Jacob's Ladder's Storytelling Stands

In 1990, I attended an opening night screening of the film Jacob’s Ladder. I knew nothing about the movie except that it was ostensibly a horror film. The film overwhelmed me. I sat transfixed, stricken by feelings of anguish and sadness. When it ended, I staggered out of the theater emotionally pummeled. I had no idea what just transpired, but I knew the experience was much more than a movie.

Over the years, I’ve watched the film dozens of times trying to understand why it had such a profound impact on me. Then it hit me. Jacob’s Ladder isn’t a horror film. It’s a spiritual primer on death and dying. The movie’s a dream-inspired narrative of a journey we will all take one day. It’s a difficult and painful watch yet ultimately rewarding and inspiring.

To properly understand the film, one must know about screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin. He was born in 1943 into a non-religious Jewish family in Detroit. When he was eight, his grandmother took him to see Sunset Boulevard. The opening scene of William Holden floating dead in a swimming pool impacted him. He became obsessed with death.

Another incident happened when he was eight. He was sick with a fever approaching 108 degrees. His mom called a doctor and asked if they should rush him to a hospital. The doctor said he wouldn’t survive the drive. His parents were told to place Rubin in a bathtub with cold water and add as much ice as the tub could hold. They called neighbors to bring ice and then kept Rubin in the bath for hours until his temperature normalized. This near-death experience taught Rubin that he’d one day die. (The incident inspired a crucial scene in Jacob’s Ladder.)

In 1962, Rubin attended NYU Film School. His classmates included Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. One of his roommates was a friend of LSD guru Timothy Leary. Rubin writes in his memoir It’s Only a Movie:

We had this pure lysergic acid sitting in the refrigerator and my roommate gave me a drop from the eyedropper. By mistake I squeezed thousands of micrograms of LSD down my throat.

Rubin embarked on a 10-hour acid trip. He experienced a mystical encounter that changed his perspectives on life, death and consciousness.

Everything I knew about life was instantaneously destroyed. I had no idea or concept for what was happening to me. And yet in some ways it was bizarrely familiar.

Rubin had read the Tim Leary/Richard Alpert book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He knew not to fight the acid trip, but what he experienced terrified him.

I remember walking down a long flight of stairs and seeing two winged demons at my side. “Where Am I?” They said, “You know where you are.” “Where am I going?” They laughed and said, “You know where you’re going.” And I did know but I didn’t want to face it. I kept trying not to think or say the word “Hell,” but I could see the entrance to Hell waiting for me at the bottom of that elongated staircase… They took me down the stairs. Then I entered the abyss.

In the weeks after his LSD experience, Rubin realized he’d arrived at a crossroads.

I sat for a long time wondering and even asking out loud, Why am I here? And a Voice, a loud, penetrating but loving Voice, answered out of nowhere, TO TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOU SAW! That was my directive. But there was one huge problem. I had no idea what I had seen.

After graduating NYU, he was hired at NBC New York as an assistant editor on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. This was a prime entry-level job pointing toward a career in television news. But Rubin knew the job wouldn’t answer the questions arising from his acid trip. Though his friends thought he was crazy, he quit his job and bought a plane ticket to Greece to begin a spiritual quest.

Rubin hitchhiked through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Singapore. He lived in ashrams in India, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, a Tibetan Monastery in Nepal. He explored Eastern religions like Tibetan Buddhism and sought a spiritual teacher. He didn’t connect with the gurus he met. While sleeping beside a river in India, a voice in his head said, “You must create a masterpiece.”

Rubin returned to New York in 1968. Needing money, he entered an Asian Antique store in Greenwich Village to sell four Tibetan rugs he’d purchased overseas. The proprietor asked Rubin why he’d been in Tibet. Rubin said he was looking for a spiritual teacher. The proprietor then asked if he’d found one. Rubin said no. The proprietor said, “I can teach you everything you ever wanted to know.”

This was how Rubin met his spiritual mentor Albert “Rudi” Rudolph (aka Swami Rudrananda). Rubin became an acolyte of Rudi and attended meditation classes in a converted funeral parlor in the West Village. Rudi taught Rubin that “the mind is the slayer of the soul.” It would take decades for Rubin to understand this concept. In 1973, Rudi died in a plane crash in the Catskill mountains. Rubin took up the mantle of Rudi’s teaching and began leading his own meditation classes.

Rubin also resumed his film career. He worked as an assistant director on Brian De Palma’s film Hi, Mom! and made a few short films. He became curator of film at the Whitney Museum and established The New American Filmmakers Series. This was a coveted job but didn’t resonate with his spiritual journey. Once again he made a mind-boggling career choice. He and his wife Blanche left New York for Indiana so she could earn a teaching degree. Blanche became a university professor while Rubin’s movie dreams floundered. He fell into depression. An inner voice reminded him to “Trust the journey.”

