51/50, Aftermaths Up The Creek

It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.-- Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Even with repeated viewings, a film such as Jacob’s Ladder opens with too ponderous and heavy a thud. It is neither a fair representation of the Vietnam experience—most films aren’t—although a vehicle like Rolling Thunder (77) excavates a POW’s psychic duress with devastating impact—nor a fair representation of horror merged in synchronization with its back story. Yes, Danny Aiello provides us with an epigram from Meister Eckhart as a justification for the demonic sequences towards the angelic sensibility of reunification, but Lyne’s direction has too many incongruities to be a good afterlife experience, indicting the Department of Defense through a metaphysical backlash rather than thorough investigation. Why a dying medic dreams himself through a wife and mistress as a postal employee with a deceased Dr. Carson at a veteran’s clinic is anyone’s guess. There are better films out there to touch upon the transcendent, including Vanilla Sky.  At the very least, the writer we have to thank for this enduring template, Ambrose Bierce, manages a seamless tale with An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, in contrast to Lyne’s camera transitions. Politically, the Civil War emasculated Bierce; stylistically, he is too translucent for my taste, akin to Edgar Allan Poe on methadone, but every writer builds up to the point where we, writers, have the breakout moment of our best pieces, and one sees this in Owl Creek, which resonated with me too upon the obligatory anthology reading. In other words, in an eagerness to relax and actually use the data I’m paying for, I unwittingly selected a film bad enough to have been syndicated numerous times. I may feel that Lyne is a pretentious Carpenter rip off, and feel some pity for the aspirations of Bill Rubin’s original script, but ironically, something clicked in yet this latest perusal of a Tim Robbins’ youthful performance.

His niche, to the extent he has one, is to play the man with whom we identify who is out of his depth. It is evident even in the neo-vigilante apologia narrative of Mystic River, in which Sean Penn fabulously murders the wrong culprit, and it is more than blatantly obvious in Code 23, one of my speculative favorites. Even in Majorie Prime, where the holograms and the human actors alike are dependent on his character, the only one not recreated as a synthetic personality, he is still out of his depth against computer science turning life experience into unwitting travesty. Perhaps, if we pause long enough, it won’t amount to the best we can offer the future.