Perhaps that refusal to abide by an established methodology is what makes 1990\u2019s Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em>, released 30 years ago this week, stick out when compared with other films in the Vietnam War subgenre. It\u2019s not the violence here that\u2019s different; Apocalypse Now<\/em>, Taxi Driver<\/em>, The Deer Hunter<\/em>, and Full Metal Jacket<\/em> have their fair share of bloodshed, with \u201cthe smell of napalm in the morning\u201d and all that. Nor is it the film\u2019s depiction of post-traumatic stress disorder, with which protagonist Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is clearly struggling; PTSD symptoms appear in Da 5 Bloods<\/em>, too, during an altercation between Delroy Lindo\u2019s Paul and a Vietnamese merchant trying to sell him something\u2014a scene that ends in traded curses and a panic attack. What is most notable about Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> is the film\u2019s relentless insistence that life is a nightmare, our sins are irredeemable, and death is our only escape. There are no second acts, neither through war (no overcoming of fear, no purpose found in military service) nor in \u201cnormal\u201d life (no romantic possibilities, no familial reunion). Our only absolution is found in finality. Profoundly bleak and deeply surreal, the narrative messiness of Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> isn\u2019t a flaw; it\u2019s the point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> begins in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam in October 1971, 50,000 Americans had already died in the war, and the men we see on the ground are exhausted. They\u2019re bruised all over their bodies; blood is clotted in their hair and on their faces; they keep their eyes closed as a helicopter hovers low to drop off more soldiers. Nothing is very surprising anymore. They pass a joint around, impressed by its quality (\u201cThis shit\u2019s something else\u201d), and bust each others\u2019 balls. \u201cThe Professor\u201d is what they nickname the easy-going, smile-prone Jacob, and their ribbing of him is wide-ranging in its comfortable vulgarity. When they hear news of an enemy force on the attack, they spring into action, grabbing their guns and preparing themselves for the onslaught they all know is coming\u2014and then everything goes sideways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSomething\u2019s wrong. It\u2019s my head,\u201d one of them groans, and then one after another, each man seems to disintegrate. They collapse. They gag. They seize. They throw up blood. One of them whirls around in a circle, unable to stop, like a Sufi mystic gripped in faithful ecstasy. In only a few minutes\u2019 time, their entire compound is overtaken by enemy forces, bombed, and left to burn, and Jacob is one of the only survivors. As he flees into the jungle, he hears a twig snap\u2014and turns toward the interloper, who buries his bayonet deep into Jacob\u2019s stomach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Is this a memory? A hallucination? Whatever it is, Jacob awakens from it while riding on a positively filthy (and hence fitting for the time) New York City subway car. The year is 1975. Jacob\u2019s hair is shaggier now, his tall frame is encased in a United States Postal Service uniform, and his hands grip a copy of Albert Camus\u2019s nihilistic classic The Stranger<\/em>. (If you know how this novel ends, the inclusion of it by screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, who also wrote Ghost<\/em> and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for that film, is already a tell toward how this movie will progress.) In a film full of allusions to the Christian conceptions of creation and the afterlife, from its title to its characters\u2019 names, this scene\u2019s details are immensely assertive. Side-by-side ads on the train car call New York City \u201ca crazy town\u201d and living in it \u201cHELL\u201d; Jacob can\u2019t find a way out of the train station, essentially trapped in a sort of purgatory; and when he ends up standing in a split in the train tracks, he is bathed in a bright, all-enveloping light, the kind of glow that suggests divine intervention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Equally immediate, though, are the signs of Jacob\u2019s troubled mind. Director Adrian Lyne is unmerciful in his steady incorporation of horror after horror, all paced perfectly to draw us into the depths of Jacob\u2019s unsteadiness. He thinks he sees tentacles poking out from a homeless person\u2019s body. When he jumps out of that train\u2019s way, he spots monstrous, faceless figures writhing and flailing about inside, one