In 1981, Rubin had a dream. He recounts the dream in his memoir:

I’m in a subway late at night, traveling through the bowels of New York. There are very few people on the train. A terrible loneliness grips me. The train pulls into the station and I get off onto a deserted platform. I walk to the nearest exit and discover the gate is locked. I hike to the other end of the platform but that exit is also chained shut. I am trapped and overwhelmed by a sense of doom. My one hope is to jump onto the tracks and enter the tunnel, the darkness. The only possible direction is down. I know that the next stop on my journey is Hell.

He woke from the dream and had the thought, “That’s a great opening for a movie.” He then decided to “write my way out of Hell.” The resulting script was Jacob’s Ladder.

Rubin merged his dream of Hell with memories of his 1966 LSD trip. He sat at his typewriter and the words came through him. “It was the first movie I wrote that was delivered, by which I mean I had nothing to do with it… I didn’t understand where it was coming from or why, but it was pouring through me and scaring the hell out of me as I wrote… I was filled with so much energy I couldn’t even sit.”

Rubin’s script incorporates the Tibetan concept of the Bardo Thödol. This is a Buddhist idea that translates to “intermediate state” or “purgatory.” The Tibetan Book of the Dead claims that after we die we go through a profound drama of self-liberation through the intervention of peaceful and wrathful ones. Angels and demons help liberate us from our body as we die.

Jacob’s Ladder involves multiple levels of storytelling. The surface narrative is a horror film. The main character Jacob Singer (played by Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran haunted by memories of combat. After the war, he returns to New York and is plagued with PTSD (a form of Hell). He sees demons everywhere and feels he’s losing his mind.

Below the surface lies another story. In the Bible, Jacob wrestles with a divine figure who’s either God or an angel. Jacob’s given a vision of a ladder or stairway connecting earth to heaven with angels ascending and descending the steps. Jacob struggles until he’s given a new name “Israel” signifying he has overcome the torment of his life. Rubin used this idea to denote a link between this world and the next.

Halfway through writing the script, Rubin became stuck. He was writing a story about a man trapped in the Hell of his life (like Rubin himself). But he didn’t know how to extricate the man from Hell. Then he remembered a short film he’d seen in college called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (based on a 1890 short story by Ambrose Bierce). In the film, a Union soldier is about to be hanged by Confederate soldiers. He’s pushed off a bridge and instead of the noose catching and hanging him, he falls into the river below. Confederates shoot at him but he escapes and finds his way home. As he’s about to embrace his wife, the soldier’s neck jerks backward and he’s once again on the bridge being hanged. The journey to his wife all happened in his head in a microsecond.

With a flash of insight, Rubin realized he’d been writing a full-length version of Owl Creek Bridge. He writes in his memoir:

I was filled with so much energy I couldn’t even sit. I stormed around the house like a madman for over an hour saying, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ I finally understood what I was doing. I had my movie. I just wrote. It poured out of me.

Rubin finished writing Jacob’s Ladder in the fall of 1981. He’d been out of the Hollywood scene for years but sent the script to a woman who’d once been an agent. She sent the screenplay to filmmakers such as Sidney Lumet and Michael Apted. They thought the script was brilliant but felt it couldn’t be made. At one point Ridley Scott was attached but he opted to make Legend instead.

Around this time, an earlier Rubin script called Brainstorm was made into a film. This gave him legitimacy. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles and Rubin signed with a new agent. Jacob’s Ladder circulated around Hollywood for two years. American Film magazine called it one of the 10 best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. No one thought it could be made. Rubin’s agent fired him saying, “I don’t want to represent you. Your stuff is too metaphysical.”

Rubin refused to compromise his vision. He recalled his LSD trip and the voice directing him to “Tell people what you saw.” To Rubin, the most important message was, “We exist before we’re born and we continue to exist after we die.” (This was also the core message of Rubin’s screenplay Ghost.)

A film executive named Lindsey Doran took interest in Jacob’s Ladder. She became vice-president of Paramount and the studio purchased the screenplay in 1986. Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, Fatal Attraction) was hired to direct. Lyne and Rubin knocked around ideas. Rubin wanted the film to have an Old Testament feel as depicted in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Lyne preferred a more subtle view of Hell similar to the paintings of Francis Bacon and the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin.

