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When making a film about war, or soldiers or what have you, what war you decide to place them in can vastly alter the tone of your movie. If you center your movie around the Civil War, then not only do you get to do an entire theme about racism in America, you have modernity vs tradition, regionalism, all sorts of good stuff. If instead you pick World War II, then not only do you get a clear ‘good vs evil’ moral coupon, but you also get the enduring quality of the human spirit and a message about the dangers of nuclear weapons. If you end up picking the Korean War or, heaven forbid, Vietnam, then pretty much the only card you have to play is ‘war sucks’. Not just because war, in fact, does suck, but because in the history of modern warfare Vietnam has the distinct honor of being the shittiest darn war the United States has ever been a part of. You could make an argument for the equally pointless Iraq War of course, but Vietnam was horribly on pretty much every level. The reasons for the war, the laws forcing citizens to fight said war and the social ostracization for refusing to fight, the horribly bloody conflict itself, the shady-ass bombing of neighboring countries okayed by Nixon and Kissinger and of course the post-war years that saw the streets fill with soldiers who were too traumatized by their experience to live normal lives. Whether your film is about the inhumanity of the war itself, like in Apocalypse Now, Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, or the effect the war had on its soldiers and American society, like in First Blood or Jacob’s Ladder, it’s all a long miserable road to death. So it goes.
In Jacob’s Ladder, Tim Robbins plays the titular Jacob Singer, a postal worker in New York City, New York. Jake is a Vietnam veteran, currently living with his girlfriend Jezebel after some nebulous issue with his ex-wife, going to work and seeing his chiropractor every once in a while. As far as lives go, it’s not all that bad, could be better. Then the nightmares start happening, and the hallucinations, and Jacob becomes convinced that some malevolent force is coming him. Does Singer’s suspicions hold some weight, or is he just slipping into insanity? And what is is the connection between these events and Singer’s time in Vietnam? Watch and see.
Nowadays, Jacob’s Ladder is noteworthy for being the artistic inspiration for the famous survival-horror video game series Silent Hill, the next installment of which is actually being done by Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and director Guillermo del Toro. If you have experience with the Silent Hill games, then a lot of the things in this film will seem familiar to you: A protagonist with a traumatic past, disturbing visual imagery, the persistent atmosphere of unease, and even a creepy hospital. While I do find the religious subtext omnipresent within the film on the wrong side of heavy-handed, the freakiness is consistent and finishes in a way you might not expect. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, why not try climbing up Jacob’s Ladder this Halloween?
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