Altered States
A recurring theme of certain horror movies (and possibly in real life) is that in the isolated environments of college campuses all across the country, the strangest, most mindblowing experiments imaginable are being conducted in order to find the next breakthrough in medical or metaphysical science with the horror element coming from something going terribly wrong and all hell proceeding to break loose. Now as the common idea with most movies of this type, the presentation itself can range from being somewhat goofy to downright laughable sometimes even with monsters in rubber suits running amok on campus. In 1980, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (easily one of the most intelligent, deep thinkers ever in his profession who will forever be remembered for the prophetic masterpiece that was Network) decided to take on this type of subject matter but to do so from a more philosophical, analytical approach, spending years doing research in Boston before writing a novel of his story in 1978 that he later adapted into the screenplay for this film. Chayefsky specifically focused on the use of sensory deprivation as achieved by immersing oneself in an isolation tank where, in a complete state of relaxation and cut off from all contact with the outside world, a person’s mind can find itself playing along the outer edges of reality and even achieve an hallucinatory state where maybe, just maybe, answers to the questions of our existence and just why we are here on this planet can finally come to us. It’s kind of amazing that over 40 years since these type of experiments were conducted that the use of isolation tanks on a widespread therapeutic basis has become almost unheard of, as reportedly most people’s mileage can vary from having hallucinations to simply feeling completely relaxed and at total peace with themselves, especially if music or mellow calming drugs such as marijuana are introduced to the mix. But Chayefsky (who was never definitely known to have entered a tank himself) was out there using the method to find the big answers up to and including the possibility that God Himself might just speak to somebody holed up in a tank if the moment was right. Unfortunately for him, when the time came to make the movie, it was Ken Russell who was hired as director. The brilliant yet demented genius behind classics like Tommy and The Devils was no stranger to using hallucinogenic imagery in his films (perhaps better than any director before or since) but he balked at the extensive dialogue in Chayefsky’s script featuring the theological and philosophical discussions amongst various characters, knowing (quite right perhaps) that it would bog the story down and take the audience right out of it. Russell’s strategy (since he was contractually bound to not change a word of dialogue) and the main source of conflict between he and Chayefsky during production was in the PRESENTATION of all this dialogue, preferring to direct his actors doing so during heated arguments or over the course of offbeat, offhand conversations much in the way that normal people do rather than merely lecture it to the audience, a tactic that Chayefsky hated and caused him to take his name off the script and be credited under a pseudonym (although he is still credited as being the author of the original source novel). Nonetheless, William Hurt (in what was his first ever movie role after honing his craft for years on the stage) reportedly first read Chayefsky’s script claiming that it touched on things that were exactly on his mind at that moment, becoming so moved that he actually cried for 30 minutes after reading it and couldn’t even get up to walk around for an hour. After being cast, Russell would later claim to have been forced to be Hurt’s therapist for the six months of filming with much of his conversations with the actor being about his own personal problems and little to nothing at all to do with the role that he was playing. Still, Hurt does a fine job as Eddie Jessup, a brilliant PhD scientist teaching at a university who decides to play around with the isolation tank on campus along with his partner in crime colleague (Bob Balaban). His initial forays into the tank find him impressed with the strength of his hallucinations and the possible effects of long term use, but then he gets married to an anthropology scholar (Blair Brown), has kids and several years later he, his wife and Balaban all find themselves working at Harvard. Turns out that Hurt has sworn off all religion and believing in God after witnessing the horrifically slow cancer death of his father (believing that suffering for the sake of even more suffering is no kind of religious doctrine to subscribe to), but before that, he supposedly used to have religious visions all the time as a kid, so much so that his parents had to keep him isolated at times and all of which stopped when he turned his back on God after his father’s death. But now that he’s estranged from his wife, he’s itching to get into the Harvard isolation tanks with Balaban still at his side taking notes and watching over him, but first he decides to add a secret ingredient, an untested Mexican hallucinogen made from mushrooms, blood and God knows what else that he personally goes down and fetches from a witch doctor in Mexico after giving it a little taste test. The effects of the drug once he is locked inside the tank are apocalyptic to say the least, as the effects of his hallucinations start to take on physical form and as his mind goes on a journey to the literal beginning of time, he himself starts experiencing a genetic change and physically morphing into a missing link type of creature, one which escapes and beats up a security guard before breaking into the Bronx Zoo and killing and eating a sheep (with a ridiculous looking fur covered actor / double playing the role in Hurt’s place). When he comes back around, Hurt can only recall just how “wonderful” it all felt, probably because he had thrown off all shackles of civilized behavior (and when it comes to having hurt both people and animals while in this state, he’s lucky he wasn’t killed). For all of the metaphysical mumbo jumbo being spouted onscreen, it still doesn’t deter the absolutely ridiculous aspect of hallucinations of any kind being so strong that they somehow manifest themselves in reality as physical flesh and blood (a phenomenom that has never been known to be recorded) as well as appearing to (and even consuming) other people nearby who have neither taken the same drug nor spent any time of their own in the isolation tanks, so the Hurt character’s genetic alterations (and Chayefsky’s insistence that there’s possibly some spiritual meaning to it all) give way to Ken Russell’s gifted ability to put up some seriously messed up psychedelic imagery (some of which was done with what amounted to 1980’s version of CGI), much of which still holds up pretty well today and showed Russell to be truly a genius in the art of messing with his audience’s heads. Accepting the film as a science fiction / horror groundbreaker rather than as a serious philosophical treatise would appear to be the reasonable way to go here in digesting the story even as the overall presentation maintains a deadly serious tone as Hurt continues to insist to the others (including his estranged wife who is trying to get back with him) that he is definitely onto SOMETHING, the exact definition of which seems to escape even him but still compels to get back into that tank so that he can find out. Whether it be the liberation of his buttoned down, civilized self into a freer yet more primordial state or in the ongoing quest we all share to find God so that we can know all the answers, it doesn’t really matter in the end since the story asks us to accept things that are not even remotely possible (it’s one thing to see and be frightened by a person who is obviously high on drugs and quite another to be literally drawn into what they’re experiencing without the benefit of those same drugs) and just turns things into a feature length vision quest which is grounded nicely at times by Charles Haid as the grumpy department head who still helps monitor the experiments all while acting as a voice of reason (unlike Balaban who is a total sycophant for what Hurt is doing). But in the end, it’s all about Hurt (at the beginning of what would be a brilliant run in the 1980s) and the diabolically twisted genius that was Ken Russell, taking an oft used B horror concept and turning it into something more than it should have been…
8/10