Jacob’s Ladder concerns a spiritual journey – the process of what is commonly known as the Biblical “first death” – visualized in terms akin to a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis. It occurs in a state of perceptual transience as the mind (or soul) has to leave one state of being for another but cannot let go of what it considers integral to its life in that initial state. Indeed, as the film is structured to incorporate a series of seeming Vietnam flashbacks, so too it gradually becomes clear that what is accepted as past is the present, and that the “reality” of Robbins’ life as we have been following it is the psychotic construct of a dying man. Slowly, the real and the imaginary become intertwined in the film’s continuous play with subjective experience as time and space are subject to a schizophrenic dissolution, both perceptual and psychological. Dying is paralleled to psychosis – as such, the essence of transformation and psychotic, spiritual metamorphosis. Of course, the net result of this perceptual confusion is the descent into an ever more elaborate paranoia which may be rooted in an objective military conspiracy or which in turn may be the product of a mind desperately longing to keep itself grounded but lapsing into paranoid delusion. Other films have toyed with such notions – Altered States for one – but Jacob’s Ladder remains the most provocative of these “visions of madness” in its spiritual intimations.
Yet the interplay of cause and effect is also most intriguing here. Hallucination (or the inclination of demonic presences) seems to be the first stage in the process leading to the dissolution of the identity. As the many layers of Robbins’ identity are systematically peeled away, both perceptual certainty and memory slowly intertwine in what seems a struggle against a fated end - death. Indeed, the idea of a man whose sense of certainty in self is gradually eroded is a common theme throughout Lyne’s work, its most disturbing implications finally confronted most personally in Jacob’s Ladder. As fascinating as the film is as an exploration of spiritual surreality it seeks nevertheless to teasingly provide some explanations for what is a completely frightening and inexplicable loss of control. The explanations, though, are Robbins’ delusions and by inviting audience acceptance of them makes for an approximation of psychosis. The ending, reminiscent in part of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, gives the film its spiritual context wherein the rather contrived conspiracy mechanics can be explained as Robbins’ need to explain his own otherwise inexplicable predicament – the paranoid creation of delusion. Indeed, therein lays the horror of the film, in the loss of psychological self-control and subsequent perceptual stability, with hallucination and delusion emerging from the paranoid drive to re-establish order. read more