The Jacket, directed by John Maybury, brings to the screen a case study of the psychological damage inflicted by combat as well as of the psychological torture involved in improper psychiatric treatment. The film, which jumps back and forth in time, has a central puzzle: Was Jack Starks (played by Adrien Brody) resurrected after his two presumed deaths in 1991 and 1993? The first "death" occurs during Gulf War I, when he is twenty-seven. After Marine Sergeant Starks is unexpectedly shot by an Iraqi boy whom he rescues, he is almost left for dead; when a nurse notices that his eyelids are moving, he is revived. However, on returning to his native Vermont, Starks falls victim to post-traumatic stress and has amnesiac attacks as well as blackouts. During one such blackout in 1992, Starks is found alongside the body of a murdered police officer along with the murder pistol on a road in Vermont (filming is primarily in Scotland). A court finds him guilty by reason of insanity, so he is confined for mental treatment to Alpine Grove Hospital. (Evidently, someone in the production has reason to vilify same-sex-friendly Vermont, as the story requires the sparsely populated state to produce dozens of incarcerated crazies in a rather large facility.) Starks then "dies" on January 1, 1993, evidently from a fall in which his head crashes into frozen snow, but perhaps instead from a blow inflicted by Dr. Thomas Becker (played by Kris Kristofferson), the head psychiatrist at the mental health facility where he is confined by the court. Filmviewers will find difficulty in determining the temporal baseline for The Jacket, as Starks seems very much alive in the year 2007, when with the help of Jackie Price (played by Keira Knightley) he is trying to find out the circumstances of his second "death." The film indicts Becker's extreme psychiatric methods, which may cause audiences to flinch, and evidently, his license to practice medicine is revoked after Starks's "death" in 2003. Believing that Starks is delusional and prone to violence, Becker treats him with tranquilizers, to make him calm, and then places Starks in a straightjacket and locks him up for hours in a morgue drawer. Within the dark confine, Starks not only recalls the horrors of battle and events in 2002 leading up to his arrest, but also gains the uncanny ability to perceive how Becker killed other patients with his methods as well as to diagnose the problems of a young boy, whom Dr. Lorenson (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) is treating at home; the boy clearly resembles the one who shot Starks. One of the key events of 2002 involves a mother Jean (played by Kelly Lynch) and her six-year-old daughter Jackie (played by Laura Marano); while intoxicated, Jean crashes her SUV into a snowbank and is nearly unconscious. Starks, who is hitchhiking, discovers the two along the road, befriends Jackie, responds to her request to keep his army dogtag, and starts their stalled car; when Jean recovers, she refuses to thank him, believing that he is a child molester. The first car to pick him up on the road is operated by the man (played by Brad Renfro) who shoots the cop and drives on, leaving Starks as the only likely suspect. Nevertheless, on December 24, 2007, Starks runs into a grown-up Jackie, who at first refuses to believe that he is Starks, a man whom she knows died in 1993. When she finally accepts the reality that he is alive, she joins in Starks's quest to find out about his second "death," including a return to the mental facility and a confrontation with Becker after a church service. The two fall in love, bringing a happy closure to a macabre story. The puzzle about Starks's apparent resurrection from the dead in 2003 is never solved, however. Either Starks lives due to clandestine efforts of Dr. Lorenson, who is nervous about something when Starks and Jackie confront her in 2007, or the entire 2007 caper is the hallucination of a man who masochistically enjoyed sensory deprivation as an opportunity to find peace of mind before his inevitable death. Regardless, The Jacket appears to be medically anachronistic; indeed, two psychiatrists working with Becker object to his methods but do not report him to Vermont's medical licensing board. The lack of fresh air in the drawer would have killed Starks, but filmviewers are not expected to realize that flaw in the story. By the 1990s, psychiatry focused on pharmacological solutions to those with violent outbursts and thereby minimized confinement. Insofar as The Jacket is written to protest Becker's methods, that objective would have been better achieved by taking Starks to Guantánamo, where in 2002 detainees were photographed in a form of sensory deprivation bondage that Amnesty International has condemned as inhuman. CIA-approved experiments involving sensory deprivation, first conducted by Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University in 1951 to break down prisoners, involved a room, not a corpse drawer, but doubtless continued in secret, such that the methods used at Guantánamo may represent the state of the art. Alternatively, The Jacket could have portrayed the nonclaustrophobic sensory deprivation technique developed by Dr. John C. Lilly, in use since the mid-1950s, which involves immersion for up to three hours in a large salt water flotation capsule in order to achieve a level of relaxation that stimulates the immune system to overcome addictions or decreases muscle tension so that the body can recover rapidly from serious athletic injury. Instead, The Jacket falls neatly into the mad scientist genre and passes up both ways of informing filmviewers about reality. MH
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