JACOB'S LADDER
A film review by N. P. Rousseau
Copyright 1990 N. P. Rousseau
(The following is probably only for people seriously obsessed with JACOB'S LADDER, and definitely only for people who have seen the movie.)
"If you're afraid of dying, and you're holdin' on, you'll see devils tearin' your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freein' you from the world. It all depends on how you look at it." For me, these words spoken by Louie (Danny Aiello), and paraphrasing Meister Eckhart are at the heart of the movie.
Bruce Joel Rubin (writer and associate producer) sets up the story in such a way that we need only accept two relatively tame ideas in order to accept the movie as a whole. First, dreams can seem real enough to be confused with reality, and second, very long dream time can take place in very short real time. Though this may give Rubin and Adrian Lyne (director) a Teflon shovel, by allowing them to simply attribute any inconsistency to the inconsistent nature of dreams, I'd argue that they don't include anything in the film unworthy of serious consideration and analysis.
Most reviews I've read throw out references to "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," as if to say Rubin's idea is unoriginal. Many Shakespearean plays involve a confusion of dreams and reality (A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, for example) and since Shakespeare stole almost all his plots, maybe originality shouldn't be the issue. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Rubin, like Shakespeare may simply be taking an idea that "oft was thought, But n'er so well expressed."
While flashbacks have long been standard fare in literature and film, the one aspect of "Owl Creek" that might be considered original is its use of flash-forward. William Golding (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1983) uses a similar technique in his novel FREE FALL. The main character in Golding's novel is only alive for a few minutes, during an unsuccessful parachute jump. From the moment he realizes his chute won't open, the book becomes a flash-forward in the mind of the protagonist, similar to "Owl Creek." Suffice it to say that these ideas have been around, and the question remains, what do Rubin and Lyne do with them?
In the book of Genesis, Jacob, the younger son of Isaac has a vision of a ladder between heaven and earth, on which angels ascend and descend. With a single biblical phrase, Rubin sets up the major premise of the movie. We're stuck on earth, we won't be here forever, where do we go next, and how do we get there? Again, Rubin's not the first to use this metaphor, but since Calvin's references to Jacob's Ladder seldom involve LSD, this could be a new angle on an old symbol.
The Ladder may just be our ticket from here to eternity, but to eternal what? The hippie chemist's ladder takes us straight down to the primal fear, the base anger, while Gabe's staircase at the end of the movie seems to have a brighter destination. With this dichotomy in place, the trick seems to be to be able to tell the difference between up and down, or heaven and hell, since as Louie tells us, the devils might really be angels, or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it. Since Meister Eckhart and Woody Allen haven't solved this problem, we're likely to be sympathetic with Jacob's (Tim Robbins) predicament.
Jacob's son Gabe, with a name reminiscent of Gabriel, the messenger angel seems to wear a white hat (after all, he's the only son with light hair, and the only one without a spherical, bloated, demonic face). He asks Jacob to tuck him in, tells him not to go back to bed with Sarah, and has Jacob leave the door open, a little more.
Jezebel (Elizabeth Pena) pretty much wears only black, as we might picture her biblical namesake. She's a "heathen," who doesn't go much for church names, and tells us that Jacob is with her because he sold his soul for a good lay. Faust sells his soul for knowledge, while Jacob seems to sell his to be spared knowledge, with its pain and responsibility. Jezzie is often kind and comforting to Jacob, but also seems to have a dark side. Following the "Who *are* you?!" scene, she tells Jacob he can rot, and she's present in the hospital in hell scene, even preparing the syringe for his forehead. In her last scene with Jacob, she pleads with him not to go to talk with the hippie chemist, the act which finally allows Jacob to "make his peace, freeing him from the earth."
Louie wears white, has a bright, circular light over his shoulder, and looks like an overgrown cherub. In fact, he looks like an angel, as Jacob tells him every time he sees him. Louie is the only source of stability and sanity in Jacob's jump-cut life. He goes to Louie when things are out of alignment, and Louie straightens them out. Louie's a life saver, and he knows it. He even rescues Jacob from the hospital in hell. So why is he named for the very first angel to descend the Ladder from heaven to hell? Just coincidence, I guess. (You could never convince me that a single name in this script was not considered and reconsidered ad nauseum, so that while possible, coincidences are rather unlikely, as are other chronological and logistical inconsistencies).
We're willing to believe that Jacob, on his deathbed, and with the possible assistance of the chemically isolated dark side of LSD (BZ, if you prefer) could invent a believable, post-Vietnam life for himself. In dream-time, it could last six years, or the time between leaving Vietnam, and getting a call from Paul Grunigan, his similarly-spooked battalion buddy.
What helps me buy post-Vietnam life with Jezzie, and working at the Post Office is that he might have started working there and met Jezzie before going to Vietnam. We know that he spent six years studying for his Ph.D., and then went to work for the Post Office, thereby angering his wife Sarah enough to throw him out. ("What can I tell ya, Louie? After Nam I just didn't want to think.") Jacob might have invented Jezzie and the Post Office out of thin air, or possibly they were based only on the knowledge that he was having marital trouble with his wife, and that when he got back from Vietnam, he wanted to find a job where he didn't have to think.
