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| https://theasc.com/articles/personal-hell-the-sacred-iconography-of-jacobs-ladder |
Jacob’s Ladder opens on a hazy, humid evening in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta,
1971. A platoon of U.S. Army soldiers linger in the shade of canvas
tents and grass roof huts, smoking, swatting at flies, napping, passing
their time in purgatory with grass and childish jokes. Among them is Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), a private first class his comrades call “Professor” on account of college degrees.
Along
with their dog tags, some of the soldiers wear pendants around their
neck: a peace symbol, a Star of David, a lucky horseshoe. Jacob's
necklace bears the symbol for ahimsa, the Jain Dharma principle of
nonviolence.
In any other film, these details could be considered
minor references, but here they are just a few of the many instances in
which Jacob’s Ladder uses sacred imagery to tell the story of a broken
man desperately clinging to the shattered fragments of his past life.
Without
warning, the camp is attacked by an unknown enemy. All hell breaks
loose. Some of the soldiers begin to convulse and shake as fire and
brimstone rain from the sky. Men are eviscerated and dismembered.
Jacob
escapes into the jungle. In a POV shot, he’s ambushed and bayonetted in
the gut by an unseen attacker. He falls to the ground, and with a match
cut, awakens on a New York City subway train three years later. He’d
fallen asleep reading a paperback copy of Albert Camus’s existentialist
novella The Stranger and missed his stop. His right hand rests on his
abdomen, where he'd been stabbed.
Jacob steps off the train and
finds that the exit from his platform is locked, so he must cross over
to the other side to get out. As he steps onto the tracks, another train
suddenly barrels toward him. He dives out of its way, catching a
glimpse of ghostly faces through the windows as it roars by.
Jacob
is now a veteran and a postal worker, living in a cozy Brooklyn
apartment with his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña). It's revealed
that prior to the war, he’d been a doctor, married to another woman,
Sarah (Patricia Kalember), and the father of three children, one of
whom, Gabe (Macaulay Culkin), was killed in a tragic auto accident.
The
majority of the film’s directly religious references are tied to
Judeo-Christian beliefs. (The title itself is a nod to the vision of Old
Testament patriarch Jacob, who saw a ladder leading from the earth up
to heaven.) Jacob and Jezzie’s apartment is a veritable reliquary of
spiritual objects d'art: a Christian cross, crossed again with a pair of
swords hangs on the wall next to the window. A replica of Hugo
Rheinhold’s Ape with Skull is perched on Jacob’s desk, the open book at
the primate's feet inscribed with the words "Eritis sicut Deus..." which
translates to "You will be like God..." The rest of the page is ripped
away, omitting the last part of the sentence "...scientes bonum et
malum." Knowing good and evil.
Prayer beads are draped over the
shelf on the headboard, next to a candlestick base in the image of
Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (originally conceived as a likeness of poet
Dante Alighieri in the sculptor’s masterwork, The Gates of Hell).
Next
to the bed is a shelf lined with books like Savage God and The Magical
Philosophy, while elsewhere in the apartment A Witches Bible Volume I:
The Sabbats, Demonology, The Roots of Evil and Dante's The Divine Comedy
are interspersed with academic texts on sociology and psychology.
These
objects provide insight into the psyche and soul of a man concerned
with the origins of human nature, and it’s this curiosity that drives
him to investigate the relationship between his demonic visions and the
revelation that he and his platoon were the subjects of a military
psy-op gone wrong.
The filmmakers use several effective
techniques to break down the barriers of Jacob’s reality, in particular,
editor Tom Rolf’s jump/smash/match cuts between Jacob’s medevac in
Vietnam, his horrific visions and his post-war life in New York City.
Many
of the demons are portrayed as half-human ghouls with obscured and
contorted faces, horns and leathery appendages protruding through broken
skin, though some all-out monsters do appear. Makeup effects were
supplied by J. Gordon Smith's Toronto-based FxSmith company. The demons'
vibrating effect was achieved by under-cranking the camera to 4 fps for
playback at 24 fps.
"All through the movies you're dealing with
demons and angels and hell and heaven, and I spent a year, maybe more,
trying to wrestle with how to do it — how to do a devil with horns and
not make people laugh," said Lyne in a contemporaneous interview
(Cinefantastique, Dec '90). "I tried to make it all human-based — sort
of thalidomidey — fleshy, horns from the bone, a tail that looks a
little like a schlong. I didn't want these things easily dismissed as
too familiar. I did a lot of shaking, vibrating, tortured things."
Religious
symbolism is woven so throughly into the tapestry of the film's
narrative that one begins to recognize familiar images where they were
perhaps not intended, such as the scene were Jacob goes into shock after
witnessing a vision of Jezzie and a demon. His temperature skyrockets,
and Jezzie rallies the help of two neighbors to lift Jacob into a
bathtub full of ice water.
The camera is tight on Jacob's
flushed, passionate expression. His head lolls to one shoulder. His
outstretched arms are supported by the neighbors as Jezzie looms
anxiously in the backround. When they lift him into the tub their arms
fully encircle his body, the way Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lower
the body of Christ down from the cross in the popular Christian motif.
