By Michelle Boorstein
I’m not Mexican, I’ve never celebrated Día de los Muertos, but I sobbed my way through “Coco,” the animated film that won an Oscar for its
vibrant, orange-petal-filled depiction of the afterlife.
Having lost my mother somewhat recently, I found it seductive and mesmerizing to sit in a dark room full of other people and together, in front of a huge screen, plunge into the fantastical afterlife depicted in “Coco,” a detailed world where the dead picnic, party — and watch over the living attentively. My mind drifted to a skeleton version of my
mother, impeccably dressed in a sweater-skirt set, in her law office or at some craft show and just as voracious and judgey as ever, schmoozing with the load of relatives and friends who preceded her in death — a possibility just too tempting. And the closeness and the longing between the living and the dead in the film left me a puddle.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s an animated film, a project launched probably not by
hospice workers and clergy but Hollywood consultants and focus groups. And the story line of a family whose mourning and loss are eased by a guitar-playing little boy, a dopey dog and a father’s love for the chubby little girl he left behind in death? Sappiness defined. Even my 8-year-old teased me for crying.
But I have blurry ideas of what happens after death. That attribute makes me extremely common in a
country where people are rapidly ditching institutional religion, with its paradigms, rules and stories, but remain mostly uncomfortable or unwilling to think deeply or talk with others about what they do believe and imagine, if anything, about the afterlife.
Americans have very few, if any, shared spiritual spaces. Which is why “Coco” and other mega-pop-culture experiences may be in modern times a kind of
sanctuary, the closest thing we have — however cheesy it may seem — to “talking” about the religious or supernatural spheres in which all but the most hardcore nonbelievers still dabble. For many of us, these experiences open a door with others, and with ourselves, to touch the few religious topics that still feel widely relevant. That is not nothing at a time when public debates about presidential prayer breakfasts and which marriage or divorce documents God approves of seem for millions
of Americans soul-killing...READ
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