But if he knew something about working at a Post Office, and had at least met Jezzie before Vietnam, then his elaboration on these two items into the post-Vietnam life he envisions, seems more plausible. Could he have worked in a Post Office part-time, to earn a little extra money as a graduate student, met Jezzie, and then while in Vietnam, reflected on the blissful mindlessness of the Post Office? The scene in bed with Sarah would then take on the quality of a memory, rather than a dream--while living with Sarah, and working at the Post Office before Vietnam he had had a dream about living with Jezzie (or cheated on Sarah in his mind, as she puts it--a nightmare, burning with ice and guilty thoughts). Later on, during his dying moments in Vietnam, he elaborates on his memory of this dream and comes up with the whole post-Vietnam dream.
I admit that this Post-Office-before-Vietnam theory is not wholly satisfying (for one thing it takes some of the punch out of that line about not wanting to think after Nam, if he'd worked at the Post Office before Vietnam, presumably for different reasons). What I like about this theory, though, is that it sets up a consistent formula where things from the real world--facts, events, people--are used as springboards for Jacob's elaborated dream world. For instance, sometime before the battle, Jacob has considered getting a mindless job after he returns, leaving his wife, going to see a chiropractor about his back pain, and as a philosopher, thought about heaven, hell, and the afterlife. These real world thoughts are the fuel for his dream world.
Even after the battle, and Jacob's stabbing, elements from the real world enter his dream world. Lying on his back, staring up at faces from the dance floor of a Brooklyn apartment is like lying on the jungle floor, looking up at the faces of his rescuers. The disco light shining in his eyes from the apartment ceiling is like the sun in his eyes as he's waiting for, and ultimately hoisted up to, the helicopter. Having a 106 degree fever, and going into shock in the bathtub is like the shock and fever he'd be likely to experience with an abdominal bayonet wound. Being jostled around and beaten up in the car with the D.O.D. goons is like the helicopter ride to the mobile army surgical hospital. And finally, the circular lamp over the couch in Louie's office is like the surgical lamp over the operating table, in the final death scene (also like the lamp over the operating table in the hospital in hell scene).
We're less willing to believe that facts, events, and people in Jacob's elaborated dream world in 1971 match up with real world facts after 1971. For instance, that a real song from circa 1975 (Voulez-vous coucher avec moi), or a real baseball card from circa 1973 (Rich Gossage) could be part of Jacob's deathbed dream in 1971. Other chronology problems include Gabe writing a letter to Jacob in Vietnam (the one Jacob takes out of the cigar box), when Jezzie reveals to us that Gabe died before Jacob went to Vietnam. The last problem could be explained by something like Jacob shipping off to boot camp, receiving the letter from Gabe, Gabe dying, and Jacob shipping off to Vietnam, depending on how far you're willing to stretch things.
Logistical problems include why was he drafted at all, at roughly twenty-eight (twenty-two after college, plus six years of graduate school), with a wife and two (or three) kids? Why was he only a Private First Class with all his education (although the degree in the cigar box was only for a Masters, not a Ph.D.--maybe he never finished his Ph.D.)? How come the D.O.D. goons who were hassling Jacob and his battalion buddies hadn't hassled or even killed the hippie chemist, who knew the whole story and obviously had the most damaging evidence against the army? Since the last problem occurs only in the dream world, you could argue that it doesn't need to make real world sense.
The entire scene with the hippie chemist is a little hard to take, all at once. It's reminiscent of the scene in ANGEL HEART around the boiling cauldron of gumbo, where Mickey Rourke is forced to confront similarly painful facts about his past. In the ANGEL HEART scene, lines like "elaborate incantations in Latin and Greek" just don't ring true, and similarly in JACOB'S LADDER, lines like "it was starting to get ugly in the States. Hell, you remember" and "a bad trip, and believe me, I've had my share, could not compare to the fury of the ladder" don't live up to the consistently good dialogue throughout the rest of the movie, and tend to sound written, rather than spoken.
The hippie chemist scene was a tough one. We had to empathize with the chemist and Jacob, and process a lot of information and chronology, all in about three minutes. Rubin set himself up a monumental task, and the degree to which he succeeded is arguable. The scenes that follow this one, however are even more challenging, and here Rubin seems in his element. The cab ride ("Where's your home?"), Sam the doorman ("Dr. Singer. It's been a long time."), the empty apartment, teeming with life (protractor, compass, apple pie, and television snow), the thunder storm, the "Sonny Boy" melody drifting in from the music box in the hallway, and THE SOUND OF SOLAR WINDS all lead up to Jacob's discovery of Gabe at the foot of the stairs. Rubin, Lyne, and Maurice Jarre (music) all collaborate to create a moment at this reunion of father and son that either crystallizes or shatters everything that came before it. As the spiral of Gabe's staircase becomes the spiral of the fluorescent surgical lamp, we are either prepared for the final revelation, or we're not. It worked for me, but I can see where some might be lost on the ascent. The lights are bright, the solar winds loud, and the height is dizzying.
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Peter Rousseau rousseau@virginia.edu
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