Cultural References
Literary references to purgatory go back at least as far as Dante Alighieri. In his Divine Comedy story Purgatorio, Mount Purgatory is split into different terraces for those being made to be ready for heaven. At the top of Mount Purgatory is the Garden of Eden.
In the 1991 film Defending Your Life, Judgement City is a purgatory-like waiting area for the recently deceased waiting to be judged.
Purgatory is mentioned in many television shows, including The Sopranos, Lost, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Fringe, Supernatural - where it is not a place between Heaven and Hell but the location where dead monsters, such as vampires and werewolves, go after death - and Being Human.
In the South Park episode "Dead Celebrities", the experience of waiting for an airplane to take off while on the runway is referred to as purgatory.
In the 1999 film Purgatory by Uli Edel, a band of outlaws find themselves in the town of Refuge, which is really Purgatory.
In the 2010 video game Mass Effect 2, Purgatory is the name of a starship that was converted into a prison, infamous for the staff's brutal treatment of prisoners.
In one episode of the cartoon, Animaniacs, the three leads wind up in hell and take a boat to what the devil calls purgatory, after which they sing a short song about it.
In the anime "Angel Beats!", several teenagers find themselves in a purgatorial world. They believe that God gave them unfair lives, and they want to get back at him for it.
Purgatory is also the main setting for the movie Wristcutters: A Love Story
In the TV series Supernatural, purgatory is a place where the souls of monsters are sent to when they die, where they are destined to hunt and feed on each other for eternity.
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Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
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