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Scott Taylor Passing Through Oblivion Synopsis Passing Through Oblivion is the story of city columnist John O’Rouke’s consuming guilt, self-destruction and eventual redemption after his family is killed in a plane crash. John was supposed to have been with his wife, father and kids, but he stayed behind, he said, to finish some pressing work before hopping a plane the next day. What eventually leads to John’s destruction is the fact he was in bed with another woman when the plane hit the ground. He had been having an affair, and he lied to get some quality time with his mistress. There’s a saying in hospitals when patients are slowly but clearly dying. They call it "circling the drain." Six months after the crash, John is circling his drain, too afraid to end his life, too guilty to save himself. As he continues to overdo alcohol and cocaine, it’s only a matter of time before his body has had enough. One night, after a humiliating evening as a celebrity bartender at a breast cancer fundraiser, John stumbles back to Matty’s, his regular haunt, where he finally snorts enough coke to overdose. In a stupor, he tries to find his way home, but instead falls through the doors of a church where he passes out on the floor. He hears a voice in the darkness urging him to get up and get on his way. At first, John is afraid he’s about to get robbed or beaten, but it turns out the voice is that of a long-haired, bearded man in a white robe. More Jerry Garcia/Big Lebowski than Jesus, this being’s job is to take John to his destination in the afterlife. Do you know how people say we see our lives flash before us as we’re dying? Well, John sees his life in the form of a talk show like Leno and Letterman, where he’s the host and guests from his life come on to tell him about the good – and bad – influence he had on them. The audience is comprised of corpses of varying degrees of decomposition dressed in black ties, tails and top hats, or ball gowns and evening dresses with jewels everywhere. It’s Gatsby in the afterlife. All the while, John and Ringo become very close. As their journey continues, John visits with an intimidating group of men and women all dressed in black tie as well. They tell him they are the ones who decide how much everyone gets at birth, and that they’re very disappointed with him because they took some away from one to give to him, but he never really appreciated his gifts or his talent. For while they dole out intelligence, humour, anger and such, they have no say on how it’s used during the course of one’s life. Two others join them as time passes. John’s favourite college English teacher - part gruff professor, part Jack Nicholson – is found, as is John’s most consuming, dangerous love, Olivia. They all end up in a mammoth train station, one three times the size of New York’s Central Station, with doors lining every wall and legions of gray-suited drones leaving, entering and taking trains twenty-four hours a day. Stymied as to what they should do next, tension gets the best of them and they begin to argue. Only Ringo, with a found guitar, stops them in their tracks. He plays the beginning to Band on the Run.
They move closer and join in, a motley crew of the dead and almost dead, forgetting their differences and singing with all their hearts as Ringo continues to play.
But in the midst of the singing, John grabs his chest and shrieks in pain, as his image flickers in front of the others. "What’s happening to me?" he asks, but the others – even Ringo – don’t know. He screams once more, and this time he is gone. Suddenly he’s awake inside an ambulance as a paramedic shocks him again with a defibrillator. "I think I have him!" he screams to the driver. "How much longer?" John barely survives, but he does come through it with a new lease on life and a clean body and attitude to match, even though he recalls nothing of his afterlife adventure. In time, he finds new love, learns to live with his past and – most importantly – learns to like himself again. One spring evening, he climbs the stairs of a Metro station in downtown Montreal and breathes in the sweet spring air. He lopes into a convenience store (a depanneur there) for a cool drink just as a robbery is underway. A teenager holding his first gun swings towards the door and fires the trigger without even meaning to do so. The shot is an unlucky one for John because while the kid couldn’t hit the side of a barn if he was aiming at it, the random shot strikes John in the forehead. As he lies on the floor, blood seeping through cracks in the dirty tiles, he hears a voice. "Come on, man, get up. We have a long way to go." It’s Ringo’s voice, and as John’s life slips away he smiles slightly knowing somehow that it’ll be okay. |
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