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Congratulations to our competition winner...JIMMY LAMBETH

In my last newsletter a copy of Gary Lachman’s Into the Interior: Discovering Swedenborg was up for grabs for the winning entrance of our film review competition. A big thank you to everyone who submitted and after much reading our winner was chosen and Jimmy Lambeth will be seeing his name in print both here and on our Newsletter. Here is his winning review:

 ‘If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away; but if you’ve made your peace then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.’ Danny Aiello’s words certainly have a ring of the Swedenborgian about them.

Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1991) is a dark, disturbing and disorientating film that centres around the character of Jacob Singer (Tim Robins), a Vietnam veteran living in New York with his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth de la Peña). As the movie leaps and cuts in trippy fashion we seemingly follow flashbacks—in which Singer revisits an earlier part of his life, when he was happily living with his wife, Sarah, and two children—and hallucinatory sequences where Jacob starts seeing demons. Jacob falls dangerously ill with a fever and we are never quite sure what is in his imagination and what is real. Is he married to Sarah and his life with Jezebel a fantasy, a product of his fevered mind, or is it the other way round? It turns out that neither are true, the gruesome opening five-minute combat scene in the jungles of Vietnam is the reality and the rest of the film are Jacob’s deathbed visions: on the one hand, of devils and demons tormenting him, of ‘holding on’; on the other, of a marital bliss where he has ‘made his peace’.

by Jimmy Lambeth