Horror in the 90s: 'Jacob's Ladder'

Jacob's Ladder (1990)

Directed by Adrian Lyne

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena, Danny Aiello

Release Date November 2nd, 1990

Box Office $26.9 million

Director Adrian Lyne is known best for his sexy, sweat-soaked thrillers about cheating husbands, scheming women, and rich guys who pay for sex in more ways than one. So, seeing that he's also the director of a gritty, Vietnam era horror movie like Jacob's Ladder is a little jarring. Now, of course, he does throw in needless nudity, Elizabeth Pena's breasts are lovingly captured on screen for no particularly good story reason, but otherwise, Jacob's Ladder is a grand departure for the tawdry director of admittedly zeitgeist grabbing sex thrillers.

Jacob's Ladder tells the story of a deeply haunted Vietnam vet named Jacob, played by Tim Robbins. Jacob nearly died in Vietnam after his unit was the subject of a surprise attack. Jacob himself was stabbed in the gut and had to have his intestines pressed back into his body before he could be taken back to the base hospital. Jake remembers being gutted by a bayonet but he also has another memory that he cannot quite reconcile. Just prior to his being stabbed, Jacob's unit seemed to be having severe hallucinations.

Is it a dream or a memory? Jacob cannot tell. However, when Jacob survives a pair of attempts on his life and compares notes with some of the members of his unit, it appears that there may indeed have been more to this firefight than a surprise attack. Meanwhile, Jacob isn't sleeping, he's in desperate pain from a back injury. Thankfully he has a benevolent chiropractor named Louie (Danny Aiello) who acts as friend, confessor, therapist and guardian angel. Louis is seemingly the only one able to comfort the ever-tormented Jacob.

On top of his traumatic near death in Vietnam, Jacob lost a son before the war. Gabriel (Macauley Culkin), was struck and killed while riding his bike. Jacob's life has been a mess ever since. Despite having two other children, Jacob fell apart, his marriage to his wife, Sarah (Patricia Kalember) fell apart and then Jacob nearly died. It's no wonder that he can barely function and gave up life as a Park Avenue Shrink for a relatively more peaceful and less stressful job as a postal worker. Boomers and Gen-X'ers are making dark jokes right now, millennials are a bit confounded and thinking yes, being a postal worker would be less stressful. Both sides are right. Pop Culture is weird like that.

Anyway, that's Jacob's Ladder. Jacob barely functions, survives a few attempts on his life, has a couple more near-death experiences and begins seeing demons. He has meltdowns at any function he attends, when he's not sick he's obsessed with his time in Vietnam. He's slowly destroying his relationship with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Pena), while she may have a secret related to what is happening to Jacob. What is real and what is a hallucination begins to intermingle into a confusing mélange of disconnected horror images that all mean nothing when the ending is revealed.

The twist of Jacob's Ladder, spoiler alert, we have to talk about the ending, is that Jacob died in Vietnam. Everything that happened to him throughout the entire movie is a dying man's fever dream. After having spent nearly two hours teasing out a story of conspiracy, grief, depression, and PTSD, none of what we have watched actually happened. It's a cheat, the whole movie is a cheat. One might argue that the movie was about a war for Jacob's soul but that doesn't explain why Jacob's Ladder has an entire subplot about Jacob and his fellow vets trying to sue the government.

The dream scenario doesn't square with a character played by Matt Craven who repeatedly saves Jacob's life before revealing the conspiracy that led to Jacob's tormented state. In an admittedly quite good monologue, Craven opens up to Tim Robbins' Jacob about being a chemist and coming up with a more potent form of LSD. When he was busted by the cops, the chemist was offered the choice of jail time or working for the government. His potent LSD was then tested on monkeys who showed remarkable levels of aggression. Then, the drug was tried out on Jacob and his Vietnam unit. They also showed remarkable aggression but just like with the monkeys, the men turned their aggression on each other and began violently, savagely murdering one another.

One can only speculate that director Adrian Lyne wanted to expose something the American government was accused of doing during Vietnam, experimenting on American soldiers, but it is so clumsily sewn into the rest of Jacob's Ladder that it feels like an entirely different movie happening amid the war for Jacob's soul. By the way, that's a war between the good of Danny Aiello's Angelic chiropractor and an uncaring, unsupportive and demonic Veteran's Affairs bureaucracy. Naturally, if you're a military member, the idea of the V.A as a demonically possessed entity determined to steal souls, is probably a terrifically dark bit of humor.

If however, you're a civilian, the dark joke doesn't land nearly as well. It's all meaningless of course, your opinions about what you have seen and how Jacob's life and death are portrayed, don't matter. The movie was over before we started watching it. From the moment that Jacob takes a bayonet in the gut, the movie is a dream, a cop out fantasy wherein Lyne can enact elements of horror imagery without having to commit to one point or purpose. Nothing in Jacob's Ladder matters in the slightest because he's essentially dead when the movie began.

So, was Jacob's soul saved? I have no idea. Probably? He goes off with his dead son Gabe in the end so I guess that happened but, in the end, the film raises too many questions and frustratingly answers no questions. Instead, Adrian Lyne appears to have been hopping a trend for late 80s, early 90s clout. When Jacob's Ladder was released, Vietnam horror stories were a shorthand for prestige film. The trauma of Vietnam became a genre all its own after both Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone helped turn the trauma of war into a box office and critical bonanza.

It wouldn't be the first or the last time that Adrian Lyne tried trend surfing. He may be known as a pace setter for buzzy movies about zeitgeist grabbing topics but the reality of Adrian Lyne is clout chasing. Lyne ripped his movies straight from the headlines, he watched what was successful in the moment and sought to marry it to his style of movie. It worked well for a while as he was seen not as a reflection of the times, but the man setting the tone. With Jacob's Ladder however, the mask slipped and the calculating director chasing trends for clout is fully revealed in a half-assed horror movie aimed specifically at audiences he assumed were eager to have the trauma and controversy of Vietnam warmed over, repackaged and sold to them again as a buzzy horror movie.

As much as it pains me, I do have to praise Lyne just a little bit. Some of the demonic imagery that he sneaks into Jacob's Ladder are legitimately disturbing. At one point, during a massive freak-out, Jacob thinks that he sees Jezzie having public sex with a demon whose phallic tale wraps itself around her as she writhes in ecstasy. Is it kind of gross? Yes, but with intention, it's intended to be deeply disturbing and it is. The same can be said of Lyne's numerous psycho-demons whose heads morph and contort in painful and gruesome ways. These are striking visuals that have a genuine place in the pantheon of horror movie imagery. It's just a shame that they exist in this otherwise execrable horror movie.

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