MovieChat Forums > Jacob's Ladder (1990) Discussion > Why the confusion? *SPOILERS*

Why the confusion? SPOILERS

posted 12 years ago by hexedd
10 replies | jump to latest

I don't understand why people have such a hard time getting the ending of this and some of the meanings. There seems to be a particularly confused debate about Jezzie. She is obviously not a "good" character. The Biblical reference says it right away - a false prophet - and heathen. As someone else stated on here, Jacob even says "how did I end up with such a heathen" or something to that effect. Secondly, their relationship in the movie is from a Christian context at least "wrong." Their relationship seems to be based a lot on sex and or sexually driven desires, and there is no indication that they are married. This is obvious when she first goes into the shower and seduces him and then when she is seductively dancing at the party and the snake/serpent creature is wrapped around her. In that scene he is talking to the woman reading his life line and she says his life line indicates that he is "already dead." Just after that Jezzie tries to get him to stop talking to her by convincing him to dance with her (again using sex to keep him off track). Moreover, throughout the movie if you watch her facial expressions (excellently acted) you can see she "knows" something and is constantly trying to get him to stay off finding the truth. One example is when the phone rings and she tries to convince him to "leave it alone." Her character is basically a temptress who is trying to keep him/his soul in limbo. There are a lot of debates on here about her character's meaning, but if you just pay attention to some of the things I mentioned (and many I'm sure I missed) it's pretty straightforward. The only part I didn't understand was the "ghosts" with no face, or at least no eyes. What was the significance of that? Or were they just meant to be scary?

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] hexedd 12 years ago

Guess that makes sense, and his girlfriend was basically the "head demon."

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] rogerwatersfan3 12 years ago

The movie uses some Christian symbolism but is also heavily rooted in Buddhism and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

From a simplistic perspective, Jacob sees Jezzie as a temptress. But from a wider view, I don't ultimately see Jezzie as a villain, and I don't think the movie does either...she is the part of him that doesn't want to let go of his life, and she's fighting to keep him alive. She's keeping him from thinking about the things that would cause him pain--the dead son, the failed marriage...it's important to remember that Jacob is dying in the movie, but he's not dead. He's bleeding to death in Vietnam, having a deathdream about being home in New York. I think some part of him senses that to fight for his life, he needs to maintain his illusions. Once those illusions become more painful than the life he is trying to protect, it becomes important to let them go.

Jezzie is the part of himself that is fighting to remain alive. In one deleted scene near the end, Jacob actually witnesses Jezzie turn into his corpse. At that moment, he accepts his fate, and his "demons become angels".

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] Suskis 11 years ago

I think that everything in this movie is debatable, or so. I think that from the moment Jacob is stabbed to his death, all the movie is an hallucination of him trying to rethink of his past life and even to imagine his future (the death of one of his sons, or him leaving his wife). And finally, when death comes, he just lets go everything and dies peacefully. How he could guess about the drug or foresee the future are just speculation (or they were just fantasies). Also all theological stuff is just irrelevant (at least to me, that I am atheist)

'What has been affirmed without proof can also be denied without proof.' (Euclid)

[–] hexedd 11 years ago

Yes you're right, it is debatable, but only if you don't want to listen to the filmmaker's take on it. It's all a near-death hallucination. Whether or not you want to buy it as a religious "purgatory" or "limbo" thing or just see it as a "brain functioning" issue is entirely up to you.

You got it right when you said "all the movie is an hallucination". He's in Vietnam at the point of death and it's one of those "my life flashed before my eyes" moments, or "seeing the light." However you want to term it, it was his brain and/or soul looking back on his life and many other hallucinations just before he died. Even the title of the movie is a reference to the Biblical story of Jacob ascending into heaven. I'm also an atheist, but regardless of your personal stance the movie is full of religious symbolism and the end is essentially him coming to terms with his own death and accepting it. The moment up until then one could argue was a hallucination or his soul was in "limbo" depending on your stance on religion. ;) Fantastic film.

[–] Adigator89 11 years ago

From a theological POV, him being in purgatory/limbo would be incorrect, unless the scriptwriter/director has poor knowledge of the religious concepts he uses in the film. Purgatory isn't an intermediate state between life and death, but an intermediate state before reaching heaven. Those who will enter heaven go through purgatory first, and are "prepared" for heaven. No one who enters purgatory stays there, or goes to hell. Also, you have to be dead to enter purgatory in the first place, which isn't the case of Jacob, who has the hallucinations while he is dying (not to mention that I don't even remember if he's said to be catholic, as purgatory doesn't exist in other christian creeds as an actual place, and only a catholic can enter heaven in the catholic religion).

There are similar concepts to purgatory, in other religious beliefs too, including many pre-christian ones (where christianity likely got the concept in the first place), but all require the person to be actually dead, and imply those living performing rituals so to ease the one who died's passing.

A more proper explanation to what happens to Jacob would be his brain releasing DMT. It's a psychadelic substance with effects similar to LSD, which has been found to be produced an released in the brain when someone dies and creates powerful hallucinations - it's the scientific explanation for things like "near death experiences", which of course is carefully ignored by people looking to make a quick buck with books like Heaven Is for Realz, and co. The presence of the religious stuff is often due to the fact that hallucinations use elements from our daily lives and combine them in different ways, rather than create something totally new. Granted, this was probably not the intent of the director/writer, as I'm not sure this was even scientifically know when this movie was made. The original intent was probably some pseudo-spiritual new age nonsense.

[–] rogerwatersfan3 11 years ago

The screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, is a Buddhist teacher. He's using some Christian concepts in the film, presumably because Jacob is a Christian. But Jacob isn't in hell, purgatory, or anything like that in the traditional sense. All of the scenes after the war are a dream (not a hallucination) he is having while bleeding to death in Vietnam. He is stabbed in Vietnam, hits the ground, loses consciousness, and dreams he is back home from the war, in New York.

The "flashbacks" to Vietnam were not, in fact, flashbacks. They were real time. Jacob is starting to wake up in these scenes and see what's actually going on around him--he's being shepherded to a military hospital, and losing a lot of blood from the knife wound he sustained in the opening scene.

The dream he's having is helping him to let go. Whether there are actual angels or supernatural beings visiting this dream is up for debate. But he isn't hallucinating anything in the literal sense. He's just dreaming, just like you do almost every night. He starts to realize this when he crawls back in bed with Sara (notice the confused look on his face--he can't believe he's just talked to his dead son) but his brain tricks him again by taking him out of this dream into another one, where he finds himself back in the bathtub in his apartment with Jezzie. This is the scene that confuses most people, but it's key to understanding the movie. It's the moment where you either realize you're watching a dream, or you decide to try to impose a meaning on what Jacob is seeing--which is exactly what Jacob is doing.

But the physical events of the film are simple, charting his being stabbed at the beginning, his trip to the hospital, his surgery (envisioned by him as demonic), and his being pronounced dead at the end.

[–] StoneGriffin 11 years ago

Lol. Sorry. Had to laugh. Hell wouldn't seem so bad if your fate was having sex with Elizabeth Pena over and over again. Not so bad at all! ;)

Dr. Kila Marr was right. Kill the Crystalline Entity.