[Film Review] Jacob's Ladder

Note: This review contains spoilers. If you haven't watched the film, don't read this review!


 Jacob's Ladder likes to look as though it is playing a little trick on you.  It is a psychological horror film about Jake, a Vietnam vet seeing visions of demons everywhere he goes in 80s New York City, while suffering quick flashes to a time in the war where he was stabbed by a bayonet.  The stabbing occurred during a firefight, the kind full of grotesque horrors living up to the mantra "war is hell".  Jake, in the modern day, doesn't want to remember.  He wants to live with his girlfriend, Jezzy (short for Jezebel), work his mailman job, and just carry on the best he can.  Unfortunately, Jake's mental state seems to be unraveling as he sees demons and grotesqueries in everyday life.  He thinks he is losing his mind until he gets a call from another vet, Paul, who was there during that horrific firefight, and he's been seeing the same shit.  Slowly, it becomes clear to Jake that the government is hiding something, something they did, and it is ruining his life and everyone else's who survived that day.  But what is clear to Jake isn't so clear to us: is it truly the product of some government conspiracy, or is Jake actually just going crazy, or, worse, is he already dead?  The film leans pretty heavily into the government conspiracy angle, so it may be a surprise to some that, in the end, the entire film is inside Jake's mind during his final death throes.  This may sound condemning to those who loath the "it's all in his head" framing devices, but Jacob's Ladder is a textbook example of how to use it right.

The film is a trick, but not the trick it is trying to sell you.  It wants you to question what is real and what is really happening, so it can land effectively on its ending where Jake ascends to heaven with his deceased son Gabe.  The real trick is convincing you that it matters what is real and what isn't in the first place, since it all builds on top of itself as a whole.  In reality, Jacob's Ladder is an interweaving of several plot threads, each with different thematic significance: Jake living with his girlfriend seeing demons, the government conspiracy, and the brief flashes of Jake dying in Vietnam after being mortally wounded.  These three threads create an overarching theme as well.

The one best out of the way first is the government conspiracy angle, as it is a good foundation for the overarching themes.  Near the end of the film Jake learns that, during that fateful firefight, his outfit was dosed with an experimental drug called The Ladder, meant to increase aggression and combat effectiveness in soldiers.  It goes horribly wrong, and leads Jake and co. to kill each other.  Throughout the film, various people Jake knows are killed (notably by car bombing, which seems pretty obviously a hit, but, then again, this is all in his head).  Jake is almost run over and later harassed and threatened by government agents to just drop it and live his life.  Jake's pursuit of this truth acts as one of the major tensions throughout the film: is the government behind this, and what are we going to do if they are?  The film's demonic imagery and Jake's unraveling throughout the film mimics an extreme version of PTSD, and any pride he could have from having served in the military is taken from him by this conspiracy.  Vietnam was not a "proud" war, and Jake's horror at the U.S. government reflects this.  When Jake meets Paul at the bar and learns he is seeing demons too, Paul laments "I'm going to Hell, and don't try to tell me I'm crazy, because I'm not."  The film uses Vietnam and the repercussions the soldiers live with as the conductive surface between themes.