of whom waves goodbye at him from the caboose window. He bursts into tears when he comes across a photograph of his dead son, Gabe (Macaulay Culkin). A car tries to run him down, and he sees another vibrating figure in the backseat; the psychiatrist he had been seeing for years has mysteriously died; at a party with his girlfriend, Jezebel (Elizabeth Pe\u00f1a), he sees her writhing against and humping a demon with massive teeth, wings, and a thrusting tail. At the moment of climax, the creature impales Jezzie through the mouth. This Lovecraftian blitz builds up to a positively gruesome sequence at a hospital where Jacob is immobilized and wheeled past pools of blood, piles of limbs, and more damaged, antagonistic strangers before being strapped into what looks like a human-sized hamster wheel. \u201cThis isn\u2019t happening,\u201d Jacob insists, but it\u2019s hard to argue with a literally blank-faced doctor injecting something into your brain against your will. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet for as unsettled as his mind is in the present\u2014as much as Jacob seems to be living two parallel lives, and existing in two realities at once\u2014his memories of Vietnam, which he calls \u201cweird flashes,\u201d are more concrete. Lyne places us both alongside Jacob in these flashbacks, allowing us to see what he does (the glow of an American soldier\u2019s red flashlight illuminating a spiderweb with an insect immobilized at its center; a field doctor hovering over Jacob before he\u2019s lifted into a helicopter), before switching to an outside perspective that lets us observe how Jacob is acting in these moments (his eyes, frozen wide, in shock). \u201cAfter \u2018Nam, I didn\u2019t want to think anymore,\u201d Jacob had told his chiropractor Louie (Danny Aiello), but the only times he seems coherent are in these scenes that no one would want to remember. If those are the memories Jacob\u2019s subconscious allowed him to hold onto, what has it made him forget?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em>, Robbins had been most known for his supporting roles in action movies and comedies: Top Gun<\/em>, Howard the Duck<\/em>, Bull Durham<\/em>. His work here demonstrated the intensely contrasting desperation and determination Robbins can communicate in a single look; although Jacob is a naturally sympathetic character as a traumatized war veteran, Robbins imbued him with additional, understandable anguish. He is searching for a home that seems impossible to find, and for answers that no one is willing to provide. Not Jezzie, who laughs off his concerns about demons (her response of \u201clowlife, that\u2019s all they are; the streets are crawling with them\u201d is very \u201870s New York). Not the palm reader Elsa (S. Epatha Merkerson) at that strange party, who notices something very unusual about Jacob\u2019s lifeline. Not Jacob\u2019s fellow veteran Frank (Eriq La Salle), who dismisses Jacob\u2019s concern that something strange happened in Vietnam (\u201cWar\u2019s war. Things happen, man\u201d), nor two men who take Jacob hostage and threaten him (\u201cLet it lie\u201d). Robbins\u2019s Jacob is shut down over and over again, but the impact of his performance is in how unyielding he is in pursuit of an explanation for what the Army did to them in Vietnam, and what is still plaguing them so many years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n War, of course, is never easy to understand or comprehend, and there\u2019s a certain fruitlessness to Jacob\u2019s journey. Would having a concrete answer about whatever Jacob and his fellow soldiers were subjected to make their pain any less? Would it bring back his dead friends? Would it return Jacob to who he was before Vietnam? All of this is impossible, and Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> knows this; that\u2019s why trying to understand the film\u2019s plot turns is its own kind of folly. What matters more about Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> is how its pervasive sense of dread and lurid, terrifying imagery combine into a sort of silent scream, a cry of agony that no one cares to hear. The destructive spread of war is uncontainable, and the damage it inflicts on the soul is irremovable. \u201cYou\u2019ve done it to yourself this time, haven\u2019t you?\u201d Louie asks Jacob, but what Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> underscores is how often the evils forced upon us are the most impossible ones to transcend. Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em> is available through Cinemax and digital rental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/jacob2-1024x545.jpg\")
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