An astrological take on "Heaven Can Wait"

"Heaven Can Wait" had an all star cast worthy of a disaster movie like the "Poseidon Adventure," or "The Towering Inferno," but it was an adaptation of "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" from my Grandparents time and starred Warren Beatty, Dyan Cannon, Charles Grodin, Buck Henry, James Mason, and Jack Warden. The first act of "Heaven Can Wait" was about a very 1970's L.A. Rams hippie era quarterback played by Warren Beatty, who jogged in the canyon, practiced clarinet at night, a humble servant of football, with no ego. He was best friends with Jack Warden, the trainer for the Rams, and if memory serves me well Beatt gets into a game when the starting QB gets hurt and shows his stuff, presumably at the onset of a great career. Then, he goes for a bike ride the next day in his grey sweatsuit and is hit by a car in a tunnel. It turns out that the young innocent's death was a mistake when Beatty boards an airplane for Heaven and lands on a fog machine set where he meets his angels. It appears a bumbling angel, Buck Henry, took Beatty away too soon, and this is explained by the chief angel, James Mason. It seems the afterlife doesn't function this way and the two angels concoct a plan to bring back Beatty's spirit to life, but in another body, and he incarnates a very wealthy man, Leo Farnsworth, who is dying, and takes over his life.

The second act turns into a hilarious romantic comedy about Warren Beatty's hippiesh spirit and character in the body of a very wealthy man, living with a conniving couple trying to take him for everything he's worth. The woman in the couple (Dyan Cannon) is also his wife, and is cheating on him with Dyan Cannon, but Beatty who still has the personae of "Joe" could care less. He has been reincarnated, or newly embodied, to see out his destiny, but no one gets this, and thus the screwball comedy. In some ways, the movie really gets into the innocence of a hippie archetype and how ill fitted he is for wealth, a rare moment in time around 1976, before the Boomers struck it rich, and Beatty plays it perfectly. He ends up falling in love with Julie Christie, a reporter trying to take Farnsworth's businness (?) down for being unethical, and a lot of the humor plays on Farnsworth agreeing with her that his business practices are unethical, and she starts to fall in love with him, and he with her, disregarding his marriage entirely, another big theme of the day. A lot of the humor plays on Farnsworth surprising everyone with his 'new character' because he's not really Leo Farnsworth.

Beatty resurrects his football career by hiring Jack Warden, the Rams trainer, to train him on the Farnsworth estate, where the second act takes place, and where Leo Farnsworth surprisingly becomes a very good quarterback who wins a tryout with the Rams and makes the squad. Farnsworth becomes L.A.'s hottest story, but dies on the field of battle because the angels have a master plan: they tell "Joe" Beatty, that he has to give up Farnsworth's body to inhabit the body of a new Rams quarterback, Tom Jarrett, and leads them to victory through Jarrett's corporeal transitory temporal state. Admittedly, I had to wikipedia the end of this rather cosmologically profound film, but Beatty becomes Tom Jarrett, not Joe, who he was in the 1st act, or Leo Farnsworth, who he was in the second act. In terms of plot movies often run on faith, and I can only imagine Joe can't come back to life because he's dead, and Farnsworth is dead too, leaving Tom Jarrett, who dies on the field also, so two deaths for the Rams in a very short time, but now I remember and Jarrett doesn't die. He's fatally injured but the angels of mercy bring him back to life to win the Super Bowl in the coliseum, the stadium where I watched the Rams and SC kick ass!

According to wikipedia, the angels also told Joe that he'd have no memory of what he'd just gone trhough but because his spirit's inabitation of Farnsworth's body was never meant to be the QB was still aware of his past. I am a student of the Myth of Er, Plato's version of the afterlife, that appears at the end of the Republic, a treatise on government, and I found the part about memory interesting, though on second thought if you believe in reincarnation part of the theory is that you have no memory of your past lives unless you have a mystical experience through past life regression or rebirthing. Of course, Beatty doesn't want to hear that he'll never have another memory especially since he's fallen in love with Julie Christie as "Joe," but in the body of Leo Farnsworth, a very rich man, who were lead to believe the hippie woman doesn't want to marry for his wealth but his ideals, another hippie trope. This is solved at the end when Tom Jarrett, Beatty's new identity, runs into Christie in the tunnel to the stadium like Mean Joe Greene did with that kid in the famous coke commercial. They both have a fleeting moment of romantic acknowledgement because in classic Hollywood fashion they promised each other they'd remember this moment forever when they were still conscious but "Joe" as a consciousness through the body of Farnsworth was only temporary, and he was awaiting a full transsubstatiation.

