Jacob's Ladder and PTSD

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, there’s a funky gadget which never made it into its film adaptation, Bladerunner. A common theme to both is empathy as a defining quality of human beings, but in the book there is a device people can use to experience the same reality as others simultaneously but also across time. They all tap into the virtual reality experience of a man struggling up a hill and in their shared struggle they are drawn together. It doesn’t matter if the man is real, if his struggle is real, because their empathy for his struggle is real. In the book, it is a religious experience, and for me it goes without saying that this is Philip K Dick’s way of highlighting empathy as one of the most vital elements of fiction media.

In Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob Singer is a Vietnam war veteran who keeps seeing demons on the faces of people in crowds, experiencing vivid dreams and flashbacks, and other bizarre experiences, and slowly unravels a conspiracy by the government to cover up a botched drug trial that resulted in Jacob’s platoon going crazy and all killing each other, before confronting the memory of his dead son and ascending to heaven, as we the audience are shown that Jacob died in Vietnam in the first act and has been dead the whole time.

Except he isn’t.

To me, the point of Jacob’s Ladder is to communicate the experience of post-war PTSD.

It’s worth being up front about the fact that this is my aggressive reading. The intent of this film doesn’t line up with what I feel when I watch it. The film was inspired by a nightmare that the writer had where he was trapped in a subway station at night. That scene, near the start of the film, is one of the main pieces of the story that besides being very spooky, doesn’t fit into what I’m talking about here at all. There’s also a deleted scene in which Jacob gets cured of his mental issues, which I’m really glad they deleted, not just because it doesn’t align with what I think this film is about, but because it was just kinda bad. And of course there’s the most damning thing - the end card that says that American soldiers really were unwilling lab-rats for combat drugs, essentially canonising that as what the author says is the point of the film.

But I don’t care what the author wanted me to think, because I’m too cool for that. Hell yeah.

So to say it again: To me, the point of Jacob’s Ladder is to communicate the experience of post-war PTSD.

The really upsetting thing about Jacob’s Ladder is the realisation that he in fact, didn’t die in Vietnam, but that the constant torment we are shown through the majority of the film is just his life. The alternative happy ending for him is that he died years ago in a medical tent in a war zone.

Jacob reaches out to another person who is in a way more extreme state than him but they “blow up”. Then he meets up with his whole squad at their funeral, but their friendship doesn’t last, and from Jacob’s perspective this is a shadowy conspiracy trying to keep him from working together with his friends to expose the truth. One of the most telling moments in the whole movie is the one where Jacob gets hung up on, and the camera reveals that the friend who hung up on him is in the room with everyone else, conspiring against him. They might as well all be laughing behind his back.

This isn’t something Jacob can see, but we’re being shown it because Jacob feels so powerfully that it is true.

Another time that the film shows us something that Jacob can’t see is when the trolley he is strapped to is wheeled through a disturbing nightmarish hospital. We are shown chopped up, bloodied body parts on the floor, which Jacob - strapped to the table face up - has no way of seeing whatsoever. That’s because Jacob is terrified of being in the hospital because of his trauma related to the war - seeing people get wounded, die, have their limbs blown off, and of course having to go through a medical emergency himself.

It should be noted that Jacob’s ability to receive care from others is one of the most intensely impacted things by his condition, really hammering home that this film is about PTSD. Every time he’s in a hospital he slips into a terrifying nightmare world, and when he gets a serious fever and his girlfriend takes care of him, it isn’t simply that he gets a fever it’s that he has an impossibly high fever and she has to call the neighbours to bodily force him into an ice bath while he screams for them to stop, insisting “You’re killing me!”
Jacob’s conflation of medical care with being actively harmed or even killed is extremely telling, and aligns with many soldiers’ experiences coming out of war. Medical institutions aren’t places of healing, they’re just meat factories with body parts strewn about the place.

The closest Jacob comes to accepting help from ordinary characters who exist on his level is when he reaches out to his platoon-mates, and of course their shared trauma is, without a proper framework to discuss it, what ultimately alienates them from each other. Jacob is sure, just as we can be sure all of the others are too, that everyone but him is working together. He’s totally alone, they’re all in cahoots.

The only caregiver in the film that Jacob, or for that matter we, can trust, is Louie - an older man who is introduced as Jacob’s chiropractor, but is introduced in the same scene as “an angel”. It is probably worth noting as well, that the specific way that Louie provides medical help to Jacob is by hurting him. Their physical relationship uses an almost aggressive, quasi-confrontational framing to juxtapose but also parallel their emotional relationship, where Louie is being supportive and gentle, but at the same time helping Jacob confront painful bursts that knock him back into shape, ultimately hopefully culminating in him being able to walk on his own, unsupported.

It is important to the emotional truth of the film that Louie is an older man. Where one of the characters Jacob is most consistently afraid of or at odds with is Jezzie, a younger woman, Louie is always on his side, always there to rescue him - an angel. Louie somehow knows what Jacob is going through and knows all the answers to help him get through it. The reason I don’t put Louie on a level with the other characters is that he is almost an authorial insert - he espouses the philosophy of the film, such as their is one, almost directly.

In Adaptation, Nicholas Cage plays filmmaker Charlie Kaufmann, the actual maker of the film Adaptation. The story is entirely reflexive, focusing on him trying to figure out how to make the movie we are currently watching. It’s a trip. Crucially though, at a certain point the film becomes even more surreally self-aware, and acknowledges directly that the real life ending wouldn’t be a fun movie for Hollywood audiences to watch, so instead Charlie Kaufmann decides to just write action schlock for the rest of the plot, and from that point on in the film, the plot is just action schlock.

When Louie the angel tells us the way that Hell really works, the film is laying out how the rest of the movie will go down as plainly as if it had shown us the screenwriter actually stating what was going to happen for the rest of the film. Louie tells us that the devils trying to tear your life away are really trying to free you from your pain, and the only thing that burns is “the parts of you that won’t let go of your life”.

From that point on, the choice is simple. Jacob can either give up looking for answers and let go, turning the demons into angels trying to help him, or he can keep searching for answers. That’s why the denouement of the conspiracy plot falls flat for me, because up until Louie explains the angels and demons the movie has been a careful exploration of the ways that trauma affects soldiers returning from war, and the ways that their lives become horror films - their loved ones looking like terrifying impostors, caregivers appearing as murderous conspirators, the only people who could possibly understand abandoning them.

Your life would seem like a government conspiracy too if your friends started reporting the same symptoms as you but then started vanishing or killing themselves or just suddenly stopped talking to you, and that’s the reality for tonnes of soldiers who don’t have people to rely on who know what they’re going through and can help.

For me, Jacob’s Ladder is a lesson in empathy, where I can read about an experience, hear about it second hand, even understand it intellectually, but to truly get it I have to have an experience, together with others, and together with this character, real or unreal, who is experiencing it himself.