What Dreams May Come

This week in class we watched What Dreams May Come, a movie about a man named Chris who loses his children to a car accident and then he himself is killed in one. The film What Dreams May Come and Dante's Inferno have much in common, since the film pulled many ideas from the epic poem. Chris is sent to heaven, which is related to what Dante conjured up because Dante believed the punishment should fit the sin. In What Dreams May Come, the souls who are in heaven create their own eternity. At the beginning, Chris doesn't realize that he has died, since he is still on earth and can see everybody clearly. However, they can't see or hear him, and Chris begins his journey into the afterlife. His journey symbolizes Dante's journey with Virgil as his guide. Chris' eternity is literally Annie's paintings, seeing that they were/are soul mates it only Inferno, and she is cast down into hell. The entire film is filled with symbolic colors and symbols and parallels many ideas from the epic poem Inferno.
seemed fitting. Annie, however, can't handle her life without her husband and kids, and ends up killing herself in order to meet them again in heaven. What she doesn't know is that suicide is considered a sin, as it is in Dante's hell as well.

There is an abundance of symbolic colors and scenes in the film. The one that stood out the most to me was the color purple. This color is mainly used to represent suffering and death, and also centered around Annie. She paints a purple tree that appears in Chris' eternity. This relates back to Dante's Inferno because in Dante's hell the sinners who committed suicide are turned into trees just to be ripped apart and then start the whole thing over again. Annie also wore a purple dress when preparing the pills that she was going to take in order to kill herself. She was sitting in her bed, with her lamp on and Chris' lamp off, and there were three paintings behind her; hell, earth, and purgatory, therefore relating back to Dante's Inferno.