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Ethan Lawrence – ‘After Life’ Cake Scene
Cake fight: James (played by Ethan Lawrence) and Lenny (played by Tony Way) are standing next to each other and stuffing cake into their faces while mumbling unintelligible lines of script
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In the past I have done over 100 blog posts on the Netflix series AFTER LIFE written by Ricky Gervais and staring Ricky as Tony Johnson. I respect both Ricky and his character Tony for being people who demand evidence and they refuse to accept anything with a blind faith. That is part of the reason I started writing letters to Ricky several years ago with historical evidence from archaeology and ancient cultures on the Bible’s claims. I personally think his latest series AFTER LIFE is his best by far and it does a great job of examining Ricky’s humanist worldview and the natural conclusions that come from this time plus chance view of the world.
Just like Solomon in The Book of Ecclesiastes, Ricky in AFTER LIFE is examining life under the sun, which is life between birth and death without God in the picture. The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literallymeans is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter. In fact, the phrase under the sun appears 29 times in Ecclesiastes.
Francis Schaefer indicated Ecclesiastes is truly the book of modern man because modern humanist man’s philosophy has brought him to the nihilistic conclusion that all is vanity and meaninglessness. This appears to be the place that the atheist Tony Johnson has landedand many of the characters around Tony have come to pessimisticconclusions about life too, though they have searched for satisfactionand meaning in life by pursuing ladies, luxuries, learning, labor, liquor, and laughter.
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Night Of 1,000 Stars
In the 5th episode of the 2nd season we have the NIGHT OF THE 1000 STARS presentation by the TAMBURY PLAYERS and James becomes a central figure in this episode. We learn that his father left his mother because of James’ hyperactivity and later in the town show James ruins a poem that Rebecca was giving because of a fart that makes the stage STINK! This does make the episode come full circle as the first scene has Tony visiting an elderly gentleman who never washes up because it is not worth it since he has no one to love. Take a look at this review of the episode.
The Man Who Was Putting His Mail In A Trash Bin
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After Life Season 2, Episode 5 recap: The Revue by Wade Wainio
Episode 205 of Netflix’s After Life is awkward entertainment.
In After Life 205, Tony (Ricky Gervais) must still face the eccentricities of his job. This time, he and Lenny (Tony Way) interview a man (Steve Speirs) who’s been erroneously putting his mail in a dog waste bun, due to his bad eyesight.
It gets sadder and weirder when he admits he thought the stench came from himself. He also mentions he never had any relationships due to low self-esteem, knowing that any woman would leave him.
In preparation for his Revue performance, James (Ethan Lawrence) “limbers up” his leg on a desk, annoying Valerie the receptionist (Michelle Greenidge).
We also learn that, due to his hyperactivity, James’ father gave June (Jo Hartley) an ultimatum: Either James goes or he will.
On the bright side, the character of James seems to like being at The Gazette. In fact, Tony and Sandy (Mandeep Dhillon) consistently seem more down in the dumps.
Revue host Ken (Colin Hoult) does a rousing rendition of Dion’s “The Wanderer,” then June and James perform Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” James also wards off Rebecca (Tracy Ann Oberman) with a fart, essentially thwarting her poem.
The other big event
After Life has obviously hinged on Tony’s reaction to the death of his wife (Kerry Godliman). This episode offers another sad event: Tony’s dad dies. It gives us a chance to hear another side of the character. Tony tells Emma his father never hit him as a child, choosing instead to say he’s disappointed. On the surface, Tomy takes the news with aplomb, but we’ve seen how he can struggle to cope with loss before.
What’s the theme of the episode?
This episode can easily be considered clumsy, blending themes of a talent show with a tragic death. However, one possible message is that life is sort of RANDOM like that. It does NOT necessarily have a coherent message. Life can be a bunch of semi-random events, then you die.
