transcendence over the transient nature of the world to the need to fashion an authentic way of living in this world. In On Repentance, Montaigne succinctly asserts, “I am not portraying being but becoming.”10 In another essay he expresses this somewhat differently: “To practice death is to practice freedom.”11 Here Montaigne is responding to the argument made by Socrates in the Phaedo when he attempts to explain how it seems natural “that a man who really devoted his life to philosophy should be cheerful in the face of death.”12 Socrates argues that death is itself nothing more than the separation of the soul from the body and that with death the soul is able to exist unencumbered by physical needs. Since the philosopher seeks to free his soul from “association with the body,” death is merely the fulfillment of that endeavor.13 The acquisition of pure knowledge is, in short, “only possible after death.”14 To avoid the detractions and impediments of the body and to focus instead on the pursuit of knowledge is the business of philosophy. “True philosophers,” therefore, “make dying their profession.”15
Montaigne, however, deviates from his Socratic starting point in a manner that speaks to the characters in Hereafter. The essayist is ultimately less concerned with how the soul might escape the body than how soul and body exist together. The formal characteristics of The Essays differ significantly from those of the Socratic dialogue. The latter reflects a process of question and answer that would lead to truth, however limited. The former offers a medium perpetually in motion and perpetually under revision, one in which Montaigne seeks no conclusions but rather probes the conjunction of the material and immaterial. Near the end of his final essay, On Experience, he modifies the Socratic position that the soul should be separated as far as possible from the demands of the body when engaged in the pursuit of the truth. Montaigne asserts, “As for me, then, I love life and cultivate it as it has pleased God to vouchsafe it to us. I do not go yearning that it should be without the need to eat and drink.”16 His point is not simply that we need to attend to our physical well-being with a degree of pleasure, but that the truth is itself inseparable from our material existence. In his own version of Socratic irony, he concludes, “Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.”17
Sartre will take this further when he argues that philosophy begins not simply with the recognition of death but also with the acknowledgment that there are no universal truths to which one might aspire. Absence, to put it differently, provides the freedom to philosophize. “Everything is permissible,” asserts Sartre, “if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned.”18 In The Words he puts this in a way that speaks directly to an art of living: “never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a ‘talent’; my sole concern has been to save myself by work.”19 The lifetime work undertaken by Sartre is the task of investigating the human condition and formulating tentative views about it. In Sartre’s case these are the tasks of philosophy and literature.
Finally, the modernist filmmaker Paolo Pasolini brings these ideas together in a compelling narrative fiction. His Teorema (1968) is both an attack on bourgeois values and a fictional engagement with the idea of Christian abandonment. The film begins with the arrival of a charismatic young man into a typical bourgeois household. Each member of the family falls in love with his physical and spiritual beauty. Then one morning at dawn before anyone in the household has risen he leaves the house and disappears down the street, not to be seen again. His sudden absence throws each member of the family into confusion. The void left in their lives precipitates a crisis of identity and meaning. Each individual in the household reacts in his or her own way. The son obsessively paints, the mother becomes excessively devout, and the father quite simply goes mad. The emotional and psychological struggles of these characters are grounded in abiding philosophical questions concerning the material conditions of the world and the immaterial aspirations of its inhabitants. Hereafter is philosophical in just this way. In a world beset by absence, Eastwood’s characters seek to maintain the tenuous bonds that bind the living both to one another and to the departed.
Although the story of Marcus, whose twin brother is killed in a traffic accident, unfolds after the first two narratives have been established, his experience lies at the heart of the film. Marcus and Jason are the children of a single mother (Lyndsey Marshal) who, because of her addictions, seems incapable of properly caring for her children. Although the responsibility that they demonstrate to one another and to their mother suggests that at an earlier age they had been taught a certain set of values, they nevertheless must now construct and maintain their world by themselves. They have, as a result, become disproportionately dependent on one another. Marcus seems more vulnerable to separation than Jason. This is hinted at when Marcus asks Jason for help on his math homework. And when agents of Social Services arrive, Jason tells Marcus how they should handle the situation. Their relationship is symbolically suggested by their birth order. Jason was born a few minutes before Marcus and is technically the older brother. The dependency of Marcus on his brother will become even clearer near the end of the film, when Jason tells Marcus through George that he knows his brother had relied upon him, but that he cannot do so anymore.
When Jason is suddenly struck by a lorry and killed, Marcus is thrown into a crisis similar to the one experienced by Augustine with the death of his close friend. Augustine laments, “My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there. I hated everything because they did not have him, nor could they now tell me ‘look he is on the way,’ as used to be the case when he was alive and absent from me.”20 Marcus also knows that Jason is not on his way home and that the absence he now experiences is an enduring one.
