The Jacket- Buddy Powers

I can’t believe I had never heard of the movie The Jacket. That was a great film. I thought it was a very interesting aspect to the film was how the main character Jack Starks, played by Adrian Brody, traveled back in time. It was very un-Hollywood with no flux-compassiter or shocks of lightening sending him back in time, but a “medical” procedure that was essentially a torture technique sent him through time. I also appreciated how his mental state effected whether or not he would travel. He had to be relaxed in an extremely uncomfortable context (clothed in a straight jacket and locked in a morgue drawer). There is certainly important symbology to this context. The jacket symbolizes the limitation of his time in the future, he ends up being able to control his time there to some extent but this is mostly him just becoming aware of exactly how long he was allowed there. The morgue drawer was interesting because it obviously takes on the connotation of death. Jack entering the drawer as a living being goes against the purpose of the morgue, which is to house dead bodies. His entrance into the drawer each night and then out again symbolizes his journey from the world of linear time to a world outside of time that maybe only the dead are supposed to see. Maybe the dead are to be taunted by what will happen in their absence, but Jack has the chance to leave the drawer each morning alive and do something about what he sees