Altered States

It’s a shame that  Altered States turned out to be such a disputed project, with its brilliant writer Paddy Chayefsky condemning the entire result and pulling his name from the credits. It’s a terrific series of audiovisual assaults on the audience. Was 1980 not a good year for far-out, unhinged science fiction with a serious sidebar of psychoactive drugs?

Chayefsky scored big with a select group of masterful teleplays and films spread over nearly 30 years. Several became film milestones.  Marty,  The Catered Affair and  The Bachelor Party examined different experