William Parrish Will Perish – Meet Joe Black
by Sabrina Dawkins
In Meet Joe Black, the Jamaican woman called Joe “obeah.” Her daughter said it meant “bad spirit.” But Joe Black/Death responded, “Rahtid. Obeah evil. I not evil, woman.” And he quickly convinced her that her initial impression of him was wrong—but it wasn’t.
Satan and evil spirits need material bodies through which to fulfill their will in the material world. Death entered the world through the serpent’s beguilement of Eve, which led to disobedience to God: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). So who is Death in Meet Joe Black? He isn’t God—God didn’t want Adam and Eve to die. Death is Satan, the serpent who brought on the deaths of Adam and Eve by enticing them to disobey God.
God can both kill and make alive: “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive. I wound, and I heal. Neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39). Satan can only kill: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). But he was cleverly turned into a sensitive, naïve protagonist hero in the film Meet Joe Black. The evil spirit who has caused the spiritual and physical deaths of so many has been fashioned into a likeable and familiar character.
Satan is introducing himself as Death: Meet him. And he is letting William Parrish know that he Will Perish. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
Like Joe Black, William Parrish is a likeable character, but he doesn’t know God. So instead, he unwittingly confides in an evil spirit: We know this because he never calls “Death” by his real name: Satan. Does it make sense to befriend death, allow it into your house as it wears the body of some dead person and is on the mission to make you dead as well? Would you trust a spirit that does not talk about God?
So many movies and songs glamorize death—a godless death at that. They even make it poetic and set it to hypnotic music. In “Feel Good Time,” a song by Pink, she joyfully sings: “Sleeping in the church, riding in the dirt. Put a banner over my grave,” and then, “We know how to pray. Party every day. Make our desolation look plain.” And waiting at the end of the spiral dark tunnel of deceit and maybe a “feel-good time” is always an evil spirit who got you to choose death over eternal life. Before he takes you, Death/Satan might give you a life of wealth and luxury. He might take you to the top of the hill, as he did to William Parrish before he disappeared with him down below, to the grave, ending his life and his illusion of power.
It’s as if Satan is forcing his dupes to live out, to reenact his fall from grace and short illusion of power in the material world:
For thou hast said in thine heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.” Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, “Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms?”
Isaiah 14:13-16
Sources
https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Meet-Joe-Black.html Screenplay by Bo Goldman (and others)