The circumstances in which Jason has been killed are, in addition, if not deeply ironic, then most certainly poignant. Their mother, apparently moved by the near loss of her children to a government agency, sends Jason to the chemist to pick up a prescription for a drug that counters the effects of drug addiction. It is on this errand, one that would quite possibly change their lives, that he is killed. The irony of this may not be readily apparent to Marcus, but it is to the audience of the film. Moreover, the death of Jason indirectly causes Marcus to suffer a second devastating loss. His mother recognizes that she must enter a treatment facility. She tells Marcus, “I’m not running away,” but she also acknowledges, “it must feel like the worst thing in the world.” The “normal family” that Marcus and Jason thought was just ahead has now for Marcus become a foster family.
Marcus has been cast into a region of absence and confronted with the precariousness of human life. Through the remainder of the film, Eastwood will chart Marcus’s frustrating attempts to communicate with Jason through a series of psychics rather than fashioning a way of living without Jason. His struggles and their tentative resolution reflect the struggles of the other principal characters in the film and provide, as I pointed out earlier, the basis for the film’s philosophical inquiry.
The vision of the afterlife that Marie experiences at the beginning of the film is itself of less interest to Eastwood than how she responds to her traumatic encounter with death and her vision of an afterlife. In the days and months that follow, largely because of her overriding concern with her experience, she will lose what has defined her professionally and personally. Before the tsunami hits, Marie and Didier (Thierry Neuvic), her producer and lover, have come to the end of their vacation together in Indonesia. They plan to return to Paris on that day, and she asks her companion if he has bought gifts for his children. He suggests that they buy them at the airport. She is amused and forgiving of his seemingly uncaring attitude and declares that she will take care of it herself. On her way to the shops in the village, she calls a colleague in Paris to ask how many posters promoting her television program have been put up in the city. Prior to the tsunami, she seems unaware of the shallowness of her lover and the superficiality of her celebrity status. She has not yet undertaken a critical self-examination of her life in order to determine its authenticity. After her return to Paris her public and private personae will collapse in a relatively short amount of time.
Because her return to television proves to be premature, Marie signs a contract to write a hard-hitting book on Mitterrand. The project, which she had first considered prior to her accident, is soon replaced, however, by a plan to write a book based on her own experience of the hereafter. She pitches the book as if it were an exposé of a plot to suppress discussion of an afterlife. When told by the publisher that he had commissioned a political biography of Mitterrand, she asserts, “this is political.” She then asks, “Why are you all against this . . . why are you so afraid of this?” She then points out, “There is scientific evidence from well-known researchers forced to work in secret,” and then adds, “a Nobel prize winner, hounded by the religious lobby. That’s a story.” And finally, the subtitle of her book is A Conspiracy of Silence, suggesting that there is some sort of cover-up. She approaches her subject as the investigative reporter she has been trained to be. While she has this exchange with her publisher, news of the bombing of the Underground in London plays on a monitor. At one point she looks up and sees her replacement report the story on the television, perhaps putting pressure on her to spin her project as hard-hitting. She is still trying to authenticate a former version of herself by authenticating the existence of an afterlife.
As part of her research for the book, Marie travels to a hospice in the Swiss Alps. After the receptionist has gone off to tell the director of the hospice (Marthe Keller) that the journalist from Paris has arrived, Marie looks around the clinic. She stops in the doorway of a room in which a patient, surrounded by loved ones, is on the verge of passing away. It is a troubling and complex moment in the film. After a point of view shot is established, the camera moves slowly in on the face of the dying woman. It keeps moving, however, until it rests on the face of the sobbing husband, who is being comforted by what appears to be his mother. Eastwood makes it clear that the focus of the scene is not on the woman who is passing away and what she might soon experience, but on the living who are left behind and who must discover a way to go on in the face of a wrenchingly painful loss. It is unclear if Marie, symbolically standing on the other side of the threshold of the room, shares in this sense of loss or is still concerned with her own vision of the afterlife. At this moment the hospice director appears and makes a remark to Marie that dramatically misses the point: “What we wouldn’t give to know exactly where she has gone.” She then directly addresses Marie: “But from what you wrote in the letter perhaps you know already.” The director overlooks the loss that the survivors of the deceased woman are experiencing and instead focuses on the possibility of an afterlife. Marie and the director move into a garden, where they have tea and discuss the general skepticism of the public over the existence of life after death. The director asserts that “the evidence is irrefutable,” and encourages Marie to use her status as a journalist to convince others of the validity of her vision. Marie literally takes away an armful of evidence but has not yet, I would argue, faced the important problem of how one might fashion a meaningful way of life in a world where loss is inevitable.
