Brett's Jacob's Ladder Notes

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

Background

Script had been around for almost 10 years and had been voted one of the “top 10 unproduced scripts.” Many big directors, including Ridley Scott and Sidney Lumet, had at one time or another signed on to direct it. There was definitely a lot of industry momentum behind this project. According to imdb:

Actors who were allegedly interested in playing the leading role of Jacob Singer included Richard Gere, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino. For the role of Jezzie, director Adrian Lyne auditioned roughly 300 women, including Jennifer Lopez, Andie MacDowell, Madonna, Demi Moore and Julia Roberts.

…

Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke both turned down the lead role.

Some have pointed out that it’s odd that Carolco financed this project, since they were not known for horror films. But Carolco produced MK and Monarch-related films like Total Recall and some Chuck Norris movies. Carolco also produced Angel Heart.

Andrew Vajna was one of the founders of Carolco. Vajna was born in Hungary but escaped the iron curtain to Canada in 1968, supposedly with the help of the Red Cross but likely with assistance from the US government, which in this case would come from the CIA. Vajna is one of a host of emigres from Communist Hungary in prominent positions within the entertainment industry, including László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond; the latter two escaped to the US after filming footage of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and smuggling it out of the country.

From Den of Geek:

…by the time Vajna was in his early 20s, he was living in Hong Kong and the proprietor of a large and profitable wig-making factory.

It was in Hong Kong that Vajna began to move into the film business, first by purchasing a pair of cinemas, and then by producing a kung-fu movie – Deadly China Doll (1973), starring martial arts star Carter Wong.

Vajna would go on to be involved with a large proportion of sus projects, including Air America (1990), Total Recall (1990), and the Rambo franchise.

Vajna’s production partner and co-founder of Carolco was Mario Kassar, who was born in Beirut, a major hub of US clandestine and psychological warfare operations, as discussed in previous episodes, referencing Miles Copeland, JJ Brine, and Mark David Chapman. Kassar’s father was a movie producer, and Mario was buying European movies for distribution when he was just 18 years old. One of the first films Vajna and Kassar produced together was The Amateur (1981), a CIA film with a typical message promoting extralegal force by clandestine operatives.

After Vajna was pushed out of Carolco, Kassar helped produce Basic Instinct (with Jacob’s Ladderproducer Alan Marshall), Terminator 2 (1991), Universal Soldier, and Lolita (1997), directed by Lyne.

Producer Alan Marshall, like Adrian Lyne, was also a Brit who came out of the advertising industry and knew Alan Parker from back in the 70s. He produced several Parker films, including Angel Heart for Carolco, a movie often compared with Jacob’s Ladder. Marshall went on to produce four Paul Verhoeven movies: Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995), Starship Troopers (1997), and Hollow Man (2000). According to Alan Parker:

Looking back, I came from a generation of filmmakers who couldn't have really started anywhere but commercials, because we had no film industry in the United Kingdom at the time. People like Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Hugh Hudson, and myself. So commercials proved to be incredibly important.

Bruce Joel Rubin

Rubin’s script for Jacob’s Ladder was inspired by a nightmarish LSD trip. “I had a roommate who was very close to Timothy Leary” (i.e., part of Leary’s circle in Millbrook, NY), he says in a Projection Booth podcast interview from this year. Rubin specifically mentions Leary’s “LSD experiments” in Millbrook. This roommate was instrumental in getting Rubin to try LSD. The story Rubin tells is that his roommate had persuaded him to try LSD but that he was waiting for the right day.

That day came several months later when, by sheer coincidence (if Rubin is to be believed), Michael Hollingshead showed up at their place with some top notch LSD. Hollingshead was the New York-based director of the British-American Cultural Exchange, whose mission was to promote British foreign policy in the US. Hollingshead was responsible for introducing an array of psychedelic and counterculture luminaries to LSD, including (quoting Wikipedia):

William S. Burroughs and Paul Krassner, comparative religions scholar Huston Smith, philosopher Alan Watts, graphic designer Storm Thorgerson, film director Roman Polanski, poet Allen Ginsberg, businessman-financier Saul Steinberg, musicians Donovan, Keith Richards, Pete LaRoca, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson and Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison of the Beatles.

Hollingshead was a LSD researcher in his own right and was a close associate of virtually all of the major psychedelic evangelizers of the 60s, including of course Timothy Leary, whom he introduced to LSD and with whom he wrote a book in 1962. Hollinghead was the one supplying Millbrook with LSD, and he lived at Millbrook for a few years.[1]

Rubin says that he already had some LSD for the prospective trip but that, when he took it, it didn’t work. Unluckily, Hollingshead had just arrived with some primo acid, and when his roommate administered it, he “accidentally” spilled the entire eyedropper all over Rubin, so that Rubin absorbed at least hundreds of doses, sending him on a nightmare trip he would compare to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (Not coincidentally, Leary wrote a book using the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a map of psychedelic space.)

