Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality

On campus today (March 29, 2008) we experienced a day-and-a-half conference that featured a valuable and transformational documentary on how our relationship with death impacts our lives. Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality combines religion, philosophy, social science and experimental psychology into a coherent perspective. This combination keeps it very real and straight. Flight focuses on two threads. First it suggests anxiety about death is a primary source of our creativity (that's the quest for immortality part as exemplified by Gilgamesh mentioned in the film). Then the Flight's interviewees suggest that intensified and unresolved experiences of death anxiety lead us to derogate and annihilate those we differentiate as "other." The film even shows some of the subjects of experimental studies demonstrating this correlation. The pollster John Zogby gave two talks here too. All these social scientists are developing their work from a 1974 Pulitzer-Prize book by Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. The film presents all this with a poetic and musical touch. I hope you get to check it out.

http://www.flightfromdeath.com/
http://www.flightfromdeath.com/synopsis.htm
http://www.flightfromdeath.com/trailer.htm