"Heaven Can Wait" must've been the first movie to map out a cosmology for me since I had no formal religious education, and everything about it made sense. I'm not sure if this was because the movie was comic gold, written by Elaine Maye and Robert Towne, with unforgettable performances by everyone, but the art of the film must've helped the message come across, or maybe the message guided the art, but either way the cosmological interpretation of events for the life of a Rams backup QB was clear. The movie said we all have a destiny and are guided by a preordained life chosen for us by a higher power, and that was a really big idea, especially since the notion of God or all the world's major religions was somehow skirted in the place of a couple of angels who seemed all too human themselves, capable of human error, but also capable of correcting it. I'm not even sure "Heaven Can Wait," was about reincarnation, but it firmly established the transsubstantiation of the soul, a vedic idea, also in Plato's Myth of Er, and yet put the word "Heaven" in the title, so that it wouldn't alienate western audiences, a brilliant move by the producers!

I can't say for sure that "Heaven Can Wait" shaped my vision of the afterlife but by making Beatty a football player in '70's L.A., my home, and then turning his spirit's plight into a classic romantic comedy, the kind they don't make anymore, made the idea of destiny plausible. It may have been my favorite movie for a season or two, and one that I'd watch over and over and over on the Z channel, because it was a crowd pleaser, further making its spiritual allegations all the more appealing. I can only imagine the popularity of "Heaven Can Wait" let people acknowledge 'there may be more in this life than our philosophy can account for,' in the words of Hamlet, also popularized by the Hamburger Hamlet, an L.A. hot spot. Indeed, one could talk about how much they loved "Heaven Can Wait" and it was almost like saying they too had a glimpse into the memory of their past life that was repressed, but could be glimpsed from time to time in moments of romantic wonder and transcendence.

This takes us to the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit, two key components of Hellenistic astrology. Together they account for the timing technique called 'zodiacal releasing,' or ZR, and completely fit with the cosmological premise of "Heaven Can Wait," a movie about how angels time events to match destiny. In the context of "Heaven Can Wait," the Lot of Fortune would literally symbolize what we are supposed to become, or how we're supposed to conclude our life, how we're supposed to be remembered, and that to tamper with this would upset the cosmic order, so one can imagine that the plan of destiny is ordained not by the angels but a higher power, and the angels are mere servants. I'm not sure an astrological chart shows you God, but it shows where you're going, the Lot of Fortune, and how you're going to get there, the Lot of Spirit. Buck Henry and James Mason were the Lords of Spirit, guiding the life's events, and the Lot of Spirit itself must be the orders they are working to fulfill Fortune. In our own personal life, I'm not sure we have much contact with our Lords of Spirit, just like Beatty didn't have much contact with his, until the plan for his life got fucked up, and they had to interfere and come down the earth to confer with him. The best metaphor we have for this are those people who appear and disappear rather quickly and yet seem to play a significant role in how major events in our life play out like car wrecks, near death experiences, or meeting the love of your life!

The Lords of Spirit and Fortune come down for a moment to alter the course of our destiny, and then just as quickly disappear, but they are simply fulfilling the Lot of Spirit, that is inextricably linked to the Lot of Fortune. So, the Lot of Fortune is God's plan, and the Lot of Spirit is the implementation of the plan, with the Lords of Fortune and Spirit both working on behalf of God. In "Heaven Can Wait," the Lord of Fortune would be akin to James Mason, Buck Henry's superior officer, who chastises Henry (a classic bumbling angel from which predenced had been set) for not following the divine order to take plac by taking out "Joe" too soon, something Buck Henry, the Lord of Spirit, may not have been able to see too clearly, since he's more a pupeteer pulling the strings of "Joe's" fate, and may not see the grand plan. In both cases, the Lords of Fortune and Spirit are able to materialize on the earthly plane and talk to Beatty about his Lots, so that might be an astrological insight into how to look at this rather complex Hellenistic equation with a favorite movie of my youth. I do believe the more you look at Hellenistic astrology through the lens of movies and three act structure the clearer it will become.