Altered States

Altered States

The movie “Altered States” is a real mind-bender. It slings its characters through billions of years back to creation itself, where they find only an anguished “No!” as the life force shrieks at being born. Then it turns that “No!” into “Yes!” by human willpower alone in the face of the universe’s implacable indifference, and ends with the man and woman falling into each other’s arms which is always the last scene in all dramas.

But wait a minute: I’m starting to talk like those characters. They’re overwrought pseudo-intellectuals who sound like a cross between Werner Erhard, Freud and Tarzan. Some of their best dialog is deliberately staged with everybody talking at once: It’s not what they’re saying that matters, but how serious they are about it. Intellectually, I can tell myself that this is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster; a movie that’s meant to be one wave after another of sensational excesses crashing over the audience and intellectually I know all that but still I was carried away.

Does such a movie deserve to carry us away? Yes, I suppose it does, if it has earned that right by working as hard as “Altered States” works. This is finally Ken Russell’s Triumphant masterpiece; yes, indeed, even more so than Russell’s earlier films (“The Music Lovers”, “The Devils,” “Lisztomania”) showed him capable of doing. You take his gift for visual pyrotechnics and apocalyptic sexuality no holds barred with Russell! and pass it through just enough scientific gobbledygook to give it form; maybe meaningless form but we are not worried while we are watching.

It was inspired by a novel from Paddy Chayevsky based on Dr. John Lilly’s experiments with total immersion tanks dark, silent chambers where human subjects are floated in water without touching any external reality. In “Altered States,” William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes one step further: He ingests a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe (which, he observes in an easily overlooked line of dialog, give everyone the same hallucination).

Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, which is all there was or ever will be except for life that exists only in thought.

Get it? It doesn’t matter. This is a brilliant idea, but “Altered States” never slows down for something like that. There ain’t no way to classify this movie. Right when it starts sounding like some 1960s psychedelic fantasy, a head trip, it switches tracks and turns into a farce. The scientist spends too much time in his tank, he regresses to a simian state, physically becomes some kind of ape, attacks the campus security guards, is chased by a pack of wild dogs into the local zoo, and kills and eats a sheep for his supper before changing back into the kindly Professor Jessup again.

The movie divides itself into three basic parts: The science, the special effects, and the love relationship between the professor and his wife. The science is done very well. We find out about as much as we need to (that is, next to nothing) about total immersion, genetics, and racial memory. Then we get hit with special effects: four long passages and a few quick bursts.

They’re good. At times they might remind you of the sound and light extravaganza toward the end of 2001; then again they are also supposed to suggest the birth of the universe in a throbbing celestial ovum. In the middle of this sight stands Dr. Jessup, whose body pulses in and out of an ape shape while his mouth forms an anguished “O” of protest against being born alive through these biological sluices down here where there’s nothing but pain except when you eat lambs chops which are really quite tasty if properly cooked as any hungry intellectual gorilla should know.

But then there’s that love relationship between him and Blair Brown (his wife), and here we learn how strong love can be sometimes especially if you believe in ET or Heaven’s Gate or something similar because they both involve outer space travel which might bring people closer together than anything else this side of marijuana.

During his last experiment, when he’s disappearing into a violent whirlpool of light and screams on the laboratory floor, she walks through celestial mists up to her knees in eternity reaches into those clouds where angels fear to tread (or at least wear rubber gloves) pulls him out again even though he’s filed for divorce twice already and wants custody of their unborn son who could have been a contender but now will grow up without ever knowing who his father was unless somebody tells him about it after he’s dead.

The last scene is a killer, with the professor turning into protoplasm itself while his wife turns into flesh covered with glowing rocks so hot they can only be cooled off by jumping out windows like in that other movie where everybody jumps out windows because they think their hair is on fire but actually it’s just a bad case of dandruff mixed up with too much sulfuric acid rain which causes scalp irritation as well as global warming if left untreated for more than 50 years straight before bedtime stories about snowmen come true which means santa claus must be real also since otherwise how would all those presents get delivered every year especially during times when reindeer can’t fly due to lack of oxygen caused by overuse of aerosol sprays containing fluorocarbons plus methane gas from farting cows who should really know better by now if they’ve read any good books lately?

They’re reliving the First Moment together but still somehow manage not to notice each other until after the universe explodes them back together again in arms race between galaxies where men are women and women are gorillas who eat lamb chops whenever possible provided there isn’t any pain involved because then everything becomes clear as mud except when it’s raining outside but only if you’re drunk enough first.

“Altered States” is an amazingly dumb movie, an incredible fun ride, and a smart and stupid device for making us feel fear, awe and laughter at the same time. That’s all. It’s pure movie with hardly any meaning to speak of. So did I like it? Yeah, I guess so; but don’t ask me what I think about because you might not like what hear back from me and nobody wants that happening now do they?

Watch Altered States For Free On Gomovies.