Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin wrote this tale of the death experience and couldn't get it produced until he wrote a romantic-comedy version called "Ghost" and won an Oscar for it. "Jacob's Ladder" has many elements of the buddhist description of death and the consciousness.

A buddhist meditator, David Lynch has always depicted the unconscious mind but with "Mulholland Drive" took his films to the next level, the Big Sleep of death from the normal dream sleep we all experience. The "voyager" in this masterpiece is a failed Hollywood hopeful who is shown killing herself near the end.

Lynch expands on the afterlife experience that he created so vividly and frightfully in "Mulholland Drive." Again, the death of the protagonist is not shown until near the end of the film. There are some direct depictions of buddhist bardo experience, such as the purifying radiations or emanations that burn off the soul's karma with a great deal of psychic pain.

This film is open to a lot of interpretation, but my take is that the title character was killed by an airplane engine falling on his house, and the whole film, like so many bardo movies, was his trying to remember and understand what happened to him, with a giant rabbit as a bardo guide?

The title couldn't be more of a giveaway that it's about the afterlife. The surreality of the Old West with its savagery and native American wisdom. Gary Farmer's Nobody is one of the most interesting bardo guides portrayed in film. Jarmusch is a director much attuned to the unconscious and the death experience.