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Jacob's ladder effect

There is a movie I have never seen, but I know the twist. Think of it as a really grim Wizard of Oz tale where Dorothy clicks her heals and then the audience realizes she was killed by the tornado.

That got me thinking about how much of the story telling in my beloved b-movies would be first rate if you just latched onto this premise. If you assume the inciting incident in act 1 almost killed the main character, and everything from there forward is a fever dream or the last brain synapses firing before the main character crosses over. With that lens the story telling just got a whole lot better.

Imagine if instead of the script and editing being shite and the directing + acting being inconsistent, unbalanced and paper thin ... instead the cast & crew were students of Descartes' *Meditations on First Philosophy* or Plato's *Theaetetus*. They were purposefully challenging the distinction between waking and dreaming states. As they are soliciting backers, they have a copy of Zhuangzi's "Butterfly Dream" paradox under their arms, or maybe Aristotle's *Metaphysics*. They are setting out to imbue the audience with a profound skepticism about the nature of reality.

Yeah; that jives.

Then, when you watch "Big Trouble in Little China" - just assume that Jack Burton is stabbed to death at the 5-minute mark over his winnings at pai gow, and the rest of the movie shows his final thoughts before they dump his body in the bay. Plato & John Carpenter could have been bros.

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