Though at least one half horror film, the most disturbing parts of Adrian Lyne's 1990 masterpiece Jacob's Ladder are not his hallucinatory visions of blind, mutilated surgeons or freakishly contorted executioners. The real horror in this film comes from the post-Vietnam era sense of numbness and grief, expressed in a clinically depressed palette of browns and grays, and in the ringing absence of a golden haired child who has died by accident—the son of war veteran Jacob Singer and a symbol of an entire generation's lost innocence.
Lyne uses a party scene for the onset of Jacob's real free-fall into madness, a poppin' dance floor sequence in which folks are grooving hard to James Brown's brilliant "My Thang," a searing, relentless track from his 1974 album, Hell. The script describes the dancers in this way: "Their movements are loose and getting looser," a parallel to Jacob's increasingly slack grasp on reality. The smoke in the room erases detail from the faces of the people around him. His girlfriend (played by the absurdly sexy Elizabeth Pena) is pressuring Jacob to dance, despite his reluctance to do so.
Suddenly the music seems overly insistent, and the scene grows uncomfortable. The dance floor is too hectic; the dancers are gyrating too hard. In the shadows Jacob glimpses a woman squatting and urinating on the carpet. In shock he turns away only to catch sight of a man whose head seems to twist and vibrate at such speed that it loses all definition. Jacob screams, but his friends just laugh. His girlfriend Jezzie guides his hand inside her dress, where he feels alien, bony protrusions. He jerks away in surprise and his glasses are knocked from his face. When he puts them back on, she's in an erotic embrace with another dancer whom he cannot entirely see, but who has tentacles that appear to be penetrating her from behind while she writhes in delight.
Meanwhile the music is so funky, so mercilessly driving that you can almost smell the speed in James Brown's sweat as it soaks through his denim jumpsuit. It brings to the fore what's truly grotesque about the people at this party: an overly adulterated, deeply dosed sense of fun—one that barely conceals their weariness, cynicism, and sorrow. It's worth noting that the cover of James Brown's Hell is a kind of modern version of the "damnation" panel of 15th century triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch*, that terrifying depiction of life in purgatory: bird-headed monsters feasting on human beings, a sow wearing the veil of a nun, naked men impaled on mandolins. The Hell cover features, among other things, a wounded war veteran, a junkie shooting up, and man with a gun to his head. Lyne too has created his own Bosch-like vision, invoking all the dread and denial of a time when people were hell-bent on keeping the party going, but ideologically adrift and helpless to prevent intrusive memories of war.
*Thanks to the interestment.co.uk blog for its "Album Covers Analyzed" feature.
I've always loved this movie, which everyone thought me insane for. This scene and the subway vision are both incredibly powerful.
Posted by: Shabbir | July 10, 2009 at 06:45 PM