What did Al Pacino see when he almost died?

(ANALYSIS) In Hollywood Heaven, good people get good things because the only thing that matters is love. You know that?

Maybe bad people get something else.

Yes, mass media “signals” on this topic fall on media consumers day after day, year after year. A world without end. Amen.

A long time ago, I had the opportunity to interview Bruce Joel Rubin, who won an Oscar for writing the classic romantic drama “Ghost,” which was the definitive Hollywood Heaven epic of the late baby boom (entering Generation X) at multiplexes.

The hero, Sam Wheat (Biblical overtones here), is murdered before he has a chance to openly confess his love for his astonishingly beautiful girlfriend, Molly Jensen. This unfinished business turns him into a ghost with work to do before he can go to the heavenly tunnel of white light.

Rubin is a convert to Buddhism. When I asked him why demons appear at the end of the film and drag the villain to Hell – a complicated twist in the Buddhist worldview – he gave a simple answer. He said he knew he was writing a film for ticket buyers in a predominantly Christian culture. So he needed good versus evil, heaven versus hell. That’s it.

Bottom line: Rubin knew his audience and that changed the way he “preached” to them. How many pastors (and seminary professors) are willing to think through this process, considering how mass media products shape the thinking of believers and unchurched people in this culture?

Meanwhile, movies about “life after death” keep coming out. Here is a list of 40 movies that fit, to varying degrees, the Hollywood Heaven niche found on the Internet Movie Database. There are many, many more. “Beetlejuice” is the newest one, I think. Perhaps another video of this type that came out last week.

The key is that in Hollywood Heaven there are many things that can happen after a person dies.

However, there will be no meeting with Jesus Christ and no discussion about salvation by grace.

However, note that Hollywood players know that the screen can’t just “black out” and that’s it (unless we’re talking about The Sopranos).

To read the rest of this post, visit Terry Mattingly’s Substack at Rational sheep.