Joker- Send in the Clowns by Frank Sinatra
Tony’s character seems to reflect the idea that life itself is almost nihilistic. It throws endless pitches at us, with many of them being curveballs. In that sense (if I may stick to the baseball analogy), this episode perhaps knocks it out of the park. Even if it’s nobody’s favorite, it is definitely a hodgepodge of events highlighting the random nature of human experience.
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Judy Collins – Send In The Clowns
The last song of the show James dances to the song SEND IN THE CLOWNS. This song seems to support the idea that Tony is surrounded by fools. I agree with the reviewer that Ricky Gervais believes:
Life can be a bunch of semi-random events, then you die. Tony’s character seems to reflect the idea that life itself is almost nihilistic.
Wikipedia notes:
“Send In the Clowns” is a song written by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music, an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman‘s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night.
Bernadette Peters & Stephen Sondheim – “Send In the Clowns”
The “clowns” in the title do not refer to circus clowns. Instead, they symbolize fools, as Sondheim explained in a 1990 interview:
I get a lot of letters over the years asking what the title means and what the song’s about; I never thought it would be in any way esoteric. I wanted to use theatrical imagery in the song, because she’s an actress,but it’s not supposed to be a circus […] [I]t’s a theater reference meaning “if the show isn’t going well, let’s send in the clowns”; in other words, “let’s do the jokes.” I always want to know, when I’m writing a song, what the end is going to be, so “Send in the Clowns” didn’t settle in until I got the notion, “Don’t bother, they’re here”, which means that “We are the fools.”[2]
In a 2008 interview, Sondheim further clarified:
As I think of it now, the song could have been called “Send in the Fools”. I knew I was writing a song in which Desirée is saying, “aren’t we foolish” or “aren’t we fools?” Well, a synonym for fools is clowns, but “Send in the Fools” doesn’t have the same ring to it.[3]
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Barbra Streisand – Send In The Clowns ((Lyrics ))
Sondheim teaches Send In The Clowns (Part 1)
Send In The Clowns (From ‘A Little Night Music’)
Ricky Gervais is member of the British Humanist Association and an atheist. Therefore, it is logical that he thinks life is a result of TIME and CHANCE!
In episode 2 of the second season of AFTER LIFE is the following discussion:
Tony: I drink in times of trouble. I can’t help it the world is filled with trouble. It is a horrible place. Everyone is screwed up in someway. Everyone has worries like money or health or famine, war. We are chimps with brains the size of planets. No wonder we get drunk and try to kill each other. It is mental.
Matt: Always good to talk.
Tony: I was just explaining my new plan is to drink myself to death till I eventually implode in on my own evolution.
In his interview with Russell Brand Ricky Gervais asserted, “We are machines. We are machines trying to understand ourselves and that is hard. Will there one day be a computer suffering from anxiety? I reckon so. We are chimps with brains the size of the planet….I don’t understand consciousness…”
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Francis Schaeffer noted:
Modern man resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God.But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.
This ties in well with what Schaeffer said in describing Andy Warhol’s art:
THE OBSERVER June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. Andy is a mass communicator. Someone has described pop art as Dada plus Madison Avenue or commercialism and I think that is a good definition. Dada was started in Zurich and came along in modern art. Dada means nothing. The word “Dada” means rocking horse, but it was chosen by chance. The whole concept Dada is everything means nothing. Pop Art has been said to be the Dada concept put forth in modern commercialization. Everything in his work is being leveled down to an universal monotony which he can always sell for $8000.00.
ANDY WARHOL says, “It stops you thinking about things. I wish I were a machine. I don’t want to be heard. I don’t want human emotions. I have never been touched by a painting. I don’t want to think. The world would be easier to live in if we all were machines. It is nothing in the end anyway.”
Ricky’s atheistic humanism makes his selection of the song SILENCE by Dave Thomas Jr. perfect for AFTER LIFE because there has been no revelation from above which brings me to this discussion below.
