Paranoid Jacob's Ladder: Chapter 6 Part 5 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D
JACOB'S LADDER (1990)
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There are all kinds of bardo experiences happening to us all the time, experiences of paranoia and uncertainty in everyday life. —Chögyam Trungpa, “Commentary,” The Tibetan Book of the Dead |
The Eastern notions underlying the script from its beginning clearly surfaced in a (later deleted) scene where a lecturing professor makes four points: (1) everything is a manifestation of a single Divine Reality; (2) people can directly intuit it; (3) they each have both a temporal “ego” and an “eternal self”; (4) the purpose of life is “to identify with the divine spark within.” In contrast, both Judaic and Christian traditions hold that God, the Divine Reality, differs from His Creation (including human souls). Rubin deplores this “dualism” (distinguishing between mankind and God) yet to appeal to an American public, he decided to teach his Hindu/Mahayana Buddhist/psychological lesson with Biblical imagery.
Supplementing these sources, his chief inspiration occurred in a nightmare of being condemned to Hell, appearing in the image of the New York subway (also the source of many hellish scenes in his Ghost). He woke sweating. (Psychologists find a high correlation between nightmares, vivid mental imagery, and creativity (Hunt 126).)
Was Rubin’s dream imagery entirely personal or did it spring from a tradition? Stephen Bissette notes that somewhat like Jacob’s Ladder, the anti-Vietnam war film Casualties of War (1989) “was structured as ‘a bad dream,’ a nightmare reverie, a remembrance that begins on a subway train ride” (Bissette 50). Furthermore, the image of a subway/hell runs from Early Twentieth-Century (e.g. Eliot’s Waste Land) to forgettable post-Jacob’s Ladder flicks, such as Split Second (1992). The latter ends with a monster identified as Satan on a burning subway train.
Whatever the origin, Rubin’s anxiety continued throughout the composition: “My family learned not to disturb me during this period. If anyone should come into my office as I was writing, even if they knocked softly, I would jump out of my chair. I couldn't control myself. I was in a constant state of fear whenever I sat down to write. . . . It was hard to tell if Jacob's hallucinations were mine or his” (Rubin 152).
Despite many changes in the interpretation of paranoia from Freud to “Ego Psychology” to “Object Relations Psychology” to “Self Psychology,” one of the constants has been the finding that paranoids feel more guilt than they admit. (Their acknowledging it would lessen self-esteem and lead to depression). To a typical psychoanalyst, Rubin's dreaming that he was damned would sound like the emergence of a repressed, personal guilt (however “archetypal” his imagery may have been).
Rubin had a special reason for ignoring the nightmare's verdict of damnation. His years in Asia had made him disbelieve in perdition. Despite this, he felt driven to write of his Hell nightmare as if taking dictation. he learned, to temper his desire to turn the work into an apocalypse: “In the early drafts of Jacob I had attempted to introduce a third layer to the script, the idea that Jacob's confrontations with demons might actually be connected to a larger world event, the Biblical Apocalypse. I wanted to portray the dissolution of an individual mind in the larger context of a dissolution of the entire world” (Rubin 175). He adds that “residues” of this apocalyptic theme persist in the final film (e.g., scenes of people being kidnapped by demons, an image that in Rubin’s movie Ghost equals consignment to Hell).
In the annals of psychology, the most famous case of paranoia is that of Daniel Paul Schreber who presumed himself at Judgment Day. The most celebrated novel of paranoia, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow, begins with Armageddon imagery. Because of paranoids' suspicion of those around them, Armageddon is an appropriate setting for paranoia, with the collapsing world rendered violent and untrustworthy.
Rubin's script frequently describes its many wild scenes as “chaotic,” which, in his usage, means bifurcation (i.e., division into dynamic opposites), envisioned in old images (e.g., horned devils, winged angels). These seemed to him “archetypal”: “I wanted to engage the ancient images that man has played with for centuries, images out of Jung's primordial unconscious” (Rubin 179).