Marie’s fall from grace reaches its climax at a dinner with Didier. She tells him that she wishes to resume her career on television. She tellingly laments, “Today they even took down my posters.” When Didier tells her that she cannot return, she accusingly asks him if he is sleeping with her replacement. When he evades the question, the camera moves slowly closer to Marie’s face to record her recognition of what has happened. At this moment she suffers a second death experience. The personal and professional world she had constructed for herself proves an ephemeral edifice. It will be the process of writing and sharing her book that will ultimately lead her into a future life.
The lynchpin of Hereafter is the psychic, George. His role in the lives of the other two protagonists is critical. He not only directly encounters both Marcus and Marie at the London Book Fair but also has access to the afterlife in a way that they both lack. But his psychic gift ironically denies him access to the living. As he tells his brother, Billy (Jay Mohr), his power is really a “curse.” Earlier in the film, Billy explains George’s reluctance to use his psychic powers to a business associate whom George has agreed to help. George has told Billy, “A life about death is no life at all.” It is not simply that George’s gift requires him to visit the dead instead of the living; it prevents him from establishing meaningful relationships with the living. Although he can cross the boundary between this world and the next, he cannot cross the boundary between self and other. When George communicates the words of the dead, he becomes privy to the secrets of strangers. The intimacy he achieves is perhaps too powerful and yet concurrently distancing. His situation is dramatically portrayed in his encounter with Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard). After taking the first steps in creating a relationship, Melanie becomes aware of George’s psychic gift. She persistently implores him to use his abilities and connect her with those who have passed from her life. After a vision of her mother appears, George tells her that a man seeks forgiveness for what “he had done to her.” We infer from her reaction that she has been the victim of her father’s sexual abuse. George has unintentionally uncovered a dark and damaging secret from her past. A curtain descends, dramatically and irrevocably separating them. It is ironic that when the couple physically touch, when George takes hold of the young woman’s hands as an aid in calling up the dead, it almost immediately closes off the future. Clearly this is not the first time George has had this experience. As soon as Melanie becomes aware of his powers, George sees what is coming. His gift provides an intense, immediate, and deeply ironic intimacy that forms a barrier between him and those he helps. This talent envelops him in the absence that others experience, as well as the absence he feels in his own life.
Denied this and other intimacies, George seeks solace in the imaginative landscapes of fiction. In a darkness that cuts him off from the imperfections of the world and safely substitutes for the darkness of the underworld, he listens at night to the voice of Derek Jacobi reading David Copperfield. As I mentioned earlier, Dickens’s novel provides a particularly apt narrative. David’s life is informed by loss, abandonment, and death. The three passages that George listens to in the film all pertain to absence or its possibility. In the first, David recalls how his nurse, Peggotty, runs out to give him cakes and three shillings as he begins his traumatic journey away from his home and his mother. In the second, Micawber is mixing punch for what appears to be a festive occasion. But it has come after the unwavering loyalty of Mrs. Micawber seems about to break under pressure of yet another financial crisis. The punch is intended to relieve the “despondency, if not to say despair,” caused by Mrs. Micawber’s condition. And finally, after Melanie has left him, George listens to David’s accounting of the deep despair with which he is overcome with the deaths of Dora and Emily. George has moved from the voices of the dead to the voices of Dickens’s imagination. But George does not yet utter his own words, nor reveal his own secrets.
Dissatisfied and seeking a way to care for himself rather than others, George undertakes a pilgrimage to Dickens’s home in London. When George arrives at the very desk on which Dickens probably wrote David Copperfield, he reaches out his hand and touches its surface. This touching differs significantly from the touch of those who come to him for help. From the look on his face, George feels a powerful and personal connection to the past. He experiences how physical space can hold memories. This remains, however, still an encounter with the dead. He has not yet established a relationship to the living.
This changes for George in the final scenes of the film. Before leaving London, George attends a reading of Little Dorrit by Derek Jacobi at the London Book Fair. It is tempting to argue that this reading marks a symbolic change in George. Of course he did not choose the reading, but its contents differ from those moments of loss and absence to which he was drawn in Copperfield’s narrative. A plasterer, Plornish, has come to Marshalsea Prison to deliver a message to Little Dorrit. When he leaves the debtors’ prison, where he himself had once resided, he ponders whether he might at some future date be sent there again. He is in some sense still a prisoner of the Marshalsea workhouse, still not fully released from its psychological hold. George occupies a similar position. He has left the problems of San Francisco but has yet to be released into the future.
