Jacob's Ladder:
Dreams and Consciousness,
Hollywood-Style
Kelly
Bulkley
The
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is considered
one of the most profound works ever written on the mysteries of consciousness,
dreams, lucidity, spirituality, and the subtle relations between life and
death. This ancient Buddhist treatise has fascinated people for centuries,
prompting the meditations of monks the speculations of philosophers, the verses
of poets -- and now, a big-budget movie from Hollywood.
That the
venerable Tibetan Book of the Dead
could be one of the main inspirations for the 1990 release of Hollywood's
"Jacob's Ladder" may sound unlikely, if not absurd. Hollywood films
are not renowned for sensitive portrayals of metaphysical anxiety and spiritual
struggles with the ultimate questions of human existence. But the brilliant,
bewitching movie "Jacob's Ladder" shows that popular films can in
fact effectively explore the strange realms of dream, fantasy, vision, and
memory.
For those who
haven't seen it, he film begins with Jacob Singer in Vietnam (played with
likable earnestness by Tim Robbins), enjoying a moment's rest with other
soldiers of his platoon. Suddenly, a burst of furious violence explodes upon
them; amidst all the frenzied machine-gunning, agonized screaming, and chaotic
savagery, Jacob is bayonetted in the gut and left
lying in the jungle, holding in his own intestines. Then, just as suddenly, he
seems to wake up: he's in a New York subway car, in his postal service uniform,
having dozed off on his way home from work. He shakes his head, puzzled by the
nightmare. But now he begins to wonder if he has entered a new nightmare -- for
he cannot find his way out of the eerily abandoned subway station, and he narrowly
avoids being run over by a train filled with haunting, spectral faces.
Jacob finally
makes it back to the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth
Pena), and tells her of his perplexity over these weird flashbacks and visions.
Jezzie's warm, sensual tenderness helps to comfort
him, but when Jacob looks at some photos of his ex-wife and their tragically
killed son Gabriel, he falls into yet another vivid, disorienting reverie: he
is once again with his son, playing and laughing, and once again must suffer
the wrenching sorrow of losing him.
The movie
shifts restlessly from the stark brutality of Vietnam to happy memories of
playing with Gabriel, from terrifying, surrealistic glimpses of horror to
ordinary, day-to-day life with Jezebel in New York. Sometimes the shifts are
almost imperceptibly gradual; sometimes they are shockingly abrupt. Jacob is
continuously forced to ask himself, was that a dream? Am I awake now? What is
real, and what is imagination? "Jacob's Ladder" is like a classic
mystery tale -- but rather than "whodunit?", the question is,
"Am I alive, or am I dying?" Director Adrian Lyne
(whose other film credits include "Fatal Attraction" and "9 l/2
Weeks") uses awkward camera angles, excessively dark or bright lighting,
and unsettling changes of mood to build up a tense, thoroughly ominous
atmosphere.
Themes and
images from The Tibetan Book of the Dead run throughout "Jacob's
Ladder". The Buddhist classic is
primarily intended as a guide for the dying person, to help him or her navigate
the transition from one existence to another.
The most important message of the book is that the dying person must
learn how to distinguish between the different fears, dangers, trials, and
temptations he or she will experience in making that transition. This is exactly what Jacob Singer struggles
with -- the nearly impossible task of understanding the true nature of the
various dreams and visions he is experiencing.
He gets caught up in many of the nightmarish situations described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead : for
example, calling out and not being heard; being paralyzed; suffering extremes
of heat and cold; being chased by unknown assailants; and enduring bodily mutilation and
disintegration. One of the most harrowing scenes of the film has Jacob being
wheeled on a stretcher from an ordinary hospital room down increasingly dark,
deserted hallways that are first dirty, then spattered with blood, and then
grotesquely littered with body parts and shreds of flesh.
As with The Tibetan Book of the Dead , the heart
of "Jacob's Ladder" is a quest for release -- release from worldly
entanglements, from persistent memories, from terrifying fears, even from
comforting pleasures (Jacob must ultimately leave Jezebel, too). Jacob does not
understand what is happening to him, and so he fights against his experiences,
against the endless shifts of reality, against the transformation he is
undergoing. He tries to hold on to some aspects of his world and push away from
other aspects. Only when he realizes the true nature of his condition -- when
he realizes he is desperately clinging to a state of existence that must pass
away -- does Jacob finally achieve release.
As the title
suggests, the film also makes abundant use of Judeo-Christian symbolism.
Jezebel is the woman in 1 Kings 16-18 who marries the Israelite king Ahab and
leads the people into the blasphemy of worshipping Baal rather than the Lord
Jehovah; Gabriel is the archangel who announces to Mary in Luke 1 that she is
to bear the son of God; and Jacob is the Hebrew patriarch who has the
astounding dream in Genesis 28 of a ladder spanning heaven and earth. The film
weaves these biblical references into an essentially Buddhist story of
enlightenment, suggesting that the Judeo-Christian yearning for salvation and
the Buddhist quest for release are ultimately one.
A credit at
movie's conclusion states that during the Vietnam war the U.S. Army reportedly
experimented with a hallucinogenic drug called BZ, although the Pentagon denies
it. The suggestion is that Jacob's experiences could have a factual
basis -- what Jacob suffered might "really" have happened. This
marvelously confounding statement draws the audience directly into the mystery
of "Jacob's Ladder": was the film "real" or not? what is
real? what does it mean to us if the film included the "real"
experiences of a real person.
This sort of
concluding statement is a literary device that Hindu and Buddhist myths
frequently use to blur the lines between the story and the audience, and thus
to force the members of the audience to ask themselves whether they are
actually in the story. The ending of "Jacob's Ladder" has this
exact effect. After seeing the movie, we cannot help but wonder about our own
perceptions, our own abilities to distinguish clearly between dreams, wishes,
memories, and reality. Jacob Singer's awful predicament is really ours, too:
Vietnam certainly has been a nightmare experience for American society, a
painful encounter with suffering, violence, and death. "Jacob's
Ladder" suggests that perhaps we, like Jacob, have not woken up
from that nightmare; perhaps we are still in some sense trapped in that
existence, without fully realizing it; perhaps some of the horrors of our
present reality (or is this, too, a dream?) are due to the fact that we have
not yet sorted out the desires, fears, fantasies, and wounds that we as a
society experienced in Vietnam.
"Jacob's
Ladder", despite its Hollywood pedigree, succeeds in recreating that sense of awe and mystery that
has made The Tibetan Book of the Dead one of the world's enduring spiritual classics.
Even more remarkably, the film
makes a powerful statement about how the metaphysical exploration of dreams,
consciousness, and memory is terribly relevant to contemporary Americans and
their society. Many of the people at the
theater where I saw it seemed deeply
perplexed by the film -- "What ever did that mean?" I heard a number
of them ask. Exactly.