Exploring the Dreams and Nightmares of Buddhist Discovery in Jacob's Ladder
With a remake coming out that sounds almost nothing like the original 1990 psychological thriller based on the simple plot synopsis released thus far (they vaguely called it an "action thriller" about "two brothers"), I felt like rediscovering and further exploring Bruce Joel Rubin and Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and its theme of death and the dying process. The film initially sparked my interest when I borrowed a VHS copy from the library at around 14 years old, a time when my otherwise strict parents would let me take home the occasional R-rated film as long as it was from a library shelf, which somehow made it permissible.
I watched the film alone one night and discovered much more than the horror film that I had originally thought it would be, greeted instead by a film that explored a whirlwind of emotions and confusion, and an existential journey that was both terrifying and unexpectedly uplifting, with Tim Robbins' Jacob Singer at the center of it all.
Now, I'm still firmly settled in agnosticism, and have been since my late teens, but something about the Buddhist philosophy has always drawn me back toward it over all other spiritual paradigms. Part of it is the idea of reincarnation, which for someone who grew up with a mountain of self-loathing and alienation is probably the best form of salvation—to live again as someone else entirely, given another chance to thrive in that ideal life. Another more important aspect is the idea of true altruism behind it, letting go of life's pains and thoughts about the self by ditching the self as we go through the process of dying, finding freedom in that final release from our illusions of identity.
That altruism is also reflected in the concept of reincarnation itself, as rebirth into another life would be the pinnacle of empathy, being forced to live as someone we might otherwise either envy or loathe to the extreme. The latter would also depend on that often-misunderstood karmic balance we've attained in our lives. Ultimately for Buddhists, the goal is that peak of nirvana, which involves letting go of the ego so entirely that we no longer need to return to Earth in any concentrated form, dispersing and blending into that universal energy that binds everything. Achieving mental nirvana is ideally accomplished prior to death, but the beauty of this philosophy is that we always have a chance through death and the countless next lives we can lead.
Though Jacob's Ladder doesn't explore the theme of reincarnation or reaching nirvana explicitly, it deals with coming to peace with one's life by detaching ourselves from the tethers of family and other sources of familiarity, breaking away to climb those final steps of transcendence. It's a flawed film that doesn't delve as extensively into the dying experience as I would like it to, and it's restricted to the Hollywood three-act structure, but Bruce Joel Rubin's script is effective enough to carry you through a meaningful journey in two hours. It's also been highly influential, having not only inspired a sequel 26 years later but also influenced many concepts in the Silent Hill franchise and more.
The film follows Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War vet nicknamed "Professor" because of his Ph. D, which he interestingly chooses to avoid putting to use as a content U.S. postal worker back home. We open to a scene with Jacob and the rest of his squad in the Vietnamese jungle, presumably awaiting orders while smoking weed—which may or may not be laced with something terrible—and joking around with each other, until one of them (George, played by Ving Rhames) starts experiencing a bloody seizure followed by an outbreak of psychosis and violence among the rest of the men. One catatonic soldier (Pruitt Taylor Vince) stares on helplessly as screams and gunfire erupt from all directions.
Before we can get a clear picture of the chaos taking place, we abruptly transition to Jacob back in New York City, reading (or rather awaking to) Albert Camus's The Stranger on the subway. Advertisements all around him in the subway and the Bergen St. station talk about the dangers of drugs, alluding to both the indirect cause of his death and his current existential predicament, with two of them talking about Heaven and how "life is Hell, but it doesn't have to be," a key concept in the film. It should be noted that The Stranger isn't merely an attempt to make Jacob look smart, but one of many metaphors—the novel's protagonist Meursault displays an emotional detachment throughout, transgressing against society's demands to conform to "appropriate" emotional responses to events. Meursault is a man who's learned to let go, much in the way German philosopher Meister Eckhart—who's directly referenced in the film—proposed we should.
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| Jacob walks through the Bergen St. station along a wall of anti-drug metaphors |
To initiate tension, a woman sharing the subway car with Jacob stares ominously at him, and another sleeping man appears to hide a phallic, slimy tail beneath his trench coat. Attempting to leave the station, Jacob finds the gate is locked and attempts to find another exit as he walks across the tracks in the darkness. He then dodges and watches a passing subway with a faceless man waving at him through the back window as though welcoming him to a new, frightening world. This is the icy introduction to the plethora of perceived demons that begin to haunt Jacob.
