Altered States
Altered States (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from freefall-productions.com on 02/11/20)
1980 / US / 102 minutes
“I think that that true self, that original self, that first self, is a real and mensurate, quantifiable thing. Tangible and incarnate- and I’m going to find the fucker!”
Director: Ken Russell / Screenplay: Paddy Chayefsky / Director of Photography: Jordan Cronenweth / Music: John Corigliano / Production: Howard Gottfried for Warner Bros. / Cast: William Hurt (Eddie Jessup), Blair Brown (Emily Jessup), Bob Balaban (Arthur Rosenberg), Charles Head (Mason Parrish), Thaao Penghlis (Eccheverria).
During the post Star Wars boom for Hollywood Science Fiction projects, most of the scripts that got made were pretty firmly in the Action / Adventure category. Alien had taken Sci- Fi much darker in 1979 but was primarily a horror film. For some years writer Paddy Chayefsky had been writing a novel he had initially envisioned as a modern day Jekyll and Hyde story that would take SF back to it’s original, pre- blockbuster currency of ideas.
Based on John C. Lilley’s research on LSD, ketamine and mescaline, the book became Altered States, the story of Edward Jessup (a name part Edward Jekyll, part Edward Hyde), a psychopathologist who develops a theory that schizophrenia may not actually be a disease but an awareness of other states as real as waking reality. Jessup then uses himself as the test subject in dangerous experiments exploring other levels of human consciousness through sensory deprivation and hallucinogens.
Chayefsky was hired to write the film version in the late ’70’s, which was originally to have been directed by Arthur Penn. Following disputes with Chayefsky, Penn was eventually replaced by Ken Russell who took on Altered States as his first US project. Inheriting Penn’s cast of largely unknown talent and soon getting into his own arguments with Chayefsky, Russell still managed to craft one of the most unusual American films of the genre and the era as well as one of most daring and genuinely disturbing of all time.
Unlike The Exorcist or Alien, the horror element of Altered States is based not in the supernatural or the fantastical but rather in real scientific concepts relating to the most complex and most potentially terrifying environment possible: the human mind. It begins with Jessup (William Hurt in his debut role) having religiously inspired “Interior Experiences” during his early experiments (the seven eyed, seven horned sheep of Revelations is one of the film’s freakiest and most haunting images) before deciding to take things to the next level.
Travelling to Mexico, Jessup takes part in a Hinchi Indian “Ayahuasla” ceremony, ingesting a bizarre mixture in the hopes of achieving a shared dream state with the natives. The visions this time are still religious but more hellish and more seemingly real. To the horror of his fellow neuroscientists, he brings some of the mixture he took back to the US and increases the dosage for his return to the floatation tank.
This next phase results in even more vivid “Hallucinations”, with Jessup imagining- or actually experiencing- being an early human primate hunting animals in the prehistoric wild. As much as his colleagues and estranged wife and family are in denial about it, actual physiological devolution has begun to take place. A doctor examining an X- Ray of him after leaving the tank even concludes that what he’s looking at is the skeleton of a gorilla.
Eventually, full physical metamorphosis does occur and passes through into our “Real”, physical world- Jessup emerges genetically transformed into the quasi- simian creature and escapes from the lab. But because he eventually reverts back to his “Normal” form with little memory of the experience, his ex- wife Emily and the other scientists remain sceptical.
Finally, Jessup reaches the stage where no longer needs the tank or the drugs to transform- it is now within him and he starts to transform into an amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter , beginning to disappear from our version of reality altogether…
William Hurt delivers a knockout performance throughout Altered States. Working with such unconventional material and playing an extremely awkward, obsessive character, he makes Jessup a dangerous but misunderstood genius. Selling Chayefsky’s unwieldy dialogue (“we’re beyond genetics, beyond even mass and matter- what we’re dealing with here is the first thought!”) and keeping us caring throughout, Hurt is ably supported by Blair Brown as Emily.
In the end, it’s the genuine love Jessup has for Emily that saves them both. Seeing her pulled in with him is the only thing that enables him to resist his final, permanent transformation. He says that his experiments have been like “Opening a black box that may scramble our whole idea of space, time and the universe” but also that the ultimate truth he has discovered is that there is none: “It’s nothing… Simple, hideous nothing. .. Truth is what’s transitory- it’s human life that’s real”.
Russell is said to have struggled so much with such speeches that he had the characters drinking in as many scenes as possible (he was heavily on the booze himself at the time), in order to make their lines seem more natural. It was the cast speeding the delivery of his words up that bothered Chayefsky though, who took his name of the script and is credited as “Sidney Aaron” (actually his middle names).
Altered States is, to say the least, a “Difficult” film about the truly unknown within us. Part speculative fiction, part body horror and part psychedelic art film, it remains incredibly divisive to this day and is very much an acquired taste. Mashing up elements of philosophy, theology and scientific conjecture, it’s ideas and imagery will stay with you and it’s atmosphere will refuse to dissipate once you’ve seen it.
Some of the concepts have been done since as pure Horror (John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness touches on a lot of similar stuff in a more accessible, fun B movie way) or as pure SF (The Matrix, Nolan’s Inception) but they’ve never again been taken to such extremes in a mainstream, theatrical feature.
Even back in my silliest days, hallucinogens were never my drug of choice but on the few occasions I did do them, I always had the same feeling of “Knowing” that our “Real” world is either illusionary or just a very small part of something much larger and it’s this simultaneously amazing and terrifying thought that Altered States taps into so effectively. It’s dismissed as an experiment as crazy as those it depicts by those who don’t want to think too far into it’s ideas but, if you’re up for it, it’s a trip well worth taking.
