Devils tearing your life away: Jacob's Ladder

The demons in Jacob's Ladder look like the demonic paintings of William Blake. This is an original, terrifying movie. I picked it up by accident because the plot interested me. But I didn't know what I was in for. I was struck by the same feeling I had when I watched The Descent for the first time. It was a sleeper and barely made a blip on the radar in terms of gross. It's looks like it's the same with Jacob's Ladder.



Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam war veteran, a mentally unstable one at that. A bayonet pierces his side during the war, but his consciousness soldiered on in some unfamiliar mode. Has he died? We don't know for sure. Horned creatures begin to terrorize him. Interesting territory is explored. Just how is our consciousness going to adjust after death? Do we have any idea? Are we going to notice? Assuming we don't have a good clue because we're really old. How long will it take for our consciousness to catch up, to realize it's dead, assuming there is a hereafter, and if there is, there's a limbo, a no man's land, not quite Heaven, but not quite Hell. It's almost like the long, swift sucking sensation you get when you go down a steep water slide, or maybe the feeling you get when you just clear the edge of a gigantic waterfall: you're no longer on the river; but you're not where the waterfall meets the water down below.

That's sort of where Jocob might be. Little things begin to break through. He swears he sees a lizard-like tail squirm beneath a homeless man. Hideous faces that look like melting wax roam slowly just behind passing car windows. During a scene, Jacob's chiropractor quotes the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:

Eckhart saw Hell too; 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, 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, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.'

Jacob's Ladder is what Jacob is supposed to be on, the ladder being a meeting place between Heaven and Hell. But 'the Ladder' also has another meaning: it was an experimental drug given to American soldiers during Vietnam, and without their knowing. The drug made a short-cut to a person's urge for primal rage. It's a ladder leading down to that part of the psyche. New revelations about the drug shed light on the mystery of Jacob's alleged death!