From: seawasp+@pitt.edu (Ryk E Spoor)
Newsgroups: alt.horror
Subject: Re: Jacob's Ladder (was Re: Flatliners
Date: 11 Apr 92 03:54:36 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <15170@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gln@cs.arizona.edu (Gary L. Newell) writes:
>including the dialogue and so forth, but it must also stand strong when viewed
>without an eye for hidden meaning or hidden intellectual content. IN other
>words, a film could be the greatest example of symbolism to have ever been
>made but if it simply does not stand when viewed without an eye for such content
>then it simply is not a good film/story - although this is a popular view, I 
>never have agreed with it - this may be where seawasp and I disagree however
>and may explain a number of things to me that made no sense before, with respect
>to his opinions.

	This is PRECISELY what I was saying. I don't care WHAT JL "really"
meant or what kind of brilliant symbolism was there. As a film, viewed without
that eye for interpretation, it was murky, confused, and basically just not
very good. The only halfway interpretable PART of the movie was the drug
plot -- which, according to you, was at best only tangentially relevant to
the actual issues of JL. Anything else required that one take a great deal
of effort to find these symbols that were there, etc. 
	So yes, that is exactly my position. I will take a Star Wars over
JL or 2001 anyday, even though I cannot argue that either one is trying to
do more that Star Wars... because SW accomplishes the very first requirement
of a fiction work, To ENTERTAIN. All else is bells and whistles.

>don't think it suceeded? In particular, since we know he was dying - what
>was all the stuff about the future in there for? What did it have to do
>with anything? How could he possibly know about the drug, since as you
>point out, he's a dead man - he dies before they can save him. Who/what
>allowed him this insight? Why?

	Those unanswered questions are why the film, on the surface level, 
fails. YOUR answers may be perfectly valid. 

	Whether you are right or not, however, will do little to affect my
view of the film, since I don't LIKE the message of the film. I don't
like the heaven and hell business -- "be good or I'll punish you" is an
infantile approach to a religion at best. I don't like futility. I don't
like the bad guys winning -- I can see THAT crap in real life, I don't
need to see it in a fictional world where the author has total control
over what happens.

	By the way, you mentioned my short story class -- I was the iconoclast
in the class. I strongly challenged any interpretation that required that
we not accept something in the story, STATED in the story, as fact. After
all, the story itself is the ONLY thing we have to go on as far as the
extant conditions of its universe are concerned.
	So my interpretation of The Metamorphosis was ... different, I
rewrote Harrison Bergeron for one paper, and my interpretations of both
The Swimmer and The Yellow Wallpaper were, in the words of the professor,
unique -- she'd never heard anything like them in many years of teaching.

	Most of the differences stemmed from that single philosophical
difference: entertain first, then add in your symbolism and so on, as long
as you DON'T WRECK THE ENTERTAINMENT.

                                 Sea Wasp
                                   /^\
                                   ;;;