Like most kids in America, I grew up on the programming that is made available
through the mass media. Like most who grew up in the 80s, before the real boom
of cable and then the Internet, by today’s standards I was relatively inexperienced
about what was out there, and what the possibilities of cinema really are. The only
thing slightly unusual about my viewing habits at the time was that I obsessively
watched PBS. Other than that, I watched Transformers, I sneaked movies like Friday the
13th in the middle of the night. Movies were a form of entertainment. Nothing less, nothing more.
I thought that the only way to tell a story was from the beginning to the end.

Then I saw Jacob’s Ladder. Looking back, the only thing I remember
is a first inkling of a sensation I had never before experienced: gnawing, existential terror.
Despite it’s somewhat lurid imagery, unlike most horror movies Jacob’s Ladder is
horrifying not because of what it shows, like with Hellraiser, not even because of what it doesn’t show, as with
Hitchcock’s Psycho, but
because you really don’t know how solid the ground is beneath you. The horror is truly
psychological. This, before I’d
ever encountered hallucinogens, before I explored the occult or read James Joyce.
This was my first contact with that
kind of uncertainty.

At the time, I didn’t know why it made me feel so uneasy. Not really. At the time,
it seemed like a fairly straightforward, weird movie about a troubled Vietnam Vet
who was uncovering some kind of government conspiracy. I wasn’t aware of the fact that
this “story” was just the feverish delusions in a dying man’s mind.

Later, I came to understand and to love the idea of
a tale that contains many stories within it, which changes,
like a hologram, depending on where you are standing. (A non-linear meta-narrative, if
you will.) I was wow-ed by Grant Morrison’s use of these techniques in a comic format with his
The Invisibles ,
and used them in my own novels and comic series.

By then, I had completely
forgotten about this movie. It was only by sheer chance that I recently saw this movie again, and was
reminded where many of these seeds were first sewn. Now, more than a decade since I first
saw it, I could recognize this piece of storytelling for what it truly is.

So if this story isn’t really “about” Jacob Singer, a man with post-traumatic stress
disorder, forced to re-live his past again and again, then what is it about?

Don’t laugh now. The Christian Mystic Meister Eckhart’s view of Heaven and Hell, and the
Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead.

It’s about the timeless
final passage into the hinterlands which all of us must take. This is the only
true Hell, which results from clinging to the things of this world as they are taken away,
one at a time. And the beings we encounter there, they too will be demons should we
resist them. But if we follow the natural order of things they bring bliss.

This idea of the dual nature of heaven and hell appears in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christian Mysticism.
The same can be said for this idea of the duality of angels/devils, after all the root of
the words “devil” and “deva” (angel) means “divine.” They are the psychological agents, you
could say, which exist in the “inbetween lands” depicted as the River Styx in Greek Mythology.
When you reach that divinity, there is no room for ego, for separate identity. That union is annihilation.
Heaven or hell. The end or the beginning. Neither and both.

The name “Jacob’s Ladder” originates from the Book of Genesis, where Jacob sees a
ladder ascending into heaven. On the way up, one encounters different ’spheres of existence,’
which were associated by Christan and Jewish mystics alike with the Sephiroth in the Tree
of Life. There can be little doubt that these inferences were intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

Psychological facts such as these, which transcend cultural boundaries (even if they wear
different garb and go by different names) can truly be called “myths,” and so, in the
end, Jacob’s Ladder is most accurately described as a modern myth.

I am happy to be able to share this movie with you now, via altertube. Whether you have
never seen this classic, or if you have but didn’t fully gather it’s import, I suggest you
sit back and enjoy.

Pick up the
Jacob’s Ladder DVD on Amazon.