At the reading, George is recognized by Marcus as the psychic whom he had seen on the Internet. He follows George to his hotel and stages a vigil on into the night until George agrees to contact Jason. Through George, Jason tells Marcus that he knows he has relied on him but now he must be on his own. When George tells Marcus that Jason is leaving, Marcus pleads, “Don’t leave me,” and begins to cry. A fundamental reorientation of George now occurs. Until this moment his head had been turned away from Marcus as he concentrated on the words of Jason. Now, however, he looks directly at Marcus and sees in his face the intense moment of loss and abandonment that lies at the heart of the film. Throughout the film whenever George listens to the dead he has turned his head away from the bereaved so as to concentrate on what he sees and hears. Now, however, he holds his eyes on the face of Marcus when he tells him Jason is returning. Eastwood means for the audience to sense that George is himself delivering the message, that he has looked into the face of Marcus and absorbed his intense sense of abandonment before telling Marcus what he himself believes he must hear in order to proceed with his life without Jason. “If you are worried about being on your own, don’t be.” Jason and Marcus are “one cell, one person,” and cannot be apart. When George tells Marcus that Jason is again leaving, Marcus asks where he is going. George quite simply responds that he does not know. This is perhaps further evidence that Eastwood’s concern is not the nature of the afterlife but rather the conditions of the living. Regardless, this is an extraordinary moment for George. He may still be able to see and hear the dead and convey their words back to the living, but he now also can hear the living. One senses that he has a new way of seeing, a new way to penetrate into the lives of others that can release George himself into the future. George takes Marcus back to his foster family in a cab. When Marcus leaves the cab, he walks straight to the door in a manner that has become typical with him. He has made little acknowledgment of others, and his gait and posture has reflected his single-minded interest in his brother. But as he reaches the door, he turns and waves goodbye to George, and George lifts his hand in return. The camera slowly moves first to Marcus’s face and then to George’s, alternating as it moves closer to each face. As I will point out later, this is a technique used throughout the film to convey an intensity of emotion. For this one moment it is not the dead who are important but the living.
The second transformative encounter at the end of the film is between George and Marie at the same book fair where George meets Marcus. George hears Marie reading from her recently published book and approaches her booth. Based on her reading, we get some indication that Marie has changed since she began her project on the hereafter. In the conclusion to her book, she admits that she will probably never know if her glimpse of the afterlife was genuine or merely a fantasy and that she has been left with as many questions as she had when she started. She seems much less intent on exposing the “conspiracy of silence” than on pondering how the possibility of an afterlife might affect the living. At her book signing, Marie and George touch hands and he momentarily has a vision of her encounter with death. Clearly a strong mutual connection is made between them. But when George later returns to the booth where she had been signing books, Marie has already left. It will be Marcus who tells George where Marie is staying in London. Despite George’s denials, Marcus sees that George does in fact want to find Marie. This offers yet another example of how “seeing” has become in the final act of the film an activity shared by the living. It is not simply George who has looked into the eyes of Marcus, but Marcus also who has seen into George.
Acting on the information Marcus has provided, George does go to the hotel where Marie is staying. When she does not answer her telephone, George decides after some hesitation to leave a message. We are never privy to the precise contents of the letter, but because of its length and the expressive look on the face of Marie when she reads it, we can infer that George has communicated more than a mere suggestion to meet for coffee. While in the past George has been a conduit for the voices of the dead, he now communicates in a very personal way. Let us go so far as to say that he speaks not from the hereafter but from the heart.
The final scene in the film takes place at Leadenhall Market, where George has invited Marie to meet him. We see Marie arrive in a point of view shot that is through George’s eyes. Eastwood then cuts to a reaction shot of George’s face, and the camera moves slowly and fluidly toward him. He then cuts to Marie’s face with the camera still moving slowly. Once again, this is the signature camera movement of the film. Now George has his final vision in the film. George experiences an unaccustomed type of vision. Instead of calling up the voices of the dead, he foresees himself and Marie embracing and looking into each other’s eyes. When their hands touch, George does not see the dead souls who reside in Marie’s past as he had done with the woman he had met earlier in the film. He simply sees her face in the here and now. It is a moment of imagined intimacy suggestive of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which when Helena is told by her father that she must marry the man of his choosing she laments, “I would my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.56). This is the quintessential statement of Shakespeare’s understanding of his own art. The theater is a place where one enters the imaginative realm of another and this somehow changes one, expands one’s understanding of self and world. At this moment in the film, Shakespeare’s art of living becomes Eastwood’s, an art informed by imagination and the capacity to see the world through the eyes of another. The film ends with the couple prepared to enter the land of the living and the hereafter of their meeting.
