Jacob's Ladder (film) - Production

Production

The film's title refers to the biblical story of Jacob's Ladder, or the dream of a meeting place between Heaven and Earth (Genesis 28:12). The film was also perceived by many, including its screenwriter and co-producer Bruce Joel Rubin, as a modern interpretation of the Liberation Through Hearing During The Intermediate State, Tibetan Book of the Dead. Rubin's original screenplay differs significantly at parts from the film, especially towards the ending.

The film's director Adrian Lyne used a famous body horror technique in which an actor is recorded waving his head around at a low frame rate, resulting in horrific fast motion when played back. In a Special Edition's commentary track, Lyne said he was inspired by the art of the painter Francis Bacon when developing the effect. The imagery also resembles the work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.

The plot device of a long period of subjective time passing in an instant, such as the imagined experiences of Jacob while dying, has been explored by several authors. An early literary antecedent appears in Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor, Chapter XII, "Of that which happened to a Dean of Santiago, with Don Illan, the Magician, who lived at Toledo", in which a life happens in an instant (1337). This story was rewritten by Jorge Luis Borges in "The Wizard Postponed", in his book A Universal History of Infamy (1935). The story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce narrates the long subjective experience of a Confederate sympathizer, who imagines that he has escaped and made a 30 mile journey to his home during the fraction of a second that it takes for the hangman's rope to break his neck. A similar hallucination of a year of subjective time passing at the moment of death occurs in Borges' short story "The Secret Miracle" (1944).

In the film, Jacob is told that the horrific events he experienced on his final day in Vietnam were the product of an experimental drug called "The Ladder", which was used on troops without their knowledge. Jacob is told this by Michael, who is later seen treating his wounds in a Medevac helicopter. He is told that the drug was named for its ability to cause "a fast trip straight down the ladder, right to the primal fear, right to the base anger." At the end of the film, a message is displayed mentioning the testing of a drug named BZ, NATO code for a deliriant and hallucinogen known as 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate that was rumored to have been administered to U.S. troops by the government in a secret attempt to increase their fighting power. The effects of BZ, however, are different from the effects of the drug depicted in Jacob's Ladder. Adrian Lyne himself noted that "nothing ... suggests that the drug BZ—a super-hallucinogen that has a tendency to elicit maniac behavior—was used on U.S. troops."