Adrian Lyne's film Jacob's Ladder can be difficult to understand without knowing a bit about the Bible. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
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Caution: Spoilers Galore!
Adrian Lyne's tragic masterpiece, Jacob's Ladder, is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. It's a thinking man's horror movie, but it's also one of the best films ever made about the Vietnam War and its after effects on the American psyche. After rewatching it for the first time in almost 30 years, I'm happy to report that it still holds up. The special effects of Jacob's nightmarish world weren't created with modern CGI, but it doesn't matter, because there's nothing cheesy about them.
Jacob's Ladder is a story about a young academic from New York named Jacob (played by Tim Robbins from The Shawshank Redemption (1994)), whose career is interrupted when he's drafted to serve in Vietnam. Jacob is also a father of three sons--all of whom have Biblical names--and the husband of Sarah, played by Patricia Kalember from the then-hit show, thirtysomething.
The film begins with a surreal Vietnam battle sequence in 1971, in which Jacob’s unit is attacked by an unseen enemy. Before and during the attack, Jacob sees many of his fellow soldiers exhibiting odd, terrifying behavior, such as rapid jerking and seizures, and unexplained bleeding. Frightened, he runs into the jungle and is bayoneted by an off-camera enemy we never see. We hear the noise of helicopter blades overhead as Jacob falls into unconsciousness.
The next time we see Jacob, the war is over and he’s sitting on a grimy subway train in New York, wearing the uniform of a US postman. He has a bizarre and disturbing experience in the train station, but eventually arrives home to the grimy Brooklyn apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Jezzy (short for Jezabelle, played by sexy Elizabeth Pena)— a character with another Biblical name that is symbolic of what is to come. Jacob is a man torn between his current life with Jezzy, and his former life with his ex-wife Sarah and their children. He also continues to suffer terrible grief from the death of one of his sons, Gabriel, just before he shipped out to war.
The Ladder
Jacob suffers nightmarish incidents and visions, and eventually seeks help from a VA psychiatrist who knows him well, Dr. Carlson. Unfortunately, Dr. Carlson is recently deceased in an explosive car accident. Later on, Jacob is contacted by an old Army buddy, Paul, who is experiencing the same nightmarish visions as Jacob. Paul also dies in a car explosion.
Other men from Jacob's old unit contact him and say they’ve been experiencing the same nightmarish visions. They believe that the Army exposed them to an experimental drug that causes their hallucinations, and they agree to hire a lawyer to sue for damages (somewhat amusingly, the lawyer is played by Jason Alexander, looking and acting not much different from his Seinfeld character, George Costanza.)
Their hunch is validated when Jacob is later contacted by a former military chemist named Michael, who says he cooked up a powerful hallucinogen called The Ladder, which the military used on soldiers to make them more aggressive. Michael tells Jacob he thinks The Ladder was secretly given to Jacob's unit before the battle.
Agents or spies of the military kidnap Jacob after his meeting with Michael; he escapes but is injured and taken to a grungy hospital where he experiences a ride on a gurney to the operating room from hell (a disturbing creepfest that’s justifiably famous among serious horror fans.) At the hospital, he is eventually rescued by his only real friend, a chiropractor played by Danny Aiello from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.
By that time a broken man, Jacob hails a cab and asks to be taken “home,” which turns out to be the marital home he shared with Sarah, not his grungy apartment with Jezzy. No one is home except his deceased son Gabe, who leads him upstairs towards a bright light.
The scene switches to Vietnam for the last time, and we see the real story of the battle that injured Jacob; members of his unit attacked their own side, while stoked up on paranoia and aggression caused by unwitting consumption of The Ladder. We then see two army surgeons fighting to save Jacob’s life, but finally losing.
The conclusion: Jacob never left Vietnam; his post-war life was a dream he had during surgery, enhanced by hallucinations caused by The Ladder.
A Vision, not a Dream
That's the conventional interpretation of the film, anyway. But upon closer inspection of what's going on, the trope of "it was all a dream in the end," doesn't hold up. Jacob isn't dreaming his post-war life; he's being given a vision of his future by God--a future in which he's wracked by physical and mental pain, loses his family, and abandons his academic career. God is trying to convince him that it's better to stop struggling to live and just move on up into heaven to be with his beloved son.
Consider the film's title: it's a double entendre. "Jacob's Ladder" not only refers to the hallucinogen cooked up by the military chemist, it also refers to the Biblical story of the prophet Jacob's dream. In the Biblical story, Jacob falls asleep and is shown a vision of angels traveling back and forth between heaven and earth on a long, celestial ladder. The vision is not a dream; it's a communication from God. The staircase that the modern Jacob ascends at the end of the film is a very obvious reference to the Biblical Jacob's angel-transporting "ladder."
Consider, also, that modern Jacob has no way of knowing about The Ladder drug while he's dying on the operating table in Vietnam. Some fans of the conventional theory explain that away by assuming that he could have subconsciously heard the surgeons discussing the drug, which is reasonable, but as we shall soon see, this isn't the only anachronism that appears in Jacob's "dream."
When he wakes up to the post-war world in the subway car, Jacob is living in the mid-70s. The clothes and cars are clearly of 1975-1976, not of the early 70s (i.e. , Jason Alexander's gigantic polyester tie). We also know it's the mid-70s because one of his old Army buddies says they haven't talked in five years. Five years from 1971 is 1976. Yet, how could Jacob have known, dreaming on the operating table in 1971, what cars and clothes would look like five years into the future?
Another anachronism: In the script, Jezzy makes a point of telling Jacob that she's "left a Hungryman in the oven" for his dinner. Not "a TV dinner," but specifically, "a Hungryman." If you look up the history of that brand, it didn't hit the market until 1973. The mention of the Hungryman TV dinner is a deliberate clue that Jacob is receiving a vision of the future.
And still other anachronisms: Jezzy and Jacob go to a party, and Jezzy starts dancing to Lady Marmalade by Patti Labelle. Lady Marmalade was a huge hit in 1975, something that Jacob couldn't possibly have known in 1971. And finally, on Jacob's final cab ride to his old house, the camera pointedly lingers on a political flyer for Richard Nixon that the driver has posted in his cab. The flyer uses a slogan that Nixon used in his second presidential campaign in 1972, not in his first campaign in 1968.
How do we know it's God who's sending Jacob these visions? Aside from the reference to the Biblical story, in one of the film's most important scenes, Jacob is told so--in a roundabout way--by his chiropractor friend, played by Aiello. The chiropractor, who is pointedly lit with a bright white light like an angel, hints to Jacob that his terrifying hallucinations of demons, explosions, and mutilated bodies are possibly just God's way of convincing him to move on in life.
As a film, Jacob's Ladder is rife with symbolism, most of it Biblical in nature, and it can be difficult to absorb on first viewing. Every significant character has a Biblical name, including Jezzy, who in some scenes is portrayed as some kind of demon or fallen angel. Jacob's terrifying gurney trip at the hospital to the nightmare operating room is clearly a reference to Dante's Circles of Hell. As the gurney rounds each hospital corner, the patients lurking in the hallways become successively more mutilated and terrifying after each turn.
However, this film becomes easier to understand when viewed from the standpoint that Jacob's postwar life is a vision of his future, not a dream.
Interestingly, there's a remake of Jacob's Ladder that's scheduled to be released this year, starring Jesse Williams from Grey's Anatomy in the title role. Once again, Hollywood has decided to remake a film that doesn't need one.