1980 / US / 102 minutes
“I think that that true self, that original self, that first self, is a real and mensurate, quantifiable thing. Tangible and incarnate- and I’m going to find the fucker!”
Director: Ken Russell / Screenplay: Paddy Chayefsky / Director of Photography: Jordan Cronenweth / Music: John Corigliano / Production: Howard Gottfried for Warner Bros. / Cast: William Hurt (Eddie Jessup), Blair Brown (Emily Jessup), Bob Balaban (Arthur Rosenberg), Charles Head (Mason Parrish), Thaao Penghlis (Eccheverria).
During the post Star Wars boom for Hollywood Science Fiction projects, most of the scripts that got made were pretty firmly in the Action / Adventure category. Alien had taken Sci- Fi much darker in 1979 but was primarily a horror film. For some years writer Paddy Chayefsky had been writing a novel he had initially envisioned as a modern day Jekyll and Hyde story that would take SF back to it’s original, pre- blockbuster currency of ideas.
Based on John C. Lilley’s research on LSD, ketamine and mescaline, the book became Altered States, the story of Edward Jessup (a name part Edward Jekyll, part Edward Hyde), a psychopathologist who develops a theory that schizophrenia may not actually be a disease but an awareness of other states as real as waking reality. Jessup then uses himself as the test subject in dangerous experiments exploring other levels of human consciousness through sensory deprivation and hallucinogens.
Chayefsky was hired to write the film version in the late ’70’s, which was originally to have been directed by Arthur Penn. Following disputes with Chayefsky, Penn was eventually replaced by Ken Russell who took on Altered States as his first US project. Inheriting Penn’s cast of largely unknown talent and soon getting into his own arguments with Chayefsky, Russell still managed to craft one of the most unusual American films of the genre and the era as well as one of most daring and genuinely disturbing of all time.
Unlike The Exorcist or Alien, the horror element of Altered States is based not in the supernatural or the fantastical but rather in real scientific concepts relating to the most complex and most potentially terrifying environment possible: the human mind. It begins with Jessup (William Hurt in his debut role) having religiously inspired “Interior Experiences” during his early experiments (the seven eyed, seven horned sheep of Revelations is one of the film’s freakiest and most haunting images) before deciding to take things to the next level.
Travelling to Mexico, Jessup takes part in a Hinchi Indian “Ayahuasla” ceremony, ingesting a bizarre mixture in the hopes of achieving a shared dream state with the natives. The visions this time are still religious but more hellish and more seemingly real. To the horror of his fellow neuroscientists, he brings some of the mixture he took back to the US and increases the dosage for his return to the floatation tank.
This next phase results in even more vivid “Hallucinations”, with Jessup imagining- or actually experiencing- being an early human primate hunting animals in the prehistoric wild. As much as his colleagues and estranged wife and family are in denial about it, actual physiological devolution has begun to take place. A doctor examining an X- Ray of him after leaving the tank even concludes that what he’s looking at is the skeleton of a gorilla.
Eventually, full physical metamorphosis does occur and passes through into our “Real”, physical world- Jessup emerges genetically transformed into the quasi- simian creature and escapes from the lab. But because he eventually reverts back to his “Normal” form with little memory of the experience, his ex- wife Emily and the other scientists remain sceptical.
Finally, Jessup reaches the stage where no longer needs the tank or the drugs to transform- it is now within him and he starts to transform into an amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter , beginning to disappear from our version of reality altogether…
William Hurt delivers a knockout performance throughout Altered States. Working with such unconventional material and playing an extremely awkward, obsessive character, he makes Jessup a dangerous but misunderstood genius. Selling Chayefsky’s unwieldy dialogue (“we’re beyond genetics, beyond even mass and matter- what we’re dealing with here is the first thought!”) and keeping us caring throughout, Hurt is ably supported by Blair Brown as Emily.
In the end, it’s the genuine love Jessup has for Emily that saves them both. Seeing her pulled in with him is the only thing that enables him to resist his final, permanent transformation. He says that his experiments have been like “Opening a black box that may scramble our whole idea of space, time and the universe” but also that the ultimate truth he has discovered is that there is none: “It’s nothing… Simple, hideous nothing. .. Truth is what’s transitory- it’s human life that’s real”.
Russell is said to have struggled so much with such speeches that he had the characters drinking in as many scenes as possible (he was heavily on the booze himself at the time), in order to make their lines seem more natural. It was the cast speeding the delivery of his words up that bothered Chayefsky though, who took his name of the script and is credited as “Sidney Aaron” (actually his middle names).
Altered States is, to say the least, a “Difficult” film about the truly unknown within us. Part speculative fiction, part body horror and part psychedelic art film, it remains incredibly divisive to this day and is very much an acquired taste. Mashing up elements of philosophy, theology and scientific conjecture, it’s ideas and imagery will stay with you and it’s atmosphere will refuse to dissipate once you’ve seen it.
Some of the concepts have been done since as pure Horror (John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness touches on a lot of similar stuff in a more accessible, fun B movie way) or as pure SF (The Matrix, Nolan’s Inception) but they’ve never again been taken to such extremes in a mainstream, theatrical feature.
Even back in my silliest days, hallucinogens were never my drug of choice but on the few occasions I did do them, I always had the same feeling of “Knowing” that our “Real” world is either illusionary or just a very small part of something much larger and it’s this simultaneously amazing and terrifying thought that Altered States taps into so effectively. It’s dismissed as an experiment as crazy as those it depicts by those who don’t want to think too far into it’s ideas but, if you’re up for it, it’s a trip well worth taking.
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