Rubin mentions The Tibetan Book of the Dead as his model for the near–death state depicted in Jacob's Ladder. Together, his references to C. G. Jung and that book are significant. In his “Psychological Commentary” prefacing The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jung explains how to make the bardo (state of consciousness during death) comprehensible to Occidentals. He suggests putting the Immutable Light at the end, rather than the beginning as in the original (Jung 1960, xli-xliii). Jacob's Ladder ends with that Light. Jung notes, “Not only the `wrathful' but also the `peaceful' deities are conceived as . . . projections of the human psyche” (Jung 1960, xxxvii). Rubin's “Chronicle” states, “In my view, Jacob must learn that he has been doing mortal combat with his own fears, his own demons, throughout the movie” (Rubin 183).
Rubin continues that his character Jezebel (or “Jezze” as she is most often called) is what Jung calls a “trickster.” Jezze takes many forms, both demonic and benign, including Jacob’s own son (in the draft), but she is part of Jacob’s mind. He spends much of the film learning that he is dead. Jung writes, “It is a primordial, universal idea that the dead simply continue their earthly existence and do not know that they are disembodied spirits . . . (Jung 1960, xlv). According to Rubin, “By finally ‘letting go,’ Jacob frees himself from the entire struggle and accepts the inevitability of his death . . . ” (Rubin 183). Jung explains that one must stop struggling against the illusions and make a “complete capitulation” of egohood as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Recognizing the voidness of thine own intellect to be Buddhahood, and knowing it at the same time to be thine own consciousness, thou shalt abide in the state of the divine mind of the Buddha” (Jung 1960, xlvi, xxxvii). Rubin writes, “. . . like a Buddhist monk, [Jacob] sits down and allows himself to be consumed by [flames] (Rubin 183).
Then in one draft “The room crumbles beneath ... and disappears into the void” (Rubin 140). Translating entry into the void in terms of his own psychology, Jung simply says that it requires “much sacrifice”—a colossal underplaying of Asian assumptions. With certain exceptions that would not easily apply to Jacob, most Buddhist sects assume that it requires thousands of lifetimes. Entry to one of the Buddhist heavens is far easier. Thus, oddly, Adrian Lyne's wanting Jacob to go to Heaven is closer to Rubin's Asian sources than Rubin, whose greatest affinity appears to be with Jung.
Considering Rubin's Oriental interests, one might have expected
that he would have harmonized order and disorder as is so often the case in religion
outside Judaism and Christianity. Like Jung, however, Rubin conforms his sources
to Western love of categorization, in the name of making them more “archetypal,”
i.e., universal. The task of reintroducing a less rigid approach fell to Lyne, whose
own metaphysical and aesthetic attitudes partly reshaped the story. In the following
description of what the movie became, I provide section titles from the apposite
sections of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which divides dying and death itself
into various stages. It might be described as a major work of utilization, for its
purpose is to term what many consider the ultimate disaster—death—into the vehicle
of salvation.
Chikhai Bardo (The Moment of Death)
For an opening, Rubin wanted a yellow sky and helicopters disgorging troops on a
hillside. Lyne prefaces this with aircrafts crossing water. An idyllic piano theme
by Maurice Jarre plays in the background. The camera cuts to the helicopters’' reflections—an
appropriate image since the movie concerns reality and reflection. In counterpoint
to this pastoral, the fighting, drug-convulsed soldiers (including Rubin, gutted
by a bayonet) are depicted as crudely as Rubin intended. Lyne, though, refused to
show that the battle was between 500 Americans killing each other.
Chönyid Bardo (Place of
Peaceful and Wrathful Deities)
Suddenly Jacob finds himself in a subway, where he sits holding a copy of Albert
Camus's absurdist classic The Stranger. His eyes focus on a sign describing
New York as a “crazy” place where one will never be bored so “Enjoy!” A second sign
reads “HELL” followed by an anti-drug message. The two posters emphasize different
ways of regarding mental chaos—as pleasure or damnation, but both exemplify utilization,
mental chaos as a source of recreation or a way to scare people back to health. Paradoxically,
as entertainment and warning, the film does both.
