Depicting Death -- `Jacob's Ladder,' `Ghost' Probe Enigma Of Dying

The body count reached astounding proportions in this year's American action films. More than 250 people went to their deaths in ``Die Hard 2.'' You could be forgiven for losing count during ``Total Recall.''

These were among the most popular films of last summer. So were two movies that took a very different view of death: ``Ghost,'' in which the hero is murdered and spends the rest of the movie trying to communicate from beyond the grave, and ``Flatliners,'' which deals with a group of medical students who experiment with the mysteries of dying, by using themselves as guinea pigs.

The current ``Jacob's Ladder,'' which also has turned out to be remarkably popular, again confronts the enigma of death rather than the mechanics of killing. Even last summer's moronic Bill Cosby comedy, ``Ghost Dad,'' dealt with experiences similar to those reported in recent research about patients who were revived after being clinically dead.

Probably none of these movies would exist if it hadn't been for the publication of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' 1969 book, ``On Death and Dying,'' which catalogs the behavior of dying patients, or Raymond Moody's 1975 ``Life After Life,'' which records the transcendent recollections of people who have officially ``died,'' then returned to life.

Kubler-Ross' theories were popularized in the late Bob Fosse's 1979 autobiographical musical, ``All That Jazz,'' in a memorable monologue about the five stages that terminally ill patients inevitably go through: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Moody's accounts of people who were inspired by a brush with death were dramatized in the 1980 Ellen Burstyn movie, ``Resurrection,'' in which the Burstyn character almost dies while bathed in light, surrounded by visions of dead relatives. Moody's book undoubtedly influenced the final script of the 1983 film, ``Brainstorm'' - the first screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, who went on to write both ``Ghost'' and ``Jacob's Ladder.''

Despite their popularity, Rubin's two 1990 movies have not received unanimously favorable reviews. ``Jacob's Ladder,'' in particular, has become a loathe-it-or-love-it movie: perhaps the most controversial American film released this year. Like ``Do the Right Thing,'' ``Brazil,'' ``Blue Velvet'' and very few other major-studio releases, it's a movie that sets out to spark discussion.

It's been the subject of vitriolic attacks as well as unwavering raves. Variety called it ``dull, unimaginative and pretentious''; Time magazine described it as ``dreadful and hysterical.'' But The New York Times' Janet Maslin praised it as ``a slick, riveting, viscerally scary film,'' and Newsweek's Jack Kroll praised the writing, direction and Tim Robbins' performance, adding that ``when the movie's final revelation comes, everything falls into place with a powerful and moving logic.''

Some have complained that the ending is a non sequitur, that the picture is a shaggy-dog story. US magazine's Lawrence Frascella was disappointed that ``this fast-moving film doesn't end in an upsurge. It goes out with a whimper.'' Yet the audience with which I saw ``Jacob's Ladder'' was spellbound and touched by its final scenes.

The nature of the attacks suggests that some critics are so uncomfortable with the subject matter that they've essentially stopped watching the movie by the time it's over. Variety's critic insisted that ``the revelation that Robbins is a ghost comes as no shock . . . How a hallucinogenic drug turned the soldier into a supernatural being isn't explained.''

Yet, while the movie toys with demonology and visions of heaven and hell, it never proposes that Robbins is a ghost, or that the supernatural comes into play at all. Like Moody's book, it makes no sensationalistic claims about life beyond the grave.

If you haven't seen ``Jacob's Ladder,'' and you don't usually sneak a peak at the last page of an Agatha Christie mystery, read no further. Rubin's entire script is designed to lead up to a last-minute revelation that changes everything - so much so that it becomes a different movie the second time around.

As Rubin and his director, Adrian Lyne, have acknowledged, that revelation owes something to Robert Enrico's Oscar-winning 1962 short subject, ``An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.'' Enrico's script is based on Ambrose Bierce's story of a Civil War soldier who is condemned to hang; while his body drops and before he reaches the end of the rope, time stands still as he sees himself escaping and being reunited with his wife.

In the final minutes of ``Jacob's Ladder,'' we learn that Robbins - who is apparently playing a Vietnam veteran named Jacob Singer, who works as a New York postal clerk in the mid-1970s - is actually a Vietnam soldier struggling for life in a field hospital in 1971.

In the words of director Lyne: ``Jacob Singer died in the Vietnam war and the movie we have just seen was in his head while he was dying.'' As Kroll points out, the movie is about ``the power of consciousness to create a reality that transcends the blank finality of death.''

The ending also suggests Kubler-Ross: ``Even the angriest and most difficult patients shortly before their death begin to deeply relax, have a sense of serenity about them.''

Jacob goes through all of Kubler-Ross's stages. He's angry at being fatally wounded. He denies his fate by spinning out fantasies about a post-war life with a jealous mistress who tries to destroy all traces of his past. He bargains with various characters who keep telling him he doesn't exist, and he becomes depressed when he realizes that he has no options but death. Finally he accepts his fate, sees himself being reunited with his dead son and chooses to free himself from the earth.

This finale is not so different from the endings of such Hollywood fantasies as ``Death Takes a Holiday'' (1934), ``On Borrowed Time'' (1939) and ``The Ghost and Mrs. Muir'' (1947). They are united in their view that death happens to everyone, that it can't be denied and is not be feared.