City of Angels, Cert. PG
Directed by Brad Silberling
Starring Nicolas Cage, Meg Ryan
Hollywood films which treat heaven as a reality are few and far between. Those which do, and are also set in Hollywood itself, are rarer still. City of Angels is an exception. It takes as its starting point that this visible, material world is but a small part of a wider, open universe and that human life does not end at death. Moreover, the spiritual world is not portrayed simply as spooky, full of demons and grotesque special effects. Rather, there is some attempt to portray heavenly life and to compare it with human mortality.
City of Angels (a pun on 'Los Angeles') is about ... angels. They appear in their hundreds and are described as eternal messengers of God. However, their job appears to be more a mixture of guardian angels who are paradoxically unable to intervene, and comforters to the dying, whom they usher into their new, presumably eternal, life. We glimpse what this eternal life is like from the angels who represent it. It is not life as we know it.
The angels portray eternal life as passionless, aloof, a superior kind of existence to ordinary humanness -not unlike the pre-Diana image of royalty. They hover above the world, observing us in their literally bloodless way. They perch on the well-known monuments of Los Angeles, including the Hollywood sign, and emphasise its superficial lifestyle. They wear long, stylish coats rather than the more traditional white gowns and expressions so vacant and dreamy that they sometimes seem in danger of complete insensibility. They have bodies but are able to move or fly over distances instantaneously. But, crucially, they cannot feel, either physically or emotionally. And here we are at the centre of things. For this picture of eternal life compares poorly with human warmth and experience.
Falling into humanity
Seth, the angel-hero, gets involved - inevitably by falling in love with a glamorous Los Angeles surgeon whose job brings home her own powerlessness in the face of death. His life is transformed and his discovery of emotional feeling leads him to wonder about sensual feeling: the taste of a pear, the touch of skin. So far, so good. But Seth discovers that he can become human by exercising his free choice and giving up his eternal angelic future. The prospect of love and human intimacy makes standing on the beach listening to the 'song of the dawn' pale into insignificance. And so he becomes human. This is imagined as a 'fall', for the spiritual and the sensual are pictured as inevitably in conflict. Unfortunately, things rather go downhill from this point on. The subsequent storyline can be summarised as: angel falls for girl; angel gets girl; angel loses girl. I will not bore you with the details.
While ultimately flawed as a film, City of Angels is of interest because, unusually, it takes eternal life for granted; as Seth tells the sceptical surgeon: 'Some things are true whether you believe them or not.' His way of going from 'Hello' to 'What do you think happens after death?' is a lesson to us all. Moreover, the film tries to portray what eternal life might be like, and paints a picture which underlines common misunderstandings. God is not uninterested in his creation as this film suggests. Nor has he left it to its own devices. Eternal life is joy, passion and love, life indeed. But for Seth, the spiritual and bodily are mutually exclusive. That God should come in the flesh is not only a scandal but an impossibility. That God might sacrificially love the world is beyond the comprehension of this film.
Dr. Philip Sampson
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