Jacob's copy of The Stranger is all the film leaves of much in the script
about Jacob's Camus-like philosophy. (Camus considered the universe as “indifferent,”
so any order came from human categorizing). Next Jacob encounters a silent woman
and a huddled body that may have a tail. Rubin envisioned his devils as creatures
from the art of Hieronymous Bosch or William Blake; Lyne insisted that they be basically
human, but with deformed, diabolical appendages, so they would be more ambiguous,
less stereotyped. Trying to exit the station, Jacob is temporarily trapped and almost
murdered, particularly in the draft, where devilish people attack him.
In Jung’s “Commentary” on The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
he compares the Chönyid to “psychosis” and quotes: “Then the Lord of
Death will . . . drag thee along. . . . Even when the body is hacked to pieces, it
will revive again. The repeated hacking will cause intense pain and torture” (Jung
1960, xlvi). Eventually, Jacob is dragged by demons and tormented in ways that would
normally kill a living person (as when a needle is thrust through his brain). But
he has already begun to experience a hostile world. Jung describes the Chönyid
as resembling “the phantasmagoria of a lunatic” (Jung 1960, xlvi).
Sidpa Bardo (“sexual fantasies”)
Although the real Sidpa is more than “sexual fantasies,” Jung repeatedly calls
it that, and it emerges in that form throughout the movie. Jezze, a character about
whom Jacob apparently had erotic dreams during his life, appears in his bardo
experience/hallucination as someone with whom he commits adultery.
Rubin alternates wildly between stages, cutting to Vietnam, then back to bed with Jezze. She objects to the Biblical names of Jacob’s children, while he reminds her of her being named after “Jezebel” (in the Bible, the evil queen of Judah). He asks how he got involved with her. She answers, “You sold your soul.” The Faustian echoes ring clearly since, like Faust, Jacob is a Doctor of Philosophy and described as particularly brilliant.
Suffering back pains, Jacob goes to Louis, the chiropractor, whose agonizing treatment is actually therapeutic. Although even Rubin intended nothing so simplistic as Louis's being a good angel and Jezebel a wicked one, the audience may begin to wonder if that is the case, preparing them for Jacob's paranoid suspicions of his lover. With a halo of light around the chiropractor (reminding the patient of a cherub), Louis advises Jacob to go back to the latter's wife. She left him when he refused to take an academic job. He explains his decision, “I decided my brain was too small an organ to comprehend this chaos.”
After some frightening adventures with deformed demons, he attends a disturbing party, where he becomes ill. Jezebel scolds him for going “crazy.” In fevered hallucinations, he dreams that he is back with his wife. Recuperating, he sits gazing at Doré engravings of demons and sabbats. He meets a Vietnam buddy also obsessed with paranoid fears of demons coming out of the walls and unnamed beings following him. The buddy dies in a car explosion, leaving only the cross and other religious images he carries with him to ward off evil. Jacob goes with former messmates to a lawyer. After preliminary investigations, the lawyer drops the case. He claims that they did not go to Vietnam but were discharged from the army for psychological reasons.
Government agents kidnap Jacob, he escapes, and a Santa Claus robs him. Carted through a hell-like hospital/lunatic asylum, he is saved by Louis who treats Jacob's back while paraphrasing the Christian condemned heretic Meister Eckhart: “If you're frightened of dying and holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all. The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that wont let go.” A favorite of Jung, Eckhart hardly offers orthodox Christian theology, but his mysticism, neither precisely Eastern nor Western forms a link between the two and the quotation ascribed to him allows Rubin to teach the psychological lesson of change.
Letting go of the past, of course, requires Jacob to know it. He learns thus of his own murder by a GI drugged by the CIA with a substance called the “ladder.” To make Americans more ferocious soldiers, it released primal aggression. For the title character, the drug-induced madness has become a Jacob's ladder in the Biblical sense: “…a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! “(Genesis 28.12).
