ter through a gate which bears the famous inscription, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." (Canto 3, Line 9). They are immediately inundated with visions and sounds of souls in pain. While Dante describes these as "the nearly soulless whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise," Ward gives no name to their counterparts in the film (Canto 3, Lines 33-34). Next they are ferried on the river Acheron by Charon toward the first circle of hell. However, Chris and Albert must enter an elevator-type contraption upon the shipwreck labeled Cerberus to gain entrance to the rest of hell.Upon exiting the elevator, Chris and Albert are confronted with a field of heads, their bodies buried beneath the sludge leaving only their heads above ground. As Chris and Albert pass these souls cry out to them. This vision is reminiscent of many of the punishments that Dante paints but not specifically one. It can be compared with the gluttonous buried in sludge and freezing rain in Canto six or the violent against their neighbors fixed in place in varying levels of the river of boiling blood in Canto twelve.Chris inadvertently breaks through the surface of the field of heads and falls through layers of ground and into Annie's part of hell, the hell for suicides. In the film, Chris states: "good people end up in hell because they can't forgive themselves..." Annie has not been able to forgive herself for how her family had deteriorated and her escape from life through suicide. Her self-loathing and guilt paints her hell just as Chris paints his own heaven. Her hell is a version of her home on Earth but everything is dead, decrepit, and gloomy. There she stays and lives forever in a torment of her own making.Compared to Dante's depiction of suicides, this is a horribly politically correct and nineties Hollywood concoction. In the Inferno, the suicides are located in Circle seven among the violent against self. Their punishment is not self inflicted, it is de...
