The interesting question isn\u2019t why so many filmmakers rely on the resurrection trope, but what effect this has on viewers and what this trope says about American culture in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n
In the 1973 book The Denial of Death, anthropologist Ernest Becker argues that human beings across cultures find ways of rejecting the idea that death has the last word. Societies construct myths, develop cultural practices, and invest in collective pursuits to overcome the anxiety about the inevitability of death. Ancient Greek codes of honor, Chinese practices of ancestor-veneration, and the construction of pyramids and ziggurats in the ancient Near East and Mesoamerica are all, according to Becker, instances of the same human psychological impulse to use collective meaning-making to deny the meaninglessness of death.<\/p>\n
On Becker\u2019s theory, religious conceptions of reincarnation or the afterlife are not exceptions to a general acceptance of death. Rather, these religious beliefs are particularly clear, codified expressions of the near-universal human phenomenon of rejecting and repressing the finality of death. In the absence of religious convictions, human beings undertake \u201cimmortality projects\u201d and construct socially shared \u201cillusions\u201d to meet their psychological needs. Ever since the decline of religion as the unifying structure of meaning in Western societies\u2014Nietzsche\u2019s famous \u201cdeath of God\u201d\u2014film and other art forms have increasingly facilitated these shared illusions.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t need to agree with Becker\u2019s more sweeping claims to recognize that he\u2019s right about the pervasiveness of the human tendency to deny the finality of death, whether consciously or not. Seen through this lens, the resurrection trope in popular film and television serves a social purpose. Even if many viewers of these films don\u2019t actually believe that people come back to life, repeated exposure to resurrections and pseudo-resurrections functions as a sort of secular ritual of denying death.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n “Film Resurrections and the Denial of Death”<\/p>\n Columnist, Russell Johnson, explores the resurrection trope in American cinema and what it reveals about ushttps:\/\/t.co\/D9GTQz9lwP<\/a>@UChiDivinity<\/a>#marveluniverse<\/a> #DCUNIVERSE<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/jCjTRbCgPd<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Sightings: Religion in Public Life (@DivSightings) March 2, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n