Yesterday on Channel 5 TV they showed one of my favourite stupid – I'm not proud of it but I love it – movies: Splash (scroll down the list on the left), starring Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah, and I've just noticed something in this movie which I had never properly noticed before.
Just before Darryl Hannah as the mermaid makes her first appearance, the Tom Hanks character has, basically, been drowned. He has been taken out into the sea in a stupid little boat, then abandoned. Then he falls out of the boat, and the boat turns round and smacks him on the head and he sinks downwards into the depths of the sea. So everything from then could just be a pre-death dream.
I'd forgotten that scene. As I recalled it, the first time we see the mermaid, as a grown-up I mean, is when she shows up next to the Statue of Liberty.
Come to that, the Tom Hanks character's whole life after first meeting the mermaid when he's a little kid could all be a pre-death dream, before he drowns as a little kid. Everything Tom Hanks does in that movie could be a hallucination.
As a devout atheist I cannot take seriously the notion of an afterlife. It seems to me pure wish fulfilment. You only have to look at a dead body. But I do suspect that this delusion has a basis in reality. It makes sense to me that, when facing death, the brain would expend what last remaining energy it has doing what it does best when not being helped by the body, namely hallucinating. And it also makes sense to me that the physical events associated with these final experiences might last only a few real world seconds, so to speak. After all, we can have dreams which in real world time last only a few moments which pack a mass of experience into them.
Another movie which quite explicitly makes use of this idea is The Last Temptation of Christ, in which a whole alternative life for an uncrucified Christ is imagined by the very Christ who is actually being crucified.
I'm sure there are many other movies embodying similar notions, but cannot now think of any, and in any case have no time now to ruminate upon them.
