The film’s conceit is that the only thing that exists in hell is ourselves: our lives
in their concurrency when we pass: cut off from God, a life in darkness, in pain, in
absentia is all we have and therefore all we could ever have.
In essence, hell is total isolation, an eternity spent in anguish over the past: our memories,
our guilt, our trauma wreaking havoc and burning us from the inside out.
So, if true, the proper course of action while still alive is to let go of everything that
afflicts us; painful memories, hurt, lost love, even dead loved ones, in order to free
ourselves of the eternal torment that is behind the curtain of death.
So, enough wallowing in our own misery, how do we escape this place?
As the film implies, the only way out of hell is to place our hope in what our rational
minds cannot conceive.
Holding on to what we see, the external, our perceptions, is a hindrance.
The mind encased and based on this perception, on these attachments is what is doomed and
it must be dissolved, burned and destroyed.
The film parallels the biblical view of salvation.
References to God and even Jesus are made and the overall takeaway is that the way out
is up; to abandon the ground level, this world that corrupts and isolates us from God and
ascend.
The angelic assistance sent from heaven to rescue Jacob from hell is his way out, if
he listens, if he heeds.
If he actually wants the help; if he calls out for it.
He could be freed, then, from a condemned life brought on by his ancestors, by his lineage
of sin.
When Jacob emerges from the utterly deranged part of his own hell while in the hospital,
he is traumatized and at the end of himself.
Sarah and his children visit and he begs her to help him.
The very next scene shows help arriving in the form of Louis, Jacob’s guardian angel,
who barges into the hospital and forcibly pulls him out.
In order to seek help, one must first realize that they need it.
In order for Jacob to be saved, he must come to the end of the person that is at odds with
God, living only for temporary pleasures, and become a new person altogether; what in
biblical terms is referred to as a new creation.
This new creation is only possible through Christ who, according to the new testament,
was killed to bring on the death of the nature in man that stands apart from God and who
was resurrected to bring about the new life required for man to be reconciled to God.
In second Corinthians this reconciliation is described as, “Therefore, if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation.
The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of
reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting
their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”
Meaning that Christ is the way up, the ladder to heaven, the only way to God.
Jesus told his disciples that, “... No one comes to the Father except through me.”
So, unto the Christian route and philosophy, the only way out of the hell that Jacob made
for himself is to accept the life and death of Jesus: perpetually dead to the life opposed
to God and perpetually alive in God with the same life that raised Christ from the dead.
While this may seem far fetched, based on a history far removed from accepted norms
of physical law and rational thought, perhaps there is no other way out.
The film sets up Jacob’s plight in very extreme terms: although we see him living
in New York, this New York is inside of himself.
Whatever is in him is all that’s left: so if there is something wrong with his life,
something tormenting him, he cannot just run away, he cannot just get the right treatment,
he has to find a way to rid what is afflicting him, but how can he remove something that
is part of himself?
In Jacob’s predicament, on the verge of death, and given his time table, not long,
what is he supposed to do and who is he supposed to go to in his unconscious state?
Like our own lives, Jacob has few options: in truth, despite what we can grasp at in
the physical--the self help, the counseling, we alone are responsible for what happens
inside of us.
So can Jacob save himself?
Perhaps human understanding and human capability are nothing when facing the true unknowns:
why we’re here, what existence is and, ultimately, the wrestling match that we must undertake
to get out from underneath what is harming us.
What are we fighting, how do we escape, who or what will help us?
When faced with death, perhaps, all the never ending rationalizations one can conceive are
pointless.
Jacob comes to the end of himself, seeing the darkest parts of his own psyche, and realizes
that he desperately needs help, so, likewise, if one can admit that they know nothing, that
they’re powerless against the dark forces in their lives conjured by their own weaknesses,
conjured by the weaknesses in others and that they are incapable of change, then maybe they
can seek the help they actually need.
Like an alcoholic who, after pursuing a lifestyle dependent on external means of self medicating,
hits rock bottom, or in other words, comes to the end of themselves, recognizing their
own efforts of self help as pointless, perhaps, we should take a page from the AA twelve step
program for life in general and come to believe that a higher power can restore us to sanity
and make a decision to turn our will and lives over to God as we understand him.
Like in the bible, after Jacob wrestled with God to bless him and save him from the hellish
world he brought on himself, God gave him a new name and reconciled him to his brother,
thus absolving him of his past, making him fully able to fulfill his new identity and
separating him from his former identity which was doomed to die.
In Matthew, after Jesus proclaims that it is easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, his disciples ask “Who then shall
be saved?”, to which Jesus replies, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things
are possible...
Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children...
for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”
So for someone “rich” in this life, it is not possible for them, encumbered by their
amassed earthly pleasures, their earthly attachments and their sharpened and heavily labored over
intellects full of virtues, morals and knowledge to pass through the eye of a needle, the narrow
path, the way to eternal life.
In Dante’s Inferno in order to enter heaven one must first have their sins purged from
them in purgatory.
Purgatory is a mountain with different levels comprised of the seven deadly sins that one
must ascend on their way to paradise which is at the top.
Separating Purgatory from paradise is a wall of fire in the layer of lust.