Jacob returns home to his current wife Jezzie (the late Elizabeth Peña) who works with him at the post office. They both seem to have a happy and simple life, typical of a thriller's opening, and Jacob doesn't come across as particularly disturbed by his visions in the subway. He visits who will be his chief guide, his chiropractor Louis (Danny Aiello), who provides support in times of desperation to come.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State, describes the ideal condition for the dead or dying to contain a reading of this guide from someone who can help relieve the disturbed soul as it journeys through the afterlife, which may include people for whom the dead had a deep affection. However, loved ones can also assist the departed through the Transference of Consciousness-Principle, which entails the transference of merits through remembering selfless deeds that the dead had performed in his or her life. Perhaps Jacob had people who recalled good deeds back home, most likely his wife Jezzie, if she exists beyond his purgatory. But without the guide itself, Louis could act as a substitute throughout, a spiritual entity meant to help carry him through. Jacob is also shown to be a good person, which would make the chances of him achieving liberation much greater.
Regardless, Jacob's Ladder isn't specifically a Buddhist film, so my theories about this are possibly my own personal interpretation. The very title itself is biblical, although the conventional Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell are skewed to be more ambiguous. I'm reminded of the Cenobites in Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart when it comes to this film's interpretation of demons, representing demons to some, and angels to others. Bruce Joel Rubin has also expressed his Buddhist beliefs and meditative practices, so my interpretation may not be far off from Rubin's thinking. There are some obvious surface-level references to Dante's Inferno, but that won't be the focus here.
Let's continue to follow the plot. As time passes, Jacob's sheen of superficial comfort slips, and he's subjected to visions of these demonic presences with heads that tremble and twist inhumanly, phantoms dressed in black that try to run him over in cars, dehumanizing deformities, and hints of Jezzie's possibly demonic side. Occasionally, his life in this world is disrupted by "flashbacks" to his time in Nam following the chaotic scene we saw earlier, when it's revealed that he's dying from a wound sustained after getting stabbed by one of his own drugged men's bayonets.
Jacob finds certain inconveniences in his life, such as when he visits the hospital to see Dr. Carlson to address his recent disturbances. A nurse informs him that there isn't a Dr. Carlson at the hospital, and when her cap falls off to reveal a suspicious horn-like bone in her scalp, it sends Jacob into a panic as he searches for the doctor. He happens upon a group therapy session, wherein the mediator calmly explains to Jacob that Dr. Carlson was killed in a car accident. It's yet another one of the increasing number of obstacles interrupting Jacob's perception of normality.
Later in this purgatory layer of reality, Jacob goes to a party with Jezzie, where he first receives a palm reading from an attendee, a practice among some Tibetan Buddhists. Through the palm reading, the woman finds a line across his hand that indicates he's dead, which is Jacob's first true mental shove into what's really happening around him. As people dance in the party to James Brown's "My Thang" (which was on his album with the noteworthy title of Hell), his panic is worsened by a man in the back of the crowd with a revolving blur for a head, along with the hallucination involving a slime-covered reptilian tail that sprouts between and wraps around Jezzie's leg as she moans provocatively, and a transparent spike that viciously pokes through her mouth.
Soon, Jacob falls ill from some kind of flu, which is representative of the beginning of his internal torment as he longs for the comfort of the life he understands, and Jezzie places him in a bathtub with ice to help him break his fever. As he goes through this, he recalls his past family life, which includes tucking in his dead son (played by then-unknown Macaulay Culkin).
Upon breaking the fever, Jacob reads Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, visibly disturbed by illustrations of persecuting demons. Jezzie interrupts, acting as a demon herself when she tries to redirect his attention and reveals a set of sharp teeth and pitch black eyes for a brief moment. Needless to say, his trust of her motives suddenly wanes.