Rubin wanted the movie to pass beyond heaven into the Buddhist
“void,” by which he seems to have meant some very un–Buddhist state that could be
categorized and depicted. Lyne objected not only because he thought such an ending
would be uncommercial but also for oddly personal reasons. He identified with Jacob.
Since he hoped to be reconciled with his own father in heaven, he did not wish to
show the Afterlife as empty (Rubin 191). In the actual movie, Jacob's dead son leads
Jacob up a stairway. They disappear in a flood of light, which may or may not itself
be a symbol of the void. The light then becomes the glow of a Vietnam operating room,
where Jacob's corpse lies peacefully.
Death comes for Everyman
Judeo-Christian tradition has shown less interest in final delirium than has Buddhism.
One partial exception is the fifteenth-century British drama Everyman. When
Death meets the title character, the latter finds that not his body, riches, or companions
but only his Good Deeds will accompany him to the Judgment. Unbeknown to the medieval
playwright, the story comes not from a Christian but an ancient Buddhist parable,
“The Man and his Four Wives” (Miscellaneous Agamas, no. 101). In Christianized
form, it reached Europe in the short-story collection Barlaam and Josaphat.
According to the original parable, a dying man loses his three wives (personifications
of his body, riches, and companions). Only his fourth wife, his “True Nature,” remains.
In Rubin's version, Jacob’s love for his actual wife constitutes his True Nature.
(Similarly, in Rubin’s Ghost, the dead protagonist finally tells his Molly,
“It’s amazing ... the love inside, ... you take it with you.”)
Jezebel evokes the carnality to which Jacob clings in death. In one scene cut from the final version, she metamorphoses into his Doppelgänger. According to Rubin, Jezebel is the “Angel of Death” (176), cf. the character Death in Everyman. She is associated also with companionship and bodily pleasure, cf. the Buddhist parable. Surprisingly, however, she does not represent wealth; she lives in a housing project while the true wife inhabits an apartment building with a doorman.
In a typical 1930s movie (e.g., Holiday, 1938), a hero renounces riches for love. Writing in the late 1980s, Rubin reverses that idea as if a contemporary audience would not trust Our Lady of Poverty. Movies tell us much about the psychological/religious currents of our time—the apocalyptic paranoia of seeing cities filled with demons and the desire to rise above them to a high apartment with a guard at the front door. Since the 1960s, both films and psychological theorists have toyed with the idea that in a dangerous society, paranoia may be utilized to advantage (Fleming and Manvell 152).
Delusion can be wholesome in another sense if, as in Jacob’s Ladder, it gives rise to sudden changes of perspective and hallucinatory spectacle, deconstructing outworn conventions. Buddhist fascination with the bardo stems from hope that recognizing the illusoriness of that state will lead to a greater realization: material life itself is but a collection of stereotypes in the mind, or in Thomas Pynchon’s terms a “creative paranoia,” projecting one's hopes and fears on the world around one, generating mysterious connections. No wonder that he models his Crying of Lot 49 on the 49 days of the bardo state! According to Pynchon, “[Paranoia] is the leading edge of the awareness that everything is connected” (Pynchon 703). These endless connections overwhelm conventional structures, revealing a chaotic holism.
In Gravesean terms, Jacob’s Ladder shows the inadequacy
of each stage before eight. His trying to survive alone in the subway exposes the
pitfalls of stage one. His difficulty having a trusting family relationship condemns
stage two. The horrors of war denounce stage three. The restrictive bureaucracies
of Jacob’s job, the veteran’s bureau, and the hospital reveal the rigors of stage
four. As already mentioned, stage five is treated more kindly than one might expect,
but Jacob’s decision to work at a more menial job than necessary shows that he has
at least partly transcended materialism. That so many characters are presented as
monsters limits empathy (the hallmark of stage six). Jacob’s rejection of philosophy
implies inadequacies in stage seven. Thus, the film suggests an imperative to move
beyond the known stages of complexity to some higher spiritual level and what brings
emotional power may come from the personal psychological problems of Rubin and Lyne,
fueling their spiritual quests.
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