NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/horror/5415

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-29 | 3.4 KB

Xref: sparky alt.horror:5415 rec.arts.movies:36248
Newsgroups: alt.horror,rec.arts.movies
Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!emory!rigel.econ.uga.edu!dogwood!hughes
From: [e-mail] (Wayne Hughes)
Subject: Re: Jacobs Ladder
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Botany Department - U of Georgia, Athens
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 03:36:25 GMT
Lines: 58

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Aphoriel/Kinsman) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ramon Dominguez) writes:
>>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Aphoriel/Kinsman) writes:
>>=>[Jake] died in the vet hospital. (This is what they kept flashing back to;
    [...]
>>No no no no no no...
>>Jake was dying throughout the entire movie.  The movie was what was going on
>>in Jake's mind while he was dying.  Louie explained it to Jake;  he said that
    [...]
>No no no no no NO...
>Jake [thank you]'s "dream" lasted for years and years...
>
    [...]

Hey you two!  You're both right!
Actually Jake's "dream"  covers only a few weeks, months at most,
not years.  But even so, there's nothing to say that he isn't
living out the purgatory phase in a sort of expanded time sense
while he's dying over the course of a few minutes or hours.  This in
fact is what is happening.  That's why the final death scene in
the medic tent (*not* a vet hospital) comes at the very end, and
not at the beginning.  It's no coincidence that he's pronounced
dead in a "flashback" immediately after the culkinator gets him.

>Louie himself [I am assuming Louie was the Ladder researcher, discard this
>paragraph entirely if that is wrong] was also dead. I believe that him
>explaining to Jake about the "Ladder" drug vindicated both of them; Louie
>gets it off his chest and can go off to the afterlife, while Jake starts
>to figure out what's going on.
>
   The problem with Louie, or whoever, is most unfortunate, since
   he's a construct included for no other purpose than to provide
   the feebleminded with a concrete explanation.  He's then
   placed in the background at points throughout the dream so
   that his presence later seems natural.  It's hard to
   explain his grating performance in terms of the rest of the
   story, since he shouldn't be there in the first place.  That
   entire 10 minutes with Louie giving us a melodramatic, over-
   acted explanation, conflicts painfully with the marvelously
   ambiguous sense of the movie as we've seen it to that point.
   I don't know whether I would go so far as to delete out the
   pivotal scene where we see who is bayonetting Jake, but that's
   all the explanation that's needed for what has happened.

   Whether he, or for that matter, Jake's fellows that Jake
   encounters in his dream, are dead and are independent of
   Jake, rather than a figment of his dream, is really irrelevant.
   Their presence, and what happens to them, is significant only as
   one of the alternatives that Jake may choose from.  You wouldn't
   after all suggest that his wife was a part of his dream because
   *she* was dying.

   Other than those minor details, good interpretation, Kinsman.

   Wayne  (all IMO, of course)