Death and what comes after has always been a subject of great interest and uncertainty. Many have tried to depict their own vision of the afterlife, be it heaven or hell, paradiso or inferno. Here, I will discuss the similarities and differences in the hell represented in the movie What Dreams May Come and the Inferno of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.What Dreams May Come is a movie about two soul mates, Chris (Robin Williams) and Annie (Anabella Sciorra). After Chris' death in a car accident coupled with the death of her two children four years earlier, Annie commits suicide. While Chris has gone to heaven and discovered that his heaven is living in a world of Annie's paintings, Annie has gone to a hell also of her own making because of her suicide. When Chris learns of Annie's death and her place in hell, he vows to go there and bring her back. The main theme is that soul mates exist and love goes on after death.One of the main differences between the hell that Dante paints and director Vincent Ward creates in the movie is the idea of the afterlife being objective or subjective. In the Inferno, Dante paints a hell of fire and brimstone, carefully divided and subdivided. Everything is meticulous and standardized. A place and punishment is dished out for every crime. For example, circle seven, depicted in Cantos twelve through seventeen is the designated place for the violent but has many subdivisions includingviolent against neighbor, self, God, nature, and art; each with their own punishment. Although Ward's vision of hell draws much from the traditional thinking of Dante's version, perhaps only for the sake of painting a picture of hell on the screen, the major difference is in the subjectiveness of it. In an interview regarding the film, director Vincent Ward stated "rather than there being an objective paradise where everybody's paradise is the same, you create your own paradise and it's whatever you want it to be" ("A Note on t...
