Altered States (1980)

After a string of musicals (The Boy Friend (1971), Tommy (1975), Lisztomania (1975)) and biopics (Savage Messiah (1972), Mahler (1974), Valentino (1977)), director Ken Russell took an unexpected career left turn when he took over an adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s novel Altered States at the last minute from Arthur Penn who departed the project due to his fractious relationship with the author. Chayefsky was so appalled by what Russell did with the screenplay he wrote for the project that he had his name removed from the final film, signing the script using his real name Sidney Aaron (though he was happy enough to keep his credit for the novel).

In the late 1960s, psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt in his screen debut) begins to experiment with a sensory deprivation tank in the belief that “our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states” assisted by two colleagues, Mason Parrish (Charles Haid) and Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban). Initial experiments don’t amount to much and Jessup meets and marries biological anthropologist Emily (Blair Brown), temporarily settling down to family life and putting his researches on hold. Seven years later, Jessup, now a father of two girls (Megan Jeffers and Drew Barrymore, also in her screen debut) and with his marriage failing, learns of a Mexican tribe that uses a drug to experience a shared state of altered consciousness. He participates in an Ayahuasca ritual during which he takes their drug that they refer to as “the First Flower” and experiences a powerful hallucination. Jessup returns to the States with a sample of the drug, using it while undergoing further sessions in an isolation tank. As his experiments continue, Jessup comes to believe that his hallucinations are becoming “externalized”, a belief that seems to be born out when he emerges from the by isolation tank as an ape man and goes on a rampage before reverting to his normal state. As his hallucinations threaten to transform him into a mass of primordial matter, only his love for Emily is able to save him.

In essence, Altered States is a throwback to a certain strand of 50s and 60s B-movie in which people regress to a more primitive state – see The Mind Benders (1962), the Outer Limits episode Expanding Human (1964), Monster on the Campus (1958) and Basil Dearden’s The Mind Benders (1962) which shares some of Altered States‘ DNA – but with a great deal of money thrown at it. The result is the greatest cinematic mindfuck since Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and while it might have been Russell’s most mainstream film in years (the last time he came this close was with probably with Billion Dollar Brain (1967)) it’s still the wildest, most out there film ever funded by a major studio (Warner Bros.).

Russell skates the fine line between a straightforward, thoughtful science fiction film and the sort of outrageous, frequently campy extravaganzas that had become his speciality in recent years. Altered States is chock full of his trademark Christian symbolism – a goat-headed, multi-eyed Christ floats through the air on a cross, writhing bodies cast themselves into the fiery pit in extracts from Henry Otto’s Dante’s Inferno (1924) and Jessup admits to thinking about “Christ and crucifixions” during sex. For the most part, Russell manages to balance these more outrageous elements and his loopy visual onslaught during the film’s many “trip” scenes with the intelligent, more straightforward approach that the story demands. The hallucination scenes are extraordinary, flipping back and forth between the grotesque, the hilarious and the terrifying and only in the scenes with the screeching caveman does the film come dangerously close to tipping over the cliff-edge of camp.

Jessup, a fine performance from Hurt, is a bit of a prick, a self-absorbed “unmitigated madman” who often fails to reciprocate his wife’s love for him until the very end and who is prepared to endanger the lives of himself and those around him in pursuit of his scientific obsession. He’s redeemed in the climax which turns out to be a huge disappointment and the film’s single greatest failing, During Jessup’s last freak out, he regresses beyond human existence itself, an extraordinary sequence visually indebted to 2001 that promises a big final reveal, an ultimate answer to the mysteries of life, the universe and everything. But all we get is Jessup’s weary admission that “the final truth of all things is that there is no truth” and a final transformation that leads to a sappy love-conquers-all finale. It’s a bit of a let-down really.

It’s possibly the ending that caused so many issues for Chayefsky who not only managed to aggravate Penn but also clashed repeatedly with Russell. But it’s hard to see why he wanted his name removed entirely as the script is unusually thoughtful and engaging and despite the flourishes, Russell tackles it far more seriously than one might have expected. Chayefsky makes his scientists actually sound like scientists without alienating us – no mean feat – though one suspects that the religious symbolism was all Russell’s work.

Chafesky had been working on the project since 1975 when he first mooted the idea with Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner as a potential idea for a film inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He took the advice of Daniel Melnick, a producer at Columbia Pictures, that turning the treatment he had written into a novel first and it was published in 1978. The script ended up at Warners when Melnick resigned as head of production at Columbia and went into production with Arthur Penn in the director’s chair. However he walked out during rehearsals, having cast the film, leaving Russell to pick up the pieces.

Altered States is a clever, inventive film full of striking images – the Ayahuasca sequence has a genuinely nightmarish quality, a lengthy psychedelic experience that culminate sin the extraordinary sight of Jessup and Emily’s bodies turning to sand and slowly being blown away by the wind – and if the ending is a letdown, then at least to trip there is a wild and fascinating one. The science is shaky on the extreme but the sensory experience is the equal of 2001 and although many will find it pretentious or muddled, Altered States is a more than creditable attempt to do something serious with science fiction as the genre was in danger of descending into pantomime in the wake of the success of Star Wars (1977). For that alone it deserves our respect.