You know that thing in movies that are supposed to be happy, but lots of people die in the end, and so after the last important death, the dead character meets up with all the other dead characters? Do they really think about what that means?

The thing that always got to me was in "Braveheart" when Murron appears in the crowd at Wallace's execution. Sure, fine, she's come to take him to heaven...but doesn't she look REALLY into his torture and murder? Her smile doesn't really come across as welcoming or comforting, more like "Yeah, yeah, pull those guts out! Now get the axe...oh, baby!" But we can put that down to acting choices or whatever. It was a little weird, IMO, when most of his romantic life in the film was devoted to his relationship with a married princess, and that Murron has been dead for the length of a normal movie, but I guess they wanted to give the audience a ray of hope at the end. Since he narrates a voiceover mentioning events after his death, one would presume that he is happy in the next life (since he was using his "Scottish" accent, we have to accept that it was Wallace speaking to the audience, and not Mel Gibson), thus rendering his vision of Murron redundant, especially considering he was ignoring his best friends who actually seemed upset.

But "Braveheart" is practically ideal, compared to "Titanic", where Rose dies and the scene fades to her reuniting with Jack and everyone else on the big staircase of Titanic. I actually asked when walking out of the theater "Do you go to Titanic when you die if you were good, or if you were bad?" People were crying, but I'm pretty sure my question had nothing to do with it. The music and the facial expressions of a pair of now Oscar-winning actors, suggest it is heaven, which conforms with Rose's assertion that in the brief time they had, they loved a lifetime's worth - No, dammit, that was the GOOD James Cameron romance movie - anyway, stuff to that effect. So, because she lived a good life, and because he died saving her (sort of), they get to spend eternity together, reliving their happiest moments, while the father of her children gets some peace and quiet. But it's not just them on the staircase, it's EVERYONE, including people who in real life would have been driven away from the rich people parts of the ship by truncheon-weilding stewards! Including the designer of the ship, who is the closest person standing by them when they meet up. Does he get to share in Titanic-heaven, because his design flaws sent a thousand people to an icy watery grave and eventually derailed the filmmaking career of one of the greatest directors of the late 20th century? Or is it hell for him, where he has to watch a couple of obnoxious kids making out for all eternity? What about all the other people for whom Titanic was a last torment to endure before reaching the promised land of opportunity, except they never got there! How bad were they, that their afterlives are all about reliving that tantalizing experience, which happens to be very close one of the oldest specified infernal punishments, of Sisyphis and the eponymous Tantalus? Or what does it say about Jack and Rose, that their heaven is basically having the only fun in everyone else's hell?

And what about Molly Brown? She was on a lot of ships that sunk. Why do the other two ships not warrant her presence in THEIR afterlives? And then there's Rose's mother. Assuming her daughter can disengage from her peasant crush long enough to catch up, is heaven going to consist of learning that her only child had a long and happy life, while letting Mom think she had drowned? Or that in addition to besmirching her virtue in the cargo hold with said peasant, Rose went on to such depravity as a stage career and later titilating a future-boat with minute details of her sex life and hand-drawn nude portraits of herself.

Or for one more example, to get off the theme of James Horner soundtracks tricking us into underthinking eternal rewards, think about the ramifications of the finale of "Les Miserables" where Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway end up on the barricades with the filthy commies. Are the barricades hell, in which case, like 98% of the cast died for nothing, their revolt was wrong and they are being punished for it, or is it heaven for them? If they were truly motivated by justice and desperation, then heaven should be a world where they have the things for which they were ostensibly fighting, not the struggle itself. Because if heaven is the barricades, that is, the actual battle, then they aren't really heroes, nor are they desperate people pushed to their limits, they are troublemakers who were only fighting for the sake of causing uprest, for the excitement or violence of it all. In which case they DON'T deserve heaven, so the barricades HAVE to be hell. In other words, the scene of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway (why is she so excited about them, she died years before the riots? Is watching your future son-in-law's dead friends pointlessly wreck the city heaven or hell? ) proudly observing them and singing along, is actually subverting the entire seeming point of the movie/novel. The fact that Jackman (I watched a lot of I Love Lucy as a kid; I can't say his character's name with a straight face) turns away from the bishop & church to watch the guys on the barricade suggests too, that it lies in the opposite direction of heaven.

In a discussion on the WoT board a while back, I mentioned that I was just as glad that Jordan didn't bother to include any religion in the series, because people who don't understand religious belief only seem to portray it badly. I think the constant mishandling of heaven in film supports my position. It's enough to make reincarnation seem like a happy alternative.