100 Scariest Movie Moments: #21 Jacob's Ladder

I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I went into this movie wanting to hate it. Over the last several years, I’ve made several attempts to watch it, and always given up, simply because I’d convinced myself that I didn’t want to see a movie in which almost everything was a dying hallucination. Now though, finally, I’ve sat down, made myself watch it all the way through the two times that my rules require, and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a movie about death that deals with it in a much more complex manner than “good people go to Heaven, bad people go to Hell.” In fact, the protagonist is tested in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with his morality.

I don’t think the director ever intended to keep the movie’s “Twist” a secret from anyone but the main character. Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is a dying soldier in Vietnam who’s been severely wounded and exposed to a hallucinogen. Refusing to accept his death, Jacob imagines a hypothetical future life in which he’s divorced from his wife (Patricia Kalember) and married to a woman named “Jezzie,” short for Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña). He has a series of strange experiences in which he begins seeing demons everywhere, and is led to believe the army intentionally gave him an experimental drug in Vietnam and is covering it up. The film ends with him accepting his own death, bringing his suffering to a conclusion.

This film is so wildly open to interpretation that I feel actually reviewing the movie itself would be an exercise in futility (aside from saying that it’s awesome to have so much room for interpretation). Instead, I have to give you my interpretation and review the film based on that.

I have no idea what role the hallucinogens played, but I think the life with Jezzie was created by Jacob’s mind to tie him to the real world and stave off his death. However, I see the demons in this movie as independent entities intruding into the fictional world, taking the form of government agents and sadistic doctors. Likewise, I believe his chiropractor, Louis (Danny Aiello), is an angel.

The thing that’s particularly fascinating about this movie is that Louis and the demons are not actually in opposition. It’s implied they dislike each other (at one point Louis calls them “barbaric,” and asks why they don’t just burn Jacob at the stake and be done with it), but they’re both in opposition to the fabricated life represented by Jezzie. The demons simply represent the stick trying to make Jacob’s suffering too great for him to continue tolerating, and Louis represents the carrot, trying to teach him to give up the attachments that cause his suffering. (Yes, the movie has a strong Buddhist leaning, that’s not really a secret either.) Jezzie on the other hand represents a complete rejection of reality as his own mind tries to force him to keep living.

With any movie that ends with the revelation that it was all a dream, dying or otherwise, the greatest problem is establishing whether or not anything we just saw actually mattered. In this case, I think the movie establishes real stakes with the danger of a self-inflicted Hell. I don’t personally think Jacob could have delayed his actual death inevitably, but I’m fairly certain that the demons (if they were real) weren’t going to give up on “liberating” him just because his heart stopped. We see people who appear to have been in Hell for ages (or perhaps just his projections of what he’s in store for), so we want Jacob to liberate himself quickly.

All this said, I can’t claim to have fully cracked the code of this movie. There are numerous characters who might be angels, demons, or hallucinations… or possibly in their own Hells. There are also scenes with Jacob’s ex-wife which seem to represent a secondary alternate reality in which Jezzie is a dream... or maybe they’re simply flashbacks, and he based the Jezzie-world on a dream he actually had before the war. These are questions I might have to watch the film ten more times to have answered.

It’s been said there’s no cliché that can’t be done well. This movie does a dying dream well, by using it to give us a glimpse of a fascinating and terrifying cosmology. The Universe cares about us, but there’s only so much the Universe can do to protect us from our own self-destructive tendencies. If you pay attention, you’re sure to get something interesting out of the film.