Based on the way Rubin tells the story of the “accidental” overdose with an eyedropper, it sounds like they might have done it on purpose and used him as an experimental subject in effect. The way he tells the story certainly doesn’t rule it out, and you can be certain that such “paranoid” notions both occurred to him during the experience and thence made their way into the Jacob’s Ladder script. It is not hard to see why the connection between military psychedelic experiments in Jacob’s Ladder and Leary’s Hitchcock-Mellon-endowed, CIA-surveilled operation in Millbrook.

I think it’s even possible that the drug given to Rubin that day was not LSD but a compound related to BZ, the drug referenced in the title screen at the end of Jacob’s Ladder. From Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams (102f.), which Lyne said was an inspiration for the MK subplot:

Millbrook was Psychedelic Central for the whole East Coast. Like a magnet, it attracted illustrious visitors from all walks of life. The doors were always open, and people were constantly coming and going. One day a NASA scientist named Steve Groff dropped by for a visit. Dr. Groff wanted to observe how Leary and his clan ran their sessions. They gave him some acid, and he in turn provided samples of a secret drug known only as JB-II8, which the military had developed as an incapacitating agent. Similar to the army's BZ, this potent superhallucinogen simulated a kind of free fall, at the same time triggering bizarre visions

But Rubin is very clear that, however harrowing, he views his psychedelic overdose experience as fundamentally positive. In the Projection Booth interview, the hosts ask him to explain how his “positive” experience with LSD could inspire Jacob’s horrific experience using a different compound. Rubin admits that he meant the experimental compound to be just another vehicle of consciousness transformation, similar to LSD. So Rubin, the psychedelic trauma victim, goes on to transfer this trauma onto the public at large in a scaled-up, public version of the MKUltra experiments depicted in the film. Revelation of the Method.

He says the LSD experience itself told him to tell other people about it and is proud of the movie for essentially fulfilling this mission. He also speaks of obeying unseen forces to achieve success in the entertainment industry.

This path seems to have begun when Rubin

transferred to NYU film school in 1962.[2]

Rubin only took one screenwriting course at NYU and almost failed it, due in part to what he considered the confusing, non-intuitive theories on plotting and structure.[3][4] His classmates at NYU included Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, who became the director of Jennifer,[5] Rubin's first student script.’

He calls Brian DePalma “an old, good friend,” and had lunch with him in Hollywood during the premiere of Brainstorm. DePalma told him he needed to move to LA to be successful.

Brainstorm, written by Rubin, is another uber-sus MK movie, made with cooperation from the Esalen Institute and directed by Douglas Trumbull, who is a key link between Stanley Kubrick and NASA. Rubin volunteers that he does not understand why this script of his was made. Brainstorm ends on the same note of catharsis-through-traumatic-psychedelic experience as Jacob’s Ladder: the ending of Brainstorm is like a mini-Jacob’s Ladder. In both cases, we have the ultimate vindication of trauma as a spiritual vehicle. It’s just that the “bad guys,” the military-industrial types, have misused it.

Jacob’s Ladder even subtly vindicates the military-industrial types, reframing the whole problem surrounding these consciousness-altering technologies and prescribing a gnostic ascent to get “free” of “this world”—a world which, though hellish, is not bad as such, but serves the function of spiritually purifying us for ascent (a gnostic-New Age distortion of a Christian truth). The military-industrial “devils are really angels, freeing us from this world” (see below).

Strangely, Rubin says that the scenario in the plot, involving psychedelic experimentation on soldiers, was entirely fictional but that later he came to realize that it actually happened. Possibly this relates to his unconscious intuition (see below) that he was an unwitting psychedelic experimental subject, and that this kind of experimentation was rampant during the era.

Interestingly, Rubin says he was against the controversial title at the end of the movie about BZ because it distracted from the real meaning of the film, which has been the main criticism of it.

Rubin went on to do the spiritual world tour thing—India, Nepal, etc. Met the Dali Lama, who offered to be this teacher (CIA?). Sounds like a charmed trip. Rubin apparently spent some time under a guru in India.

