Touring heaven and hell

Abstract

Accounts of near-death experiences (NDE) are a subcategory of the growing beguilement with spectacular death in the academic and popular imagination. Memoirs by Christians, atheists, physicians, children, and ordinary people who claim to have hovered above their brain-dead bodies; toured heaven and hell; met with divinities, demons, and/or the deceased loved ones; and returned to life are bestsellers, and subjects for documentaries, films, and the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Focused on Western iterations of the phenomenon, scientific researchers propose biological materialist rather than supernaturalist-based explanations for NDE. Highly profitable, NDE accounts have been folded into the consumer–entertainment–celebrity industrial complex. Using content analysis of published interviews and memoirs, the chapter presents a study of 37 celebrity NDE, including Sharon Stone, Ozzy Osbourne, Jane Seymour, George Foreman, Christopher Reeve, Debra Winger, Tony Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Cash, and Tracy Morgan. The chapter investigates how celebrity NDE (1) features compare with academic findings; (2) are framed as transformative experiences, mythic quests; (3) are part of the mediation/mediatisation, commercialisation/commodification, re-ritualisation, and specialisation of death that are features of the age of ‘spectacular death’; (4) heighten the spectacularity of death, the dead, the undead, celebrity, and celebrity afterlives; and (5) challenge binaries established by modernity.