Altered States

Altered States is a film starring the late actor William Hurt as Dr. Eddie Jessup, a brilliant and mad scientist obsessed with "breaking through" the barrier separating man from his "primitive, real self." To this end, he devises the use of various "sensory deprivation" tanks, which are like boilers he floats in with scuba helmets (at least in one case) while his partner, Bob Balaban (as "Arthur Rosenberg") monitors his vitals. Fellow research scientific bigwig, the loud and bellicose Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), advises him, "You're a freak, Jessup." Jessup goes to Mexico to dabble in psychedelic mushrooms with the Hinchi Indians. His psychedelic trip is an explosion of visual and auditory fireworks, depicting shimmering dual entities floating in space, the explosion of worlds, and two people, Jessup and lover Emily (Blair Brown) sitting in a garden having a quaint Victorian tea, right before walking into an atomic explosion.

Blair Brown transforms into a lizard before being blown away as a pile of sand in the wind.

Curiously, the Hinchi seem to dance beneath a huge circular stone with grey alien faces painted on it. A snake writhes on a Tau cross, an image discussed by James Shelby Downard as representing the "Killing of the King" ritual he posits was the impetus behind the Kennedy assassination in his wild short book, King/Kill 33. Conspiracy theorist and guru David Icke has talked about the interdimensional nature of the UFO and "Grey Alien" phenomenon, and how psychedelics can allow you to see beyond, accessing those higher plains (the "Higher Ground" sung of in the old gospel song); he has likewise talked of the strange folklore of native tribes that hint at extraterrestrial visitors in ancient times and of the effects of the ayahuasca ritual on him when he visited Brazil [1]. I'm striding a little far afield, but, dig it, this is what Dr. Jessup wants.

I'm not sure how much of the subtext is intentional and how much is simply accident or synchronicity, but Altered States opens doorways into some strange, atypical cinematic dimensions, exploring realms of para science and ideas about consciousness, partly inspired by the pioneering work of dolphin expert and purported extraterrestrial intelligence "contactee" Dr. John Lilly. Lilly also explored "sensory deprivation," psychedelics, and altered states of consciousness in his work. He thought, much like Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson, that he had been contacted by a universal "alien consciousness." And perhaps he knew whereof he spoke.

From Altered States

Getting back to the film, Jessup, midway through, becomes a sort of regressed ape man from a bad Fifties monster movie. Later, we get mutant transformations of the completely, shockingly grotesque, but I don't want to say anymore, as to do so would give away the rest of this quintessential, incredible, visual odyssey of a film.

Dialogue is rapid-fire, full of academic and often stilted observations. The romance between Emily and Eddie is reserved, and academic; what one might expect from two vastly intellectual doctors, one with rather more bourgeois, conventional ideas of love, life, and marriage than the other.

Altered States was directed by the late auteur Ken Russell (from a novel by PAddy Chayefsky), who was known for his excess and visual flair and his ability to shock the consciousness of an audience like few other men. (His later films, such as Mindbender, a film about Israeli psychic Uri Geller, and his execrable final film, the self-produced Fall of the Louse of Usher, do not quite compare to films such as The Devils, Altered States, Aria, Crimes of Passion, Lair of the White Worm, Tommy, Lisztomania, Women in Love, Savage Messiah, The Debussy Film, and I could go on and on. What happened to his brilliance?)

Altered States ends with the barriers being broken down between Eddie and Emily, with them choosing love and life, instead of Eddie regressing into another dimension, being swallowed up by the arsehole of the Infinite. In a final note, my late friend and co-author, Jon Titchenal loved this film, and would often quote from it humorously while we walked around the campus of Ball State, often at night, discussing other realities, other realms, "New Lands," as Charles Fort termed it. Jon used Ayhuasca frequently during the last years of his life, obsessed with Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna, and wanting badly to break through to his own personal "altered state."

It destroyed him, finally. He died in what I assume was a suicide in 2020.

One makes a Faustian bargain, and it is one's own choice. But the consequences are what they are, and you must accept them as well. There are so many things I would love to have him around to speak of now that my own life has become transformed and turned into what it is, both good as well as bad. But I can only do that in an altered state.

Love and napalm.

[1] Note. The film is interesting in the light of Icke's theories, which have, for over thirty years, proposed that not only can psychedelics open the doorway into seeing into these other dimensions, these "higher frequency fields" as he puts it, but that it is a breed of "reptilian entity" that is suppressing the human race, who travel trans-dimensionally; and we have examples from religion and folklore, not the least of which is the Serpent in the story of the biblical Genesis. Altered States is replete with religious imagery, blasphemous and hellish much of it, and also with reptilian and snake imagery.

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