Adrian Lyne

He got his start in television commercials. Wikipedia:

Lyne was among a generation of British directors in the 1970s, including Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Tony Scott and Hugh Hudson, who would begin their career making television commercials before going on to have major success in films.[7] Their techniques in making commercials were admired and copied by major names in the film industry, with Lyne stating: "I remember making this advertisement up in Yorkshire when I got a message that Stanley Kubrick had called. He'd seen an ad I'd made for milk in which I'd used a particular type of graduated filter. He wanted to know exactly which filter I'd used."[7]

Similar to David Fincher, he claims:

I've always hated advertising, but I treated commercials as little films. I wasn't remotely interested in whether or not they sold the product, it was just a fabulous way for me to learn how to do it.

But Lyne, unlike Fincher, did not go back to directing TV commercials after he found major Hollywood success. [needs verification]

Lyne, who had creative control and the right to the final cut, has a history of making erotic movies pushing sexual edginess and depicting relationship trauma as he does in Jacob’s Ladderaround infidelity nightmares as in party demon sex scene.[2]Sexual revolution advanced through exposing public to increasingly shocking, taboo, and traumatic material.

Virtually every film directed by Lyne is an erotic film. Like other Brits pushing the sexual revolution in American movies (e.g., Matthew Chapman), Lyne hails from “the better part” of British society: his father was a Latin teacher at the private high school Adrian attended, and his brother was a classical scholar.

Lyne is pushing red pill sexual revolution programming still during the dissolve phase, making risky teen behavior seem edgy and hip (Foxes) or infidelity taboo and dangerous and hence alluring (Fatal Attraction). But in some of these movies, like Fatal Attraction, he’s also pushing the coagulate phase, signaling trans programming with Glenn Close the man-woman as the sex appeal while the daughter in the movie looks for all the world like a boy. Red apples visible (signaling red pill programming), some Monarch tropes, Revelation of the Method (e.g., showing harmful TV, family imitation, etc.).

Part of his interest in directing Lolita is that it’s about “the last taboo.”

Jacob’s Ladder is superlative stylistically. Lyne’s “image-making” here surpasses even Fincher in his prime. Enormously influential film, especially on horror movies and video games.

Lyne says he’s basically “agnostic” but believes there must be a creator and seems to think there is probably an afterlife.

Photographers Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin were inspirations for some of the visuals, as was painter Francis Bacon. Lyne says he was always inspired by thalidomide deformities. In short, mid-to-late 20th-century degenerate art.

Dale Dye’s Warriors, Inc., company trained actors for the combat scenes. I’ve discussed Dye’s outfit now in a few episodes. In an interview with Mike Stokey, one of the leading executives at Warriors, Inc., he says that Dye started the company because “he was so frustrated with the way movies were made and how the military was looked down upon.”

Movie

New Age and Gnostic Themes, etc.

Rubin says it depicts the “bardo” state, which was catalyzed for him by LSD. Leary wrote a book assimilating the LSD experience to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and it stands to reason that Rubin was at least indirectly under the influence of these ideas.

The first thing we see, when Jacob “wakes up” in a NY subway train, is an advertisement with a giant apple (as in New York, the “Big Apple”). Given the undoubted significance of the next advertisement, this has some meaning as well: the most obvious is the apple as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, the “serpent’s wisdom” as recognized by the transgressive hermeneutics of Gnosticism. But given Lyne’s career as a cinematic promoter of the sexual revolution, the apple here is also sex generally, but more specifically the “red pill” which so many cinematic sexual revolutionaries employ, making degraded sexuality appealing by portraying it as forbidden and dangerous.

The next shot is an anti-drug ad with the word “Hell”enlarged, in red print against a black background. The meaning is that Jacob is actually in an underworld afterlife state of some sort. Rubin says he thinks of it all in Tibetan terms, but the symbolic handles of the film are firmly based in Christianity, not unlike ancient Gnosticism.

All the other ads (according to imdb), besides the apple ad, are anti-drug ads: is this red pill pro-drug programming?(Remember that Rubin himself speaks of how groups of college kids made a ritual out of using drugs and watching Jacob’s Ladder. And remember Lyne’s use of the apple as an apparent symbol of red pill programming in Fatal Attraction.) One hint that red pill drug programming is laced into the story is in the scene where Louie cracks his neck and has a flashback. This alludes to the LSD scare myth that LSD stays in your system forever, stored in your spine, where it can be released back into your bloodstream upon injury. Cf. use of LSD scare tactics in Blue Sunshine and Nightmare on Elm Street 3.

The central message of the film, as confirmed by Rubin and Lyne, is contained in the speech that chiropractor Louie gives to Jacob after the latter emerged from “hell.” Paraphrasing Meister Eckhart, he says:

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. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all.

