Watching ‘Defending Your Life’ All These Years Later…
…and seeing it through eyes that are older and wiser
When Defending Your Life came out in 1991, I saw it once and had never watched it again until a month or so ago, but I have always remembered it.
In it, Albert Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a hapless guy stumbling his way through life and into an untimely death. He finds himself in Judgment City, a delightful, resort-like stop between this life and the next.
The story offers a twist on the traditional, “Were you a good enough person?” motif often presented in visions of the afterlife. In this universe, success at life, what a person is judged on, is their capacity to overcome fear and live with a brave and open heart, willing to risk rejection, failure, and embarrassment, to be unapologetically their truest self.
Those who are judged to have sufficiently conquered fear “go forward” to a higher state of being, while those who haven’t proven their bravery are sent back to earth (home of the “little brains”) for another lifetime of trying.
That one viewing over thirty years ago made enough of an impression that I have never forgotten the movie’s message. I was charmed by this vision of the afterlife, and it has remained somewhere in the back of my mind in the years since…