(A similar mood is struck in Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ.)
Jacob's
only solace is in his visits with Louis (Danny Aiello), the smiling,
rotund chiropractor whom Jacob describes as an “overgrown cherub.”
Louis's office is a sanctuary filled with soft white light streaming in
through a set of bay windows and Tiffany stained glass.
Jacob's
inquiries into the possibility that he and the other soldiers were
unwilling test subjects in a murderous wargame gets the attention of
U.S. Government agents, who ambush and threaten him. Jacob escapes
capture by throwing himself from their moving vehicle, but severely
injures his back. He's taken to a hospital, the bowels of which is
populated with a host of tortured souls.
"I tried to use images
from Francis Bacon — tortured, blurred shots, red streaks and sharp
pieces which, when you freeze frame this stuff, looks just like Bacon's
drawings," said Lyne (Cinefantastique, Dec '90).
Jacob is
strapped to a reclining operating table and his head is screwed into a
medical halo. The operating lamp bathes him with light, which reflects
off his body and onto the attending doctors lurking at the edge of
darkness in a macabre twist on Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr.
Nicolaes Tulp. Jezzie, in a surgical gown, preps a wicked-looking
syringe then hands it to an eyeless demon, who plunges the giant needle
into the middle of Jacob’s forehead in an attempt to purge his memories
and ultimately, his will to live.
Cinematographer Jeffrey L.
Kimball, ASC's striking photography possesses the tones and textures of a
Renaissance-era painting. Optically, the film has a deep-focus quality,
with atmospheric perspective used to achieve a sense of depth by
contrasting dark foregrounds and light backgrounds filled with steam,
haze and smoke.
Additionally, light is diffused at the source,
creating a sfumato effect through which tones and colors gradually shade
together to produce soft outlines and hazy forms.
Chiaroscuro lighting enhances textural qualities with deep shadows.
Jacob
awakes in the hospital, doped up and in traction, unsure of what he's
experiencing is real or a dream. Louis storms in, all righteous fury.
Untangling Jacob from his harnesses, he cries “Why don’t you just burn
him at the stake?” Louis transfers him from the hospital bed to a
wheelchair and whisks him back to the safety of his office. “I was in
hell,” Jacob murmurs. “I don’t want to die."
Louis cracks a
knowing smile. “Eckhart saw hell, too,” he says, referring to the
thirteenth century German Catholic theologian, philosopher and mystic.
“The way he sees it, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding
on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your
peace, the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. It’s
just a matter of how you look at it.”
Carl G. Jung — a Swiss
psychiatrist whose ideas the filmmakers (and Jacob) are almost certainly
aware of — writes in his 1964 essay Approaching the Unconscious that
symbols point to something working deep in the human unconscious to
conjure the vast, significant mysteries of existence. When signs, like
an effigy or image of the human body, are imbued with mystery, they
become symbols because they now stand for something beyond the object
itself, though their true meaning remains elusive and subjective.
Back
at the apartment, Jacob sorts through the contents of an old cigar box,
a personal collection of sacred objects he's held on to over the years:
honorable discharge papers, a Master of Arts degree from Brooklyn
College, dogtags (the religious preference is Jewish) and a letter from
Gabe.
In one of the film's most visually and thematically darkest
scenes, Jacob meets with Michael (Matt Craven), a former chemist in the
Army's "Ladder" program, who reveals the truth of what happened on the
day Jacob's platoon was attacked: in a drug-induced craze, the soldiers
turned against each other, their lives sacrificed on the altar of war.
Thus
enlightened, Jacob gives a taxicab driver all the money in his pocket
to take him "home," back to the apartment he once shared with Sarah.
Rosary beads jangle on the dashboard as the cab cuts through the dense
night fog like Charon on the River Styx.
A doorman at wrought
iron gates welcomes Jacob as an old friend or St. Peter might. Past
halls of white marble and crown molding, Jacob finds tableaus of
unfinished homework and half-eaten dessert, a life in framed photographs
on the piano.
Jacob sits on the couch in quiet contemplation as
rain falls outside and a sharp blue light cuts into the room from a low
angle. In a montage set to a slowly beating heart, the most significant
memories of Jacob's life come flooding back in grainy 16mm.
The
heartbeat stops. The rain has ended. Jacob awakens and finds Gabe
sitting on the steps, bathed in heavenly morning light. The little boy
takes his father by the hand and leads him upstairs, and the image dips
to white.
We are back in Vietnam. Having succumbed to his
injuries, Jacob lies dead on a stretcher in a field hospital, his prone
body still enough to have been carved from stone, with the faint hint of
a smile upon his face. “He looks kind of peaceful,” says a medic as he
removes one of Jacob’s dog tags.
Religion uses iconography to
tell stories of life, death and redemption where traditional language is
insufficient and personal experience with a system of belief isn't
required. Symbols are necessarily universal as well as mysterious, and
only when coupled with a text or image or transferred to a personal
object or sign do they become specific. Jacob's Ladder inverts this
formula by taking the universal experience of dying — in a narrative
lifted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead — and using specific symbols to
imbue it with a deeper, more personal meaning.