Of course Jacob isn't the only one experiencing anomalies in his life; he meets with the catatonic soldier we saw at the beginning of the film, Paul, who believes he's being followed. After they feel they can confide in one another, and a moment of comfort is reached between them, Paul walks toward his car. At this moment, Jacob spots a quarter on the street. After proclaiming to Paul as he enters his car, "My lucky day," the quarter mysteriously slides away from his hand, and Paul's car explodes. The "demons" have once again torn another element of the familiar from his life.
Paul's funeral inspires a meeting between the rest of Jacob's troop, where they discover they're not alone in their visions. Oddly enough, only a number of them including George, Jacob, and another few veterans appear to have seen these "demons," while the other remains puzzled and tries to convince them it's just PTSD. This likely indicates that those who died, or are dying, from the attack on their troop are sharing this purgatory in the same space, while the others, still alive, have entities put in their place. None of them remembers exactly what transpired at their camp, and they come to the conclusion that they have to seek answers from the government.
After meeting with a lawyer (Jason Alexander) who's eager to help them, it would seem they're on their way to finding those much-needed answers, but not a day later Jacob finds that something has spooked his fellow veterans and the attorney from pursuing any kind of case. Only after a lot of prodding does the lawyer vaguely tell Jacob that the government denied any involvement.
Following this, Jacob is further thrust into the demonic spectrum of this purgatory, as the once-phantom men in the black car appear as government agents to pull him into the back of their car, menacingly telling him "the military was a past life," to which Jacob once again fights back and scuffles with the men. He suffers injuries when the car crashes, and is taken to the hospital, where staff wheel him on a gurney to the infamous dungeon full of malformed people, bloody limbs littering the linoleum floor, with more freaks climbing on top of the metal fence ceiling that resembles the subway gate he couldn't open. Jacob is understandably horrified as he passes through, but it's his rejection of the situation that brought him here.
One of the visions he sees as he's wheeled through this dungeon is a legless torso in a metal box frame, a bag over his spasming head. The man's skin color and build seem similar to George, Ving Rhames' character, who was the first to seize during the opening scene in Vietnam. This could be indicative of the purgatory George is enduring, the inability to move on in his own experience as he's left blind, alone, and immobile, with Jacob able to witness it in this shared experience. Or, it could reflect Jacob's own situation and inability to free himself.
Finally, Jacob finds himself in a dark surgical theater, where the iconic faceless doctor prepares a long needle while Jacob's head is placed in a vice.
The doctor tells Jacob he's dead, but Jacob, confused, insists he's alive. The doctor then drives the needle through his forehead, and he winds up awakening on a seemingly normal hospital bed.
We see that the needle injected the sharp pain of the recognizable back into Jacob, as his ex-wife and two other children visit him, reminders of his lost son more than anything. They briefly console him before leaving, and then Louis the guide finds him, breaking him out of the hospital and bringing him back to his office.
Jacob returns home to his current wife Jezzie (the late Elizabeth Peña) who works with him at the post office. They both seem to have a happy and simple life, typical of a thriller's opening, and Jacob doesn't come across as particularly disturbed by his visions in the subway. He visits who will be his chief guide, his chiropractor Louis (Danny Aiello), who provides support in times of desperation to come.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State, describes the ideal condition for the dead or dying to contain a reading of this guide from someone who can help relieve the disturbed soul as it journeys through the afterlife, which may include people for whom the dead had a deep affection. However, loved ones can also assist the departed through the Transference of Consciousness-Principle, which entails the transference of merits through remembering selfless deeds that the dead had performed in his or her life. Perhaps Jacob had people who recalled good deeds back home, most likely his wife Jezzie, if she exists beyond his purgatory. But without the guide itself, Louis could act as a substitute throughout, a spiritual entity meant to help carry him through. Jacob is also shown to be a good person, which would make the chances of him achieving liberation much greater.
Regardless, Jacob's Ladder isn't specifically a Buddhist film, so my theories about this are possibly my own personal interpretation. The very title itself is biblical, although the conventional Christian concepts of Heaven and Hell are skewed to be more ambiguous. I'm reminded of the Cenobites in Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart when it comes to this film's interpretation of demons, representing demons to some, and angels to others. Bruce Joel Rubin has also expressed his Buddhist beliefs and meditative practices, so my interpretation may not be far off from Rubin's thinking. There are some obvious surface-level references to Dante's Inferno, but that won't be the focus here.