All who leave Purgatory must pass through this wall of flames so they can be purged
of all uncleanliness and enter heaven.
According to Pope St. Gregory, “The same fire (in Hell) torments the damned and purifies
the elect.”
As Jacob is being tormented in hell, the demon doctors would have him believe that there
is no escape and that he will be in torment, possibly, forever.
But they’re wrong.
All Jacob has to do is let the fires of hell become the fires of Purgatory, in that the
very fire of hell which is being used to torment him can be the very thing that purifies him,
and ultimately saves him.
Maybe then, upon allowing this fire to free him, he can be saved by these benevolent forces
waiting for him to reach out.
When Jacob meets with the man who created the Ladder, Michael, he learns the truth about
what his reality actually is, a drug fueled nightmare playing upon his baser, biological
impulses.
In the bible, Michael is an archangel in heaven known as a protector, healer, and adversary
against spiritual darkness.
In Revelations he defeats Satan with an army of angels under his command.
In the film Michael is desperately seeking Jacob to tell him the truth, to let him know
what is happening to him, to give him the necessary tools to set him free.
Jacob, upon his revelation, can no longer trust the world around him, his own senses,
they are faulty, beyond saving, he must abandon them all and allow the fire that has been
burning his attachments to do its job.
A reality may seem like a reality until you back out of it, then the emotional and psychological
effects of this particular perception, become, instead of what you are experiencing, now
something you were experiencing; only a memory.
To give up a perception is to give up a reality, to give up a personality that lives in that
reality, to give up a life.
But to back away from a perception, from a homogenized reality attune to thought, to
memory, to time, to place, to person, is to separate for a reason: the reason, in the
film, is life eternal, a life that does not need input to exist, not a list of experiences
and descriptions, but a life that is of pure existence with God.
The obfuscation of the opportunity of choice: this is what living inside of the forged reality,
the old memory, affords Jacob.
In hell, the inner manifestation of his external existence, there is no free will; there is
only conformity and submission to his environment, to his genetic code.
After his meeting with Michael, Jacob is finally ready to let go of the past.
He then takes a cab over to his old apartment, which seems to have always been there, that
is, within him, waiting for him to come back.
In the book of John, Jesus states, “My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so,
would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me
that you also may be where I am.
You know the way to the place where I am going.”
Meaning that, if we choose to leave the life that subsists off of human virtue, earthly
attachments, and a misplaced desire for pleasure, backing away from the perspective that, as
long as we fixate on it, maintains a personal reality full of our personal demons, then
we can have the life that already exists, the life of Christ, in which we can reside
eternally in heaven where there is a room already prepared and waiting for us.
Upon examining the argument of the movie, that posits the absurdist mind, detached from
God, bringing on the fires of hell, must be purged by allowing these fires to burn away
our attachments in order to find salvation and embrace God, there is a compelling case
to listen to its message, lest we waste our years in hell and, alas, actually fall into
a deeper one once our years on earth are spent.
If true then it would be wise to hold out hope for something our rational minds cannot
conceive, and seek or even call out for help, admitting that we cannot save ourselves, but
we can only be saved.
According to the bible, we are not saved by our works, it is through grace; something
that must be received, not earned.
Jacob in the bible was helpless and called out for God and God saved him, changed his
name and opened the doors of heaven for him.
In Jacob’s ladder, Jacob Singer, despite fighting the dark forces, despite trying to
uncover the mystery of what’s happening to him, still ends up, helpless in hell, where
he pleads for salvation and starts his journey towards his new life with God in heaven.
Ultimately, it is up to us what we choose to believe; Jacob could have believed there
was no way out and let the fires of hell continue to torture him, but he decided to listen to
Louis and allow his attachments to this life to burn away.
At the end of the movie, Jacob sits down in the apartment, the place he had a vision of
as his personal heaven, and waits there until dawn: his mind on memories from his life,
trying to take Louis’ advice, trying to let them go.
This is similar to Dante’s Inferno in that souls in Purgatory cannot move up the mountain
when the sun is down, they must wait for daybreak before they can begin their ascent to Paradise.
Here, at daybreak, Jacob sees his son Gabe waiting for him at the bottom of a staircase.
Jacob, who is now purged from all attachment and sin, is escorted by his son up the stairs,
finally allowing his soul to be taken to heaven, and dies on the operating table in Vietnam.
It seems that the world and its inhabitants want to tell us what to choose, what to believe,
what to think.
They give us choices, and due to our possibly limited view of reality, we may assume that
these are the only choices we have.
But what if there are choices that the world does not even consider?
The choice to abandon hell and ascend the staircase to heaven for instance?
Maybe our lives, like Jacob’s, are teetering on the precipice of heaven and hell, life
and death and all our decisions boil down to, essentially, these two categories.
So, if there is more to life than a basic, common perception of reality, then perhaps
we should be bold in pursuing absolute truth--a journey that takes place inside of us, that
is, according to Descarte, the only thing we can know for certain to really exist--and,
from within, we should consistently choose what leads out of our own hells made up of
the the limitations and deceptions of what the rational mind can conceive, so, like Jacob,
we can escape what torments us and enter heaven.