What Dreams May Come

So this week we watched a movie called What Dreams May Come. This movie was sort of like how Dante's Inferno goes, but it's not quite there. It deals with a lot of emotional pain and how the brain thinks, while Dante's Inferno deals with the body being taken with the soul to the afterlife, and the body being punished physically. This movie was really well made, and had a lot of the same aspects that Dante's Inferno did, but was still amazingly different, and had an entirely different story-line too. In Dante's Inferno, there was a lot of color patterns found in each canto. Red being the fire cantos, and blue being the further down iced over cantos. In this movie, there was also tons of color schemes. Every time a person was about to die, or had just died, there was purple everywhere to indicate death. At the very beginning of the movie, the character named "Annie" is wearing a red dress, with white underneath. She waves the red around like a flag, showing innocence as the white is exposed. Slightly later, both their kids die. It changes times and has a four year skip right after. It then shows the wife (Annie) in all black, with her hair cut, and she looks completely different, and quite fierce. This is to show loss of innocence and how she has changed emotionally since the loss of loved ones. This reminds me of Dante's Inferno because in canto 32, Dante literally attacks a soul, showing how much he has been through on his journey, and what he has seen. He has lost his innocence from this voyage.

I also noticed the role water plays in What Dreams May Come. The very first scene is of Annie and Chris (the husband) bumping into each other's boats on accident in a lake. This is the very beginning of their love story, and shortly after they get married, it shows them kissing in the rain as they shoot each other with hoses. At first water plays a very happy and relaxing role, but as the movie gets going, worse and worse things start to happen when it is raining. Chris himself dies in a car accident while it is raining on a highway. Shortly after his death, he constantly recalls a memory with his son in the forest messing around while it rains. He has a serious talk with him and how he struggles. This is a key component because his son is opening up to his dad, in a way we have never seen in this movie until now. What Dreams May Come and Dante's Inferno have so much alike, and both have a very cool and intriguing story of the afterlife.