I just binge watched a new series called “Forever”. It’s a strange little show about a couple in a happy-ish marriage who die and find themselves together in the afterlife living an only slightly better version of the pretty ordinary life they had when alive. They still carry all the regrets, disappointments and emotional burdens they had in life.
The wife decides to do something she never had the courage to do when alive. It’s kind of a twist on the idea of “life is too short to not live it fully”. It’s more like “eternity is WAY too long to not live it fully.”
She makes her way to another area of the afterlife, where every day is like the ongoing party in the Great Gatsby. The people there are fashionable and exciting and unafraid. After all, nothing can hurt them anymore so why not? The goal in this new place is to forget the life one had when alive and it looks really appealing. These people have no attachment anymore to their mistakes or sorrows or any of the emotional baggage of life. They’ve put it all far far behind them. It sounds really appealing to the wife and she embraces the lifestyle, each day her former life seems further and further away. She blossoms. She’s happy.
Until, and this is the subtle genius of this show because it is never spoken, it all starts to feel a bit like nothing at all. It becomes a new kind of disappointment. Because, like her former unsatisfying life, this isn’t her path either. The ending of the show is just beautiful and I won’t detail here.
I thought a lot about it after it ended. All the things that happen to us, all the mistakes we make, the regrets we have the things we suffer, as tempting as it is to think that leaving all that behind would be great, we forget that those things are who we are. Without them we are just the boring, but sometimes fun guests at a great, but sometimes boring party. The problem really is that we have been looking at things the wrong way, hanging onto and hobbling ourselves with convenient, lazy narratives that aren’t really helping. It’s a much more interesting choice to grow and learn who we are and to embrace our complexity, and the complexity of others, as we move to the next thing in life.
I think my tarot practice (in addition to my love for and study of film) really helps me to see the deeper layers of shows like this that are created with an intelligence that assumes a thoughtful audience. They don’t smash you over the head with themes, they just sort of let them develop and expose themselves subtly, gently using humour, metaphor and symbolism.
