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Fallen Angels

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Director Brad Silberling says that his reason for making City of Angels was to celebrate "the miraculous in the everyday." That is, Seth's inability to feel, touch, or taste helps us to appreciate those things that we, as humans, take for granted. City of Angels is not primarily about angels. It's about human beings. Angels are used merely as something that is not human to highlight the wondrous things that humans have which are often overlooked. I would have to say that there are probably three reasons to use angels. Wim Wenders used angels; angels are popular in mass culture today; and "angel" is both a recognizable term (a made-up creature would have had to have been explained more fully) and a fairly ambiguous term right now. Other than that, Silberling probably could have chosen anything that didn't have senses as humans do.

From Maggie's point of view, the story is about a woman preparing for her own death. As things move out from under her control, she becomes ready to have absolutely no control as she dies. Perhaps Seth was sent to accomplish this without either him or Maggie realizing it. An inconsistency here is that although it is made very clear in the beginning of the story that angels were never human--therefore when humans die they do not become angels--it seems that Maggie is becoming more and more angellike. She can sense things mentally as well as physically, she is lighted more ethereally, and seems to be taking Seth's angelic place after he falls.

There are many issues and questions brought up in the first half of the film. Unfortunately, the second half bails out on the answers. But because it is so interesting that a 1998 film would even mention things like these, I'll list a few. After Maggie loses her patient in the first few scenes, she talks with another doctor (later shown to be her boyfriend):

Maggie: "We fight for people in [the operating room], right?"
Jordan: "Right."
Maggie: "Don't you ever wonder who we're fighting with?"

As she talks over the same incident with a friend: "Now I feel that none of this is in my hands. And if it isn't, what do I do with that?" Maggie knows rationally that it wasn't her fault that the man died. She did everything she could, but she couldn't save him in the end.
Later, when she's talking with Seth:

Seth: "People die."
Maggie: "Not on my table."
Seth: "People die when their bodies give out."
Maggie: "It's my job to keep their bodies from giving out, or what am I doing here?"
Seth: "It wasn't your fault."
Maggie: "I wanted him to live."
Seth: "He is living. Just not the way you think."
Maggie [after long silence]: "I don't believe in that."
Seth: "Some things are true whether you believe in them or not."

When Maggie and Seth are in hospital lab and she's showing him her bloodcells under a microscope:

Maggie: "That's me."
Seth: "That's all you are...If this is all you are, when you die, that's the end."
Maggie: "I don't know. I think so."
Seth: "Then how do you explain...the enduring myth of heaven?"

In these few exchanges, City of Angels almost gets around to God. But these questions, as provacative as they are, are never answered. Probably they are questions which the screenwriter and director wonder themselves, and have no answer for.

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Page last updated 8/1/04.