Their conflicting visions threatened to torpedo the project. Then an idea emerged that united them. Rubin recounts the moment in his memoir:

Thalidomide was a drug used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women that unexpectedly caused deformities in their children. It perfectly defined the demonic imagery that Adrian Lyne had trouble describing… Although I struggled to let go of my biblical imagery, the new look of the film emerged. Adrian felt that when a nurse’s cap fell off and Jacob saw horns protruding from her skull, they would look like abnormal cancerous growths, not anything so demonic. The same was true for the tail emerging from the man’s pants on the subway.

Not only did the script become more terrifying, it was mind-altering (like Rubin’s LSD trip). The audience doesn’t know why Jacob is seeing demons. Rubin sprinkles Hellish easter eggs throughout the story. The film opens with the sun setting over Vietnam during the war. The sun’s setting because Jacob’s life is about to end. The platoon is attacked by an unseen enemy. Jacob’s bayoneted in the gut. He falls to the ground, mortally wounded. (We don’t know this at the time.) When he wakes, he’s on a filthy subway train (ala Rubin’s dream) rubbing his stomach. We’re left wondering whether Vietnam was a flashback or a bad dream.

Jacob sees two signs above the subway window. Sign #1 reads: “New York may be a crazy town but you’ll never die of boredom.” (Key words are “you’ll never die.”) Sign #2 reads: “Hell. That’s what life can be doing drugs. But it doesn’t have to be that way.” These two signs spell out the movie we’re about to watch. Jacob walks to the right (in the direction of the Hell sign). He’s unconsciously choosing Hell over everlasting life (“you’ll never die”). He asks a woman on the train if she knows where the “Bergen Street” exit is. In German, the word “Bergen” means “rescue” or “salvation.”

Jacob discovers he’s stuck in the subway station (straight from Rubin’s dream). His only way out is through the dark tunnel (Hell). Inside the tunnel he’s nearly hit by a passing subway car. He sees faceless commuters pressing their countenances against the windows. A train operator with no mouth or eyes waves at him as the subway rolls into the distance. Was Jacob supposed to be on this train? Was this his transport between worlds, his passage to liberation?

This is the central conceit of Jacob’s Ladder. Jacob’s dead. He’s been dead the entire movie. He experiences Hell on earth because he refuses to accept his own death. The audience doesn’t know this (nor does Jacob) until the final scene. This is a rare example of a Deus ex machina that works. The entire story takes place in Jacob’s mind as he’s dying.

Rubin gives clues that Jacob is dead throughout the movie. A palm reader at a party tells him that according to his lifeline he’s already dead. At a VA Hospital, Jacob learns there’s no record of his medical history or of him having been a patient. A doctor tells him, “You’ve been killed, don’t you remember”

The key speech of the film is delivered by Jacob’s chiropractor Louie (played by Danny Aiello). Louie quotes the 14th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart.

The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life, your memories, your attachments. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re 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.

This is the underlying message of the film. If we refuse to let go of our life (our body, thoughts and emotions), then our death experience will be horrifying. If we can learn to let go of the world then the dying process can be beautiful.

Late in the movie we learn Jacob’s son Gabriel was killed in a bicycle accident. Jacob blames himself for not keeping his son safe. He can’t accept his son’s death just like he can’t accept his own death. Jacob’s demons are his own demons of guilt and regret. Until he lets go of this pain, he’ll be trapped in the Hell of his own thoughts. This is what Rubin’s teacher Rudi meant by “the mind is the slayer of the soul.”

The hardest part of dying is letting go of our life attachments. As our brain slowly dies, we experience a surge of gamma waves triggering a recall of our life’s events. The more we struggle to hold on, the more difficult our death will be. When we finally accept our passing, we experience liberation. This is what makes the film so hard to watch. It’s a preview of our own mortality.

Rubin recalled that when the film opened, he stood outside a theater in New York to see how crowds responded. “As the credits started rolling this guy ran out, probably five feet from me, and yelled at nobody in particular: ‘If I ever meet the guy who wrote that movie, I’ll kill him.’”

Thankfully, the film ends with a sense of hope and love. Jacob’s back in the house where he lived with his wife and children. He sees his son Gabriel at the foot of a staircase. Gabriel takes his father’s hand and tells him, “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.” The two ascend the staircase as the sun shines through a window and engulfs them in bright light. The staircase is Jacob’s divine ladder leading him to heaven with his dead son. We cut to a closeup of Jacob’s face back in Vietnam. He’s just been declared dead. The film ends. Jacob’s finally free.

The lessons I learned watching Jacob’s Ladder helped me when my own father died in 2019. I realized we’ll all find peace and comfort at the climax of our lives. Death isn’t an end. Our bodies wither, but our soul remains intact. We exist before we’re born and we continue to exist after we die. It’s only our form that changes. We get to take the love with us as we go.