So Jezebel and his demonic torturers are really good, because they’re freeing him. Consider Jezzie burning the pictures of his family. In a deleted scene (see below), Jacob goes through a sort of exorcism, confronting a kind of super-demon to discover a vision of heaven on the other side of him. Gnostic Inversion with implied sexual antinomianism (Jezebel, demonic sexual license, is really a positive figure: remember Lyne’s background as an erotic filmmaker).

Rubin’s ending in the script involved Jacob doing battle with a demon that might also be an angel who sets Jacob on fire.  We think he’s burning up, but his eyes still peer through the charred body, whereupon the demon/angel rips off the charred flesh to reveal a being a light. Pretty definite alchemical reference here: passing through the nigredo or calcination stage toward purification.

The books seen in Jacob’s apartment include:

Our Savage God (1974) by R. C. Zaehner

Catholic religious comparativist Zaehner rails against the psychotic, pseudo-mystical excesses of the New Age and counterculture, which for him is embodied by Charles Manson. This book would be “opposition research” in the circles Rubin moved in.

The Magical Philosophy, vol. 3 (The Sword and the Serpent) (1975), by Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips.

Social Foundations of…?

The Witch’s Bible (1972) by Gavin and Yvonne Frost

Dante’s Purgatorio

Demonology

Mr. Baruch (1957) by Margaret L. Coit

Book about Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, who managed the US war economy during WWI and was later the US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Possibly there’s an oblique reference here to Baruch’s nephew, Don, who was Chief of the DoD’s Motion Picture Production Branch for many years.

The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment (1963) by Christopher Hibbert

There’s a magazine cover with the words “Childbirth in America” at the bottom. Lyne mentions this in the commentary when he points out how much thought and preparation went into arranging all these items which are seen in closeups.

MKUltra and the Vindication of Trauma

Arguably, traumatic experimentation with human consciousness is the master theme of this movie. Apart from the BZ/MKUltra subplot, notice that Jacob is constantly being experimented upon/subjected to traumatizing therapies, sometimes by the well-intended (e.g., Louie, the “hippie chemist” in a deleted scene, Jezzy in the ice bath) and sometimes not so (the “doctor” in hell, the military).

The horrific ambiguity (if I may put it that way) around the therapist/experimenter-patient relationship is encapsulated in the first session with chiropractor Louie. Louie is an angelic character with a zealous regard for Jacob’s best interest, yet he knowingly subjects him to a traumatic or potentially traumatic experience because “I had to get in there.” When Jacob returns from the flashback, Louie is bathed in angelic light and Jacob remarks on his cherubic appearance.

Something similar happens in a deleted scene featuring the hippie chemist Michael, when he gives Jacob the “antidote” to the Ladder and puts him through a horrific exorcism. In the script, the demonic invasion is followed by a vision of heaven. As it was filmed, this final torture was deemed too much for test audiences and it was cut.

In this scene, Michael is seen in one shot in a broken mirror, with one eye missing because of broken glass. Illuminati/Monarch stuff going on there: Michael as a variation on the “wounded healer” psychedelic shaman, inflicting “healing trauma” on Jacob, who was wounded by his potion. “It takes a thorn to remove a thorn” New Age wisdom.

In the shot where Michael administers the “antidote” (itself a powerful mind-altering drug), it’s given to him in an eye dropper, and Lyne confirms that it is shot to appear as if Jacob is receiving a sacrament, supporting the argument for deliberate red pill drug programming at work in this film.

Laster in the scene, the trauma becomes so intense (unspeakably monstrous creatures breaking through the ceiling, Jacob in seizures and his face melting from pressure) that the lightbulb goes out in the room, symbolizing (in Monarch terms) the shutting off of the core personality.

What’s going on is that Rubin at least subconsciously senses that he was a human LSD experiment, a kind of off-the-books MKUltra test subject of the Millbrook group. Practical confirmation of this is found in the deleted “exorcism” scene when, when, as Jacob begins to hallucinate, Michael apparently changes character, pounces on him, and forces him to take the whole dropper “for your own good.”

One thing suggested here too is that Michael is really just continuing the experiment on Jacob, a position supported by another deleted scene that indicates that the antidote did not work. After Jacob has come back after blacking out from the drug-induced demon trauma, Michael is framed like Louie, bathed in angelic light, telling him he's cured (again, like Louie); but the subtext, indicated by Jacob’s almost exaggeratedly childlike appearance (directly comparable to his appearance after Louie “cures” him and also to his appearance in the bathtub after he “comes back to life” after his ice bath, as well to the appearance of the “doppelganger Jacob” he encounters behind the mask of Jezzie in another deleted scene)—the subtext is that he’s been depatterned and is prepared for reprogramming—and that hence Louie, Michael, and Jezzie are actually handlers. If this scene were left in the film, I could declare this a Monarch film.

