Future reality collides with supernatural
By Ryan Eloe
Skiff Staff

I hope to get married in the near future. My wife and I will have children, get a house and make a life for ourselves. I will make sure my kids are taken care of. My kids will be healthy. They’ll get braces. Wear nice clean clothes. Celebrate birthdays with streamers, cake and presents. I will make sure my kids take swimming lessons. I’ll encourage them in their basketball practices, clarinet lessons and math homework. I will send them off to college, and hope they don’t start doing drugs and dating the wrong type of people.

I’ll work to support my family. I will deal with the stresses the work environment presents. I will make sure I can pay the bills. I will drive through rough traffic day in and day out. I will work at least 40 hours every week to provide for my wife and children in every way possible. I hope to enjoy work, but some days going to work could be the last thing I hope to do.

Someday, I am also going to die.

What will all of it amount to? Who cares if I sacrificed my 80-odd years on earth trying to understand economic graphs, paying the Visa bill, buying new cars or even if I attended my children’s sporting events?

This brings up one of the questions of the ages: “What will happen when I die?”

Looking at our world through a lens, society explores what seem to be unlimited possibilities to this question.

Tom Shadyac (”Patch Adams,” “The Nutty Professor,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”) tries to bring audiences a new supernatural drama “Dragonfly” which appears extremely different from his usual slapstick comedy fare.

The over spiritually sensational Web site for “Dragonfly” includes a list of how different religions view the afterlife.

The site begins its synopsis of the film asking the question, “When someone you love dies are they gone forever?”

The movie stars Kevin Costner as a doctor at Chicago Memorial Hospital. After his wife (Susanna Thompson) dies in Venezuela, he begins to believe that she is trying to contact him through the near death experience of his patients and the dragonflies he sees that remind him of her.

The explanations for what happens when people die seem to be getting a little more far-fetched. But why not throw out some more possibilities?

Another interesting movie, which is an adaptation of the third book in Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles,” is being released this weekend. The movie, “Queen of the Damned” is about a Vampire rock star ( Stuart Townsend) whose music awakens a 6000 year old Egyptian vampire.

This of course alone raises a number of questions about different ways of viewing death with a supernatural slant.

However, the issue of death in the film became increasingly interesting just a couple months before its initial October 2001 release date. The awakened Egyptian vampire, Queen Akasha is played by former R&B star Aaliyah, who died in a tragic plane crash in the Bahamas on August 25, 2001.

Yet it appears that the filming was done and is going to come out in theaters despite the death of its title star. The trailer, Web site, and posters all seem tasteless and this 22-year-old deceased star stands with backgrounds of flames and destruction.

The new releases make us stop and think about how we view death and some very serious spiritual questions. Yet, the films seem to stretch so far in the realm of the supernatural that in the presence of the actual death of someone like Aaliyah, we realize that the explanations we are producing are not helpful in our quest for real answers. Rather, these films are just attempts to entertain at the whims of our most serious questions.

So after I raise a family, in an attempt to live out the American dream in some form or another, I rest assured that all of this isn’t futile.

I am not looking for explanations in near death experiences, dragonfly tokens left by the lost or vampires returning from the dead. And although I do not understand every aspect of my personal beliefs, I find confidence in the knowledge that there is a living active God that cares for me, and has a plan for me, and that even in death, I have a hope for eternity.

Different people have different views, but as a society we seem to be searching for spiritual things. Our search has led us all over the map. I think we realize that the answer for what happens in death does not rely on corruptible things like money and possessions. Yet, it may be easy to be discouraged or distracted by movies like “Dragonfly” or “Queen of the Damned.”

Some people seem to think that ideas of God, heaven and hell and the Bible are crazy beliefs, but I trust these to be the truth. Perhaps instead of seeking to find more possible answers, we should focus on finding more truth.

The truth could potentially be right under our noses all along.

Ryan Eloe is a junior international economics major from Centennial, Colo.
He can be reached at (r.c.eloe@student.tcu.edu)

credits

TCU Daily Skiff © 2002