On the topside of that conductive surface is the thread about Jake and his girlfriend Jezzy.  Jake is back home after Vietnam, and he has a lot of baggage from before he ever went to war.  His youngest son, Gabe, died after being run over by a car while they were at the park, and his wife divorced him.  Every memory of Gabe locks Jake up.  He hasn't gotten over it, and most likely never will.  Jezzy doesn't like this.  Jezzy and Jake's relationship is superficial.  He confides in her some of the things that bother him or that he has seen, and she's somewhat receptive, but regularly tries to convince him to drop it and move on (even as she sees it eating away at his sanity).  She cares about him, but you get the impression it is somewhat conditional.  When Jake sees a picture of Gabe at the beginning of the film, he begins to cry.  Jezzy attempts to crumple all of the pictures of his kids and family from before the war, stating: "I don't like things that make you cry."  When Jake isn't around, Jezzy incinerates them.  It is easy to write Jezzy off as a heartless bitch, or a true life demon (in one notable scene, she grows demonic features briefly when confronting Jake about his obsession in demonology), but there are several instances of compassion, at least on some level, between her and Jake.  She worries he works too much.  She wants him to stop looking into the government conspiracy because she sees him growing more erratic.  In what is the most memorable and intense scene in the film, she frantically forces Jake (with the help of several neighbors) into an ice bath as his temperature climbs to a dangerous 106 degrees.  It isn't that she doesn't care for Jake, it is that she wants him a certain way, and that is important to her character and how we interpret her.  Jezzy, to my eyes, is very much the Devil, but not the torturous, Christian Devil.  In Jacob's Ladder, Hell isn't a place of damnation, it is a place of loss and unforgettable past horrors.  Jake's chiropractor tells him at one point: "The only parts of you that burn in Hell are the parts of your life you're holding on to . . . they're freeing your soul. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth."  Jezzy wants him free of his past, and to live in the moment, but Jake can't let go.  He knows where he was happiest, and it was with his wife and kids before the war.  When Jezzy shoves Jake into that ice bath, Jake sees a flash of being in Vietnam, being attended to by soldiers for his wounds, before flashing again into his and his wife, Sarah's bedroom.  He tells her he is cold, and that they should shut the window.  He then starts telling her of his dream, a nightmare he was having: he was dating that girl Jezzy from the mailroom, and it was awful.  His son Gabe wakes up from all the commotion, and Jake tucks him into bed, telling his three kids he loves them.  He crawls back into bed with Sarah, starts to drift back asleep, when suddenly another flash and he is lying in a bathtub, Jezzy and a doctor looming over him, telling him he is lucky to be alive.  Jake doesn't feel lucky, though.  He was happy there, and tears well up in his eyes as he silently stares up at the ceiling.  In my eyes, it is the most horrifying thing in the entire film.  Sure, the demons and his mental instability are horrific, but his mere presence in this existence is also horrifying.  Even if he rights himself again, it will never bring back what he has lost.  There is no coming back from it.

The final thread is also the shortest:  Jake in Vietnam.  Jake sees flashes throughout the film, but only for seconds at a time.  He is stabbed, wakes suddenly to it being night, unable to scream for help, and is eventually found and treated by other soldiers.  Jake succumbs to his wounds at the end of the film in a medical tent, a peaceful look on his face.  It is unclear if The Ladder was actually ever dosed to the unit or not, but the ending title card stating something about BZ, a real world experimental drug the U.S. government worked on during the time of Vietnam, strongly suggests that it is canonical.  The Ladder has a few interpretations, along with the title of the film itself.  In the biblical sense, it is a ladder to heaven, but it is also a pun, played off of The Ladder drug that caused the unit to kill its own men (named for it taking them "straight to the primal fear zone", something you would experience if you were aware you were dying), and the supposed ladder Jake is either ascending or descending throughout the film to Hell or Heaven. Assuming they were really killed by the government's failed experiment does little to enhance the themes of the film.  It more or less just doubles down on what is already there and already effective.  The importance of this thread is for framing.  Jake succumbing to death creates a series of issues he must work through in order to finally allow himself to die, and for him to understand his death, to a degree.  We see Jake pine, even if he won't admit it much to himself, for the time before the war, for a time before Gabe died.  That was when he was happy, and it is something he cannot let go of.  We see Jake living in a post-war tragedy, where horrors prevent him from living and threaten him with the death he is unknowingly experiencing.  The tethering point, the conduit between the threads is the Vietnam war, and its affect on a person.  Jake can't take it back, he can't live past it, and he needs to accept that.  Jake's projection of life after the war is Hell, before his Heaven, and his death during the war almost a godsend, a prevention of the Hell he could have lived trying to let go of a past that would forever haunt him.  The film almost envies those lost during the war to those who survived it, and gives Jake and ending he can be peaceful with, allowing him to ascend the stairs of his old home in Brooklyn with his son Gabe, who he missed so much.

Jacob's Ladder is an imperfect film that threads together fear of death, PTSD, and grief into a parable about Vietnam and its horrific affect on those who fought it.  It is a personal and surprisingly complex film, one that could have easily hid behind a twist ending like a gimmicky thrill ride.  It is confrontational, occasionally brilliantly so, but often a bit on the nose with its imagery and dialogue.  It spells certain thematic elements out to an almost unmistakable degree, making the film feel somewhat unconfident in its own execution.  Despite this, the film is passionate and multi-themed, worthy of exploration. 
 



8.0