Yet Rubin felt that his own nightmarish experience, in which he was probably deliberately overdosed with LSD, also enriched him and advanced his spiritual growth. Hence the ambiguity around being a psychedelic test subject: certainly evil, callous people can and do abuse their position as psychedelic experimenters/initiators, and these people usually hide behind medical credentials (consider the doctor in hell); but many of their victims may in the end benefit spiritually from the trauma. That’s the real message at the heart of this movie: it’s a vindication of trauma as a vehicle of spiritual growth.

The movie is trying to make the audience vicariously experience Jacob’s traumatic spiritual journey, and this infliction of vicarious, low-intensity trauma on the audience rests on the same implicit justification: traumatically induced transformations of consciousness of this sort are good for them too.

All the spasming and shaking points toward seizure and electroshock, particularly when one considers, first, that the events depicted are internal events corresponding in some way with what’s happening externally to his body and, second, the MKUltra-related subplot. The shaking may indicate that Jacob is having a seizure.

In addition to all the spasmodic motion connoting electroshock and seizure, note the spinning of the soldier in the opening scene, reflected in Jake’s spin to the floor when he passes out at the party.

Ending brings the “government plot” angle back to the viewer’s attention, seemingly in a gratuitous and off-putting way. Lyne says he included it to indicate that Jacob was right. In the audio commentary, he says he researched the topic and only found evidence of such compounds used on Viet Cong soldiers. But according to imdb:

According to director Adrian Lyne, the drug aspect of the story was inspired by the Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain book, "Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and Sixties Rebellion".

The movie, however, serves to almost subliminally convince the viewer that all this conspiracy nonsense is just a distraction from grappling with deeper existential questions, like it is for Jacob in the movie. There’s a line cut from the film that reinforces this view. When Jacob is on the phone with Frank (Eriq La Salle), who along with the other guys has clearly been intimidated into silence, he says to Jacob, “Maybe the demons are real.”

BZ, an anticholinergic deliriant, was tested, along with a host of other psychedelic and chemical warfare agents, on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal (a parallel program with MKUltra, running from 1948 to 1975), where Frank Zappa’s father worked. In 2006, James S. Ketchum, an Army psychiatrist who performed human experiments at Edgewood, including with BZ, wrote a memoir. From Wikipedia:

Ketchum had additional psychiatric training during a fellowship at Stanford University in California (1966–68); during this period, he volunteered at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics in nearby San Francisco (he did not tell his hippie patients he was an Army doctor).

BZ was reportedly also tested on inmates at “The Farm,” the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, where Dr. Harris Isbell of the Navy conduced CIA-funded MKUltra research using a range of mind-altering chemicals.

The Method

Frequent jarring cuts, often switching the audience between (possible) realities. In general, the movie uses the signature Hollywood technique of dissolving the audience’s sense of reality by blurring different “layers of reality.”

Striking use of strobe lights in party scene. In the commentary track, Lyne says part of his intention was for the audience to fill in the holes with their imaginations.

Narrative keeps the viewer constantly dissociated, disrupting any “reality” shortly after the audience has had a chance to settle into it.

Odds and Ends

Postal worker with PTSD. “Going postal” connection.

Jacob has a cross on his wall with two, downward-pointing daggers. In this connection, it’s interesting that his dog tags identify him as Jewish.

For the hospital hell sequence, Lyne says he thought of things like the birth defects caused by thalidomide.

Was Jacob in the 101stAirborne Division? The insignia on the helicopters are from some cavalry division, and in the “Golden Eagle” cigar box with Jacob’s Vietnam stuff there’s a news clipping showing a giant peace sign shot overhead and a caption explaining that it was “apparently” made by the 101st Airborne Division.

If so, this would be significant, given the psychological warfare associations with the 101stestablished in Apocalypse Now.

[1]Like some other important British countercultural figures, Hollingshead’s life is rather mysterious: no one seems to know when he was born or exactly when he died, although his daughter, who went on to become a successful comedian, says he died of a stomach ulcer in Bolivia in 1984. Much of the available information on Hollingshead is found in Acid Dreams (1985) by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain.

[2] Lyne says he meant the scene to depict Jezzie having sex with the devil. Imdb: “The James Brown funk song "My Thang", heard during the raucous party scene, appeared on a double album of Brown's from 1974 called "Hell".” There’s a French movie directed by Claude Chabrol about a man’s descent into a nightmare world of jealous paranoia called L’enfer (Hell).