Let's continue to follow the plot. As time passes, Jacob's sheen of superficial comfort slips, and he's subjected to visions of these demonic presences with heads that tremble and twist inhumanly, phantoms dressed in black that try to run him over in cars, dehumanizing deformities, and hints of Jezzie's possibly demonic side. Occasionally, his life in this world is disrupted by "flashbacks" to his time in Nam following the chaotic scene we saw earlier, when it's revealed that he's dying from a wound sustained after getting stabbed by one of his own drugged men's bayonets.
Jacob finds certain inconveniences in his life, such as when he visits the hospital to see Dr. Carlson to address his recent disturbances. A nurse informs him that there isn't a Dr. Carlson at the hospital, and when her cap falls off to reveal a suspicious horn-like bone in her scalp, it sends Jacob into a panic as he searches for the doctor. He happens upon a group therapy session, wherein the mediator calmly explains to Jacob that Dr. Carlson was killed in a car accident. It's yet another one of the increasing number of obstacles interrupting Jacob's perception of normality.
Later in this purgatory layer of reality, Jacob goes to a party with Jezzie, where he first receives a palm reading from an attendee, a practice among some Tibetan Buddhists. Through the palm reading, the woman finds a line across his hand that indicates he's dead, which is Jacob's first true mental shove into what's really happening around him. As people dance in the party to James Brown's "My Thang" (which was on his album with the noteworthy title of Hell), his panic is worsened by a man in the back of the crowd with a revolving blur for a head, along with the hallucination involving a slime-covered reptilian tail that sprouts between and wraps around Jezzie's leg as she moans provocatively, and a transparent spike that viciously pokes through her mouth.
Soon, Jacob falls ill from some kind of flu, which is representative of the beginning of his internal torment as he longs for the comfort of the life he understands, and Jezzie places him in a bathtub with ice to help him break his fever. As he goes through this, he recalls his past family life, which includes tucking in his dead son (played by then-unknown Macaulay Culkin).
Upon breaking the fever, Jacob reads Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, visibly disturbed by illustrations of persecuting demons. Jezzie interrupts, acting as a demon herself when she tries to redirect his attention and reveals a set of sharp teeth and pitch black eyes for a brief moment. Needless to say, his trust of her motives suddenly wanes.
Of course Jacob isn't the only one experiencing anomalies in his life; he meets with the catatonic soldier we saw at the beginning of the film, Paul, who believes he's being followed. After they feel they can confide in one another, and a moment of comfort is reached between them, Paul walks toward his car. At this moment, Jacob spots a quarter on the street. After proclaiming to Paul as he enters his car, "My lucky day," the quarter mysteriously slides away from his hand, and Paul's car explodes. The "demons" have once again torn another element of the familiar from his life.
Paul's funeral inspires a meeting between the rest of Jacob's troop, where they discover they're not alone in their visions. Oddly enough, only a number of them including George, Jacob, and another few veterans appear to have seen these "demons," while the other remains puzzled and tries to convince them it's just PTSD. This likely indicates that those who died, or are dying, from the attack on their troop are sharing this purgatory in the same space, while the others, still alive, have entities put in their place. None of them remembers exactly what transpired at their camp, and they come to the conclusion that they have to seek answers from the government.
After meeting with a lawyer (Jason Alexander) who's eager to help them, it would seem they're on their way to finding those much-needed answers, but not a day later Jacob finds that something has spooked his fellow veterans and the attorney from pursuing any kind of case. Only after a lot of prodding does the lawyer vaguely tell Jacob that the government denied any involvement.
Following this, Jacob is further thrust into the demonic spectrum of this purgatory, as the once-phantom men in the black car appear as government agents to pull him into the back of their car, menacingly telling him "the military was a past life," to which Jacob once again fights back and scuffles with the men. He suffers injuries when the car crashes, and is taken to the hospital, where staff wheel him on a gurney to the infamous dungeon full of malformed people, bloody limbs littering the linoleum floor, with more freaks climbing on top of the metal fence ceiling that resembles the subway gate he couldn't open. Jacob is understandably horrified as he passes through, but it's his rejection of the situation that brought him here.