Francis Schaeffer when he was discussing the artwork of Francis Bacon then he skips over to Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, and John Cage and compares them to Bacon in their view that possibly that a message break forth from the impersonal chance universe:
I have an essay on Francis Bacon by John Russell. Methuan published it in London in 1964.
Bacon goes on, “In my case all painting–and the older I get, the more it becomes so–is an accident.” Now this is very important and to think of Jackson Pollock putting on his paint as a pure accident and you may remember my lecture on Paul Klee.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) speaks of some of his paintings as though they were a kind of Ouija board. Klee thinks that the universe can speak through his paintings. Not because he believes there are spirits there to speak, but because he hopes that the universe will push through and cause a kind of automatic writing, this time in painting. It is an automatic writing with no one there, as far as anyone knows, but the hope that the “universe” will speak.We think of John Cage with the universe speaking though chance.
Now Bacon continues and he says something very similar to what Pollock, Cage and Klee believed, “I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things that are very much better than I could make it do. Perhaps one could say it’s not an accident, because it becomes a selective process what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.”
Now here from Francis Bacon’s own viewpoint. An absurd universe in a total sense and in some element of the paint taking on its own personality and a message may come through from impersonal source.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Chance rules. If a man starts out only from himself and works outward it must eventually if he is consistent seem so that only chance rules and naturally in such a setting you can not expect him to have anything else but finally a hate of life.
I like Francis Schaeffer‘s term “Mannishness” of man. He defines it as those aspects of man, such as significance, love, rationality and the fear of non being, which mark him off from animals and machines and give evidence of his being created in the image of a personal God.
(Francis Schaeffer pictured)
The scientist Blaise Pascal is quoted by Sagan and then Sagan notes, “Most of the philosophers adjudged great in the history of western thought held that humans are fundamentally different from other animals…”
As you know Pascal was the inventor of the barometer and he lived from 1623 to 1662. Pascal also observed, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man,and only God can fill it.”
What is the solution? “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The scriptural directive is not for us to work harder to achieve God’s favor (Romans 3:20), but to accept God’s mercy through our repentance and receiving Christ as a free gift (Ephesians 2:8-10).
(Below is the message I first since to Anthony Flew and he wrote me back and said he enjoyed listening to it)
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I have more articles posted on my blog about the last few yearsof Antony Flew’s life than any other website in the world probably. The reason is very simple. I had the opportunity to correspond with Antony Flew back in the middle 90’s and he said that he had the opportunity to listen to several of the cassette tapes that I sent him with messages from Adrian Rogers and he also responded to several of the points I put in my letters that I got from Francis Schaeffer’s materials. The ironic thing was that I purchased the sermon IS THE BIBLE TRUE? originally from the Bellevue Baptist Church Bookstore in 1992 and in the same bookstore in 2008 I bought the book THERE IS A GOD by Antony Flew. Back in 1993 I decided to contact some of the top secular thinkers of our time and I got my initial list of individuals from those scholars that were mentioned in the works of both Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers. Schaeffer had quoted Flew in his book ESCAPE FROM REASON. It was my opinion after reviewing the evidence that Antony Flew was the most influential atheistic philosopher of the 20th century.
The Fine Tuning Argument for the Existence of God fromAntony Flew!
Imagine entering a hotel room on your next vacation. The CD player on the bedside table is softly playing a track from your favorite recording. The framed print over the bed is identical to the image that hangs over the fireplace at home. The room is scented with your favorite fragrance…You step over to the minibar, open the door, and stare in wonder at the contents. Your favorite beverage. Your favorite cookies and candy. Even the brand of bottled water you prefer…You notice the book on the desk: it’s the latest volume by your favorite author…
Chances are, with each new discovery about your hospitable new environment, you would be less inclined to think it has all a mere coincidence, right? You might wonder how the hotel managers acquired such detailed information about you. You might marvel at their meticulous preparation. You might even double-check what all this is going to cost you. But you would certainly be inclined to believe that someone knew you were coming. There Is A God (2007) p.113-4
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The Daily Hatch 