Although Hereafter is relatively traditional and unassuming in its formal manner of storytelling, the film nevertheless probes a fundamental and profound question, one that figures such as Augustine, Montaigne, and Sartre also address: Is there an authentic way of life that acknowledges the problems of vulnerability and solitude? Each of the three principal characters in Hereafter struggles to achieve such authenticity. As their paths intersect at the end of the film, they seem to have discovered tentative solutions.
Although Peter Morgan wrote the script for Hereafter, Clint Eastwood is ultimately responsible for the telling of the tale. As I pointed out earlier, Eastwood sees himself primarily as a storyteller, and this modest assessment of himself is reflected in what I would call a certain nonchalance or sprezzatura that seemingly characterizes his demeanor in life as well as on the set. Although many of his films are informed by violent outbursts and aggressive male assertion, it is forbearance that stands out as the salient authorial characteristic of Hereafter. If the overriding theme of the film is communion among the living, Eastwood’s camera creates its own type of communal ceremony. Moments of intimacy between subject and audience periodically surface in the narrative flow and establish the underlying tonal character of the film. The camera does not function as a voyeur, moving stealthily closer in order to spy upon the privacy of an individual, as Hitchcock’s camera might do. Nor is it the camera of Bergman that will simply stay on its subject, relentlessly refusing to move and creating an intensity of emotional and psychological contact. At the beginning of the film, when Marie loses consciousness and is carried along underwater, the camera moves slowly closer to her face until it hovers over a single eye. This sets the stage thematically and formally for the remainder of the film. It announces that the subject of the film is the passing into the interior of another consciousness, not entering the landscape of the afterlife. This camera gesture will be repeated in more subtle movements throughout the film. When Marie returns to consciousness on the dock, the camera makes an almost imperceptible movement toward her face. At the first psychic reading, after a series of 180-degree shots of George and a man seeking to hear from his deceased wife, the camera advances slowly closer to the man’s face. After George has closed the door on the woman imploring him to use his gift, an unhurried camera moves in on the face of George. Several variations of this technique occur later in the film. In the scene at the hospice in which Marie looks into the room of the dying woman, Eastwood cuts from the camera patiently approaching the bed to the reverse motion at the same pace toward the face of Marie. In a telling shot of George eating alone at his kitchen table, the camera begins to move forward but then slowly moves back across the threshold of the room, abandoning George just as he has been abandoned in life. This tone of forbearance and intimacy, as I have suggested, has been largely overlooked in Eastwood’s work, but it occurs again and again, from the lyrical and elegiac frame of Unforgiven (1992) to the quiet solemnity of Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner) as he stares up into the sky in A Perfect World (1993).
In the final scene of the film, when Marie and George meet at the market in London, the camera pulls up and away, again with the same smooth and effortless pacing. In this instance, rather than abandoning the couple, it releases them into the world. Hereafter concludes, therefore, with its focus on the life to come in this world. Our protagonists have ceased to look for the dead and instead look for and then step into the future world that they will create. But this is not simply a happy ending. One is reminded of another play by Shakespeare. Near the end of The Tempest, when Miranda sees the men whom her father has brought to their island, she feels wonderment and senses the possibilities that maturity will bring. She calls what she sees a “brave new world” (5.1.183). But we know, as does Prospero, that it is a precarious future that she is about to enter and no amount of magic will rid it of the risks entailed in life. There will be love and birth, but there will also be betrayals and loss. As Augustine realized and then experienced, everything in this world passes away, and although one might very well believe in a hereafter which awaits in the next world, it is in this world where faith is tested and meaning forged. We do not know what awaits Marcus and his mother or George and Marie. But we do sense that they are willing to forego thoughts of the hereafter for the trials and tribulations of the here and now.
1. Clint Eastwood, “The Eastwood Experience,” Hereafter DVD, 2011.
2. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 793.
3. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 104.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 127. All translations are from this edition.
6. Ibid., 152.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 57
9. Ibid., 174–175.
10. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1991), 907. All translations are from this edition.
11. Ibid., 96.
12. Plato, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), 63e–64a. All translations are from this edition.
13. Ibid., 64c.
14. Ibid., 67c
15. Ibid., 67e.
16. Montaigne, Essays, 1264.
17. Ibid., 1269.
18. Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carl Macomber (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007), 29.
19. Jean Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziler, 1964).
20. Augustine, Confessions, 57.