One of the visions he sees as he's wheeled through this dungeon is a legless torso in a metal box frame, a bag over his spasming head. The man's skin color and build seem similar to George, Ving Rhames' character, who was the first to seize during the opening scene in Vietnam. This could be indicative of the purgatory George is enduring, the inability to move on in his own experience as he's left blind, alone, and immobile, with Jacob able to witness it in this shared experience. Or, it could reflect Jacob's own situation and inability to free himself.
The doctor tells Jacob he's dead, but Jacob, confused, insists he's alive. The doctor then drives the needle through his forehead, and he winds up awakening on a seemingly normal hospital bed.
We see that the needle injected the sharp pain of the recognizable back into Jacob, as his ex-wife and two other children visit him, reminders of his lost son more than anything. They briefly console him before leaving, and then Louis the guide finds him, breaking him out of the hospital and bringing him back to his office.
Once Jacob is literally back in the comforting hands of Louis in his office, lying on his table and receiving much-needed treatment for his injured back, Louis helps him along his journey with a convenient quote.
"Eckhart saw Hell too," Louis starts. "He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life—your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So the way he sees it, if you're frightened of dying and... and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all. So don't worry, okay? Okay?"
While Meister Eckhart said something to this effect, Louis's explanation isn't exactly the best summary of his speeches and essays, although the assembled core message from Eckhart's speeches is agreeable to the plot. Credit is due to someone on Elpenor in Print for gathering the actual quotes that Louis briefly references. Eckhart's exact texts regarding his philosophy read accordingly:
Jacob's ultimate desire is to be reunited with his dead son. It's the motif we see most often: The guilt he feels about his son's death following an accident (his "Not"), the main element apart from the rest of his former family that keeps him in his purgatorial environment. Jezzie is an apparent combination of an "angel" and a "demon," giving Jacob assistance through his suffering while attempting to tear him from the memories of his family. For example, she openly calls his ex-wife "a real bitch" and even goes so far as to set his family photos on fire after seeing him sob over them. She's often not the gentlest guide, but at times she's still a bit more helpful than when she exposes Singer to the sight of a lizard tail wrapped around her leg and a crystal spike shooting out of her mouth, or her eyes turning black with a mouthful of demon teeth. But again, this demonic imagery stems from Jacob's fear of losing his grip on the familiar.
As far as we know, Jezzie is another creation in Jacob's afterlife, part of the familiar construct formed around him to help ease that transition between life and death and get him to detach from the world he knew. Her sexuality tempts him with desire, which proves to be an enemy as displayed during the infamous nightclub scene, but she's also there to move him away from both memories and the pain that comes with them.
The drug that drove his troop crazy with aggression is aptly named "The Ladder," as the scientist behind it explains to Jacob after catching up to him. It was, as he explains, a means to bring subjects down the ladder to the core aggressions and fears, perfectly poetic in relation to the story. It's based on the real military-grade experimental drug 3-Quinuclidinyl benzoate (BZ) that the government supposedly used on soldiers during the Vietnam War to enhance soldiers' combat capabilities. However, there's no real indication any such drug was used on U.S. troops.
By the end of the film, Jacob has come to terms with the fact that he wasn't responsible for his son's death and that it's time to move on from the life he knew. He's then pronounced dead by medics in Vietnam, who state that he "put up a hell of a fight." My sole issue with this conclusion is the second to last scene, when Jacob's departed son appears, embracing and comforting his father with a warm hug and holding his hand as they walk up the stairs of Jacob's old home to the white light greeting him. I understand the sentimentality and it is an undeniably cathartic ending, but I see this as somewhat of an antithesis to the idea of breaking away from all memories of the past life. I would have preferred an ending where perhaps Jacob finds himself alone in someplace entirely unfamiliar, serving as a possible hint of his next life, but for the first time without any sense of loneliness, free of the "Not" that would otherwise eat him away as it does with all of us. On the other hand, I can see how that ending might be lost on broader audiences.
Despite the mild issue I have with the ending, I think Bruce Joel Rubin and Adrian Lyne constructed a great film that's inspired my own art, in the same spirit as Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void.
"They ask, what burns in hell? Authorities [the Fathers] usually reply: "This is what happens to willfullness" [the individual will and selfishness]. But I say it is "Not" [the Nothing] that is burned out in hell. For example: suppose a burning coal is placed in my hand. If I say the coal burns me I do it a great injustice. To say precisely what does the burning, it is the "Not." The coal has something in it that my hand does not. Observe! It is just this "Not" that is burning me—for if my hand had in it what the coal has, and can do what the coal can do, it, too, would blaze with fire, in which case all the fire that ever burned might be spilled on this hand and I should not feel hurt." (Speech 5b, DW I)
"Whatever state we find ourselves in, whether in strength or in weak-ness, in joy or in sorrow, whatever we find ourselves attached to, we must abandon . . . You must give up yourself, altogether give up self, and then you have really given up . . . By renouncing yourself first, you then have renounced all things . . . A man who loves God could give up the whole world as easily as an egg." (Speech 30, DW II)
"What is the prayer of the detached heart? I answer that detachment and purity cannot pray. For if anyone prays he asks God that something may be given to him, or asks that God may take something away from him. But the detached heart does not ask for anything at all that it would like to be rid of. Therefore it is free from all prayer." (On Detachment, DW V)So, what Eckhart truly discusses is how hell is the place for removal of those things that hurt us externally, things that we should not attribute to ourselves or allow any influence over our concept of self, while complete emotional detachment frees us from self-centeredness and the desire to receive. These excerpts combined certainly reinforce the Buddhist philosophy of detachment from the ego, and posit that desire is our main source of suffering. You could say that greed is the most materialistic and societally motivated extension of that.
Jacob's ultimate desire is to be reunited with his dead son. It's the motif we see most often: The guilt he feels about his son's death following an accident (his "Not"), the main element apart from the rest of his former family that keeps him in his purgatorial environment. Jezzie is an apparent combination of an "angel" and a "demon," giving Jacob assistance through his suffering while attempting to tear him from the memories of his family. For example, she openly calls his ex-wife "a real bitch" and even goes so far as to set his family photos on fire after seeing him sob over them. She's often not the gentlest guide, but at times she's still a bit more helpful than when she exposes Singer to the sight of a lizard tail wrapped around her leg and a crystal spike shooting out of her mouth, or her eyes turning black with a mouthful of demon teeth. But again, this demonic imagery stems from Jacob's fear of losing his grip on the familiar.
As far as we know, Jezzie is another creation in Jacob's afterlife, part of the familiar construct formed around him to help ease that transition between life and death and get him to detach from the world he knew. Her sexuality tempts him with desire, which proves to be an enemy as displayed during the infamous nightclub scene, but she's also there to move him away from both memories and the pain that comes with them.
The drug that drove his troop crazy with aggression is aptly named "The Ladder," as the scientist behind it explains to Jacob after catching up to him. It was, as he explains, a means to bring subjects down the ladder to the core aggressions and fears, perfectly poetic in relation to the story. It's based on the real military-grade experimental drug 3-Quinuclidinyl benzoate (BZ) that the government supposedly used on soldiers during the Vietnam War to enhance soldiers' combat capabilities. However, there's no real indication any such drug was used on U.S. troops.
By the end of the film, Jacob has come to terms with the fact that he wasn't responsible for his son's death and that it's time to move on from the life he knew. He's then pronounced dead by medics in Vietnam, who state that he "put up a hell of a fight." My sole issue with this conclusion is the second to last scene, when Jacob's departed son appears, embracing and comforting his father with a warm hug and holding his hand as they walk up the stairs of Jacob's old home to the white light greeting him. I understand the sentimentality and it is an undeniably cathartic ending, but I see this as somewhat of an antithesis to the idea of breaking away from all memories of the past life. I would have preferred an ending where perhaps Jacob finds himself alone in someplace entirely unfamiliar, serving as a possible hint of his next life, but for the first time without any sense of loneliness, free of the "Not" that would otherwise eat him away as it does with all of us. On the other hand, I can see how that ending might be lost on broader audiences.
Despite the mild issue I have with the ending, I think Bruce Joel Rubin and Adrian Lyne constructed a great film that's inspired my own art, in the same spirit as Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void.
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