The Traumas of “Hereafter”

Beware of spoilers…

There couldn’t have been a better director for this film. Clint Eastwood has for some time now brought to his moviemaking a visual approach that’s somewhat monochromatic, achieving an austere and perhaps even funereal tone. Hereafter deals with what lies beyond life, what happens to us after we die. And Eastwood’s somber, shadowy visual predilections fit the world of this beautiful, very moving film like a glove. Perhaps more here than anywhere else.

Tastefulness and austerity aside, this is, oddly enough, a post Pulp Fiction movie—taking on an unusually trendy narrative structure that for this filmmaker seems strange (even though Eastwood presided over the jury when Pulp Fiction became the sensation at Cannes) and while the choice of storytelling style is surprising, what isn’t is the fact that the redoubtable veteran beats the young guns (Iñárritu is the most common purveyor of this kind of narrative) at this game of intertwining characters and fragmenting storylines all of which have an inevitable point of collision. For most of the film, Eastwood cuts between three different places in the world—San Francisco, London and Paris—and he does so seamlessly. We are rarely prompted to where and when we are in an overt manner, and there are times where a cut will move us from one storyline to the next, and we may not at all feel the movement. The screenwriting (by Peter Morgan, who to my mind gets as much credit as Eastwood for this film) and cutting is that assured here—there’s never a jarring moment, rarely a false note in the structure. This level of control to me is remarkable, and displays an un-showy filmmaking style that for Eastwood is typical.

But the most impressive of Hereafter’s achievements is the beautiful idea that it contains. This film, like all the best Eastwood works, has a resonant political charge that doesn’t for a moment proselytize or pander. The San Francisco leg of this film deals with Matt Damon’s reluctant, traumatized psychic, who is able to connect and, in a manner, communicate with the dead. The Paris segment deals with a journalist who has survived a near-death experience and is subsequently obsessed by a vision she’s had of the afterlife. And the London storyline has a child trying to deal with the death of his twin brother. Each of these characters and storylines dovetail thematically in that they each have a character dealing with and “in” death, and the concept of an afterlife. What connects them is a mutual “haunting” that occurs from the burden of their respective, personal encounters with mortality—and what might be waiting in the beyond.

But the film’s interests don’t end here. Eastwood and Morgan connect personal and national traumas in a deeply interesting way. Every segment here contains a certain epic trauma that has strong political underpinnings. Matt Damon’s character loses his job at a factory due to cutbacks from corporate. The boy in London witnesses a terrorist attack at a tube station. And the French journalist survives (in a thrillingly realized opening sequence) the Indian Ocean’s devastating tsunami. These moments are an organic part of the film’s three worlds, and each comes at a tremendous human cost. Each results in a dark national trauma with far-reaching consequences that are very unique. Importantly, these are also exceptional events that many of us witness, feel threatened by but perhaps never truly “experience”—much like death and what might exist beyond it. The divide between observation and experience–and the importance of understanding the latter as much as possible–might be the very reason why Eastwood stages the tsunami sequence in a way that plunges us so deeply (a POV and close-up heavy sequence as it is) into the moment of that trauma.

The film’s characters hit a wall with their shared, traumatic occupation with the afterlife. For each of them, this obsession, this connection with the afterlife, leads to an alienation from the rest of civil society, which responds to them as if they are either a curiosity or an affront. This is in some ways Eastwood’s wake-up call to apathy and prejudice, which can be among the most dangerous of all personal and political decisions in our lives. Whether it’s a disconnect from crippling unemployment, natural or man-made disasters or something like the idea of an afterlife, what Eastwood does very successfully here is create a universe in which alienation is the greatest, most tragic threat of all. A key moment occurs where the French woman, who was commissioned to write a book on Mitterrand, reveals to her publisher that she has instead elected to write a book about her experience of the afterlife and the resulting research that’s come from it. The publisher, squeamish and cringing in the company of his colleagues, admonishes her and tells her that they only publish political material, to which the woman responds, indignant, that this issue is very much political. She may well not only be speaking of the prejudice and alienation resulting from her afterlife-experience, but also of the very singular event that she has survived.

The human element is what saves the characters here. The narratives and central protagonists collide at the London Book Fair, which is here a wide open space that in its sprawled out, brightly lit interiors populated by people floating about, recalls the hallucinatory visions of the afterlife experienced by Damon and the French woman. It’s a smart stroke in a masterful film. Ultimately what resolves the issue of alienation is precisely what’s been missing for each of the characters throughout the course of this shared narrative—a fully realized connection with another human being who has shared their experience—and their alienation—on some level, and who can ultimately free them from their loneliness. Unburden them of their respective problems with regard to death not only because they bear the similar scars of personal loss, but also the ones caused by their national traumas. It’s intriguing that what creates a “global community” here is a shared narrative of traumatic experience. And it makes a lot of sense that following this continent-spanning resolution, the last vision Damon experiences (of kissing a woman he’s struck by) isn’t one involving death or what comes after it, but an image that shows him the possibilities in life.