Jared Free – “The Jacket”

The Jacket was probably my favorite film of the semester. A year after dying for the first time in Iraq, Jack Starks is hitchhiking along a road in Vermont when he is picked up by a stranger who would eventually murder a police officer. Jack has no recollection of the crime, and in fact did not commit it, but doctors and judges attribute this to the bouts of amnesia he suffers as a result of trauma sustained in the Gulf War. Jack is wrongfully sent to a mental institution where he is subjected to a very dangerous and invasive experimental therapy. He is locked away in a drawer for hours at a time and given a drug which allows his mind to hallucinate and enables him to travel into the future.
Jack undergoes a very interesting transition, at first he resists the “therapy” but later begins to embrace it as he realizes he may have the chance to prevent his own death; which he learns is imminent. Jack again transitions from going into the drawer to save his own life, to going into the drawer to improve Jackie’s life. This final transformation takes place when he meets Dr. Becker in the future and realizes there is nothing he can do to stop his own death. In a way he sacrifices himself, but in doing so he drastically changes Jackie’s life for the better and even saves the life of her mother.