JACOB’S LADDER
With Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena, Danny Aiello, Matt Craven, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Jason Alexander, and Patricia Kalember.
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The perpetual displacements experienced by Jacob Singer (Robbins), rudely awakening from one dream only to find himself in another, carry the appeal of a thriller, as they do in Total Recall. Jacob wakes from a troubling nightmare/memory of Vietnam in 1971–some of his buddies are undergoing mysterious violent seizures just before an enemy attack, during which he gets wounded by a bayonet–to find himself on a subway on his way home from work at the post office, about six years later. At this point he immediately experiences a series of other troubling displacements, or moments of disorientation. (He glimpses two posters in the same scene, one that clarifies that it’s a New York subway and another that plants a major clue about the story to come.) One silent, staring passenger refuses to respond to his query about whether they’ve passed Bergen Street, his stop; and just before getting off at Bergen Street, he briefly glimpses what appears to be the exposed penis of another passenger who’s sleeping under a sweater. Then he finds that all the exits on his side of the tracks are locked–a familiar if irrational sort of New York experience–and gingerly crossing over to the other side, he nearly gets run over by another train; all the passengers seem to be looking out at him, and one of them, who appears to be eerily masked in white, slowly waves at him from the last car.
At home in the Brooklyn flat he shares with his girlfriend Jezebel (Pena), who also works at the post office, he has another Vietnam nightmare. When he wakes, Jezzie hands him a packet of old snapshots delivered by one of his sons when he was asleep, and we learn that he was married and had three sons before he went away to Vietnam, and that one of his sons, Gabe, died before he left, a memory that causes him to weep.
A first viewing of the film convinced me that its thrust was partly political, and that it was relatively outspoken for a commercial movie–a statement about the irreparable wounds the Vietnam experience has left on the American psyche, and how the Pentagon was partially accountable. A drug functions simultaneously as the probable cause for Jake’s derangement and as a metaphor for the effects of the callousness and confusion of that war on this country as a whole, but I didn’t see it as any sort of neat solution to the puzzle of Jake’s life. I was far from convinced that Jake’s death in Vietnam had any privileged reality, that it represented any key to what was real and what was false in the story. While it obviously provided some closure to the film, I found it hard to swallow that everything before it was a deathbed dream or vision like that of the soldier in Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as some of my colleagues have concluded. (If that’s the case, then Jake’s belated discovery about the Ladder is canceled out. This in turn makes virtual nonsense of the final printed title about BZ, unless we figure that Jake’s deathbed vision either includes some supernatural intuition of the truth or is followed by six more years of posthumous life as a ghost before he makes his discovery.) I felt that the film offered a certain emotional coherence about Jake’s life, but not any final narrative coherence, because the effect of Vietnam itself–shattering Jake’s life into a collection of disconnected pieces–made such coherence impossible. The film was about what made coherence unthinkable, not about any specific solution to a puzzle.
I’m relatively indifferent to whether the film is bringing up the drug experiments opportunistically or with serious intent. If they actually took place, surely it’s worth bringing them up for any reason at all. And considering that the effects of such Army “experiments” on U.S. soldiers as Agent Orange have been so underreported by the media, I wouldn’t feel unduly alarmed about the Pentagon’s welfare. Ultimately the argument that Jacob’s Ladder uses the reported BZ experiments “opportunistically” provides only another excuse for playing into the same media policy of keeping mum about the subject.
Jake’s character recalls the touching armless World War II veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), played by an actual armless vet (Harold Russell)–though he had the consolation of knowing he was fighting for something worthwhile. I’m reminded equally of the late Robert Warshow’s remark that that character’s passivity creates the film’s “most dramatic scene,” when the woman he loves has to undress him and put him to bed. “Beneath that scene’s pathos,” Warshow wrote, “one feels a current of excitement, in which the sailor’s misfortune becomes a kind of wish fulfillment, as one might actually dream it: he must be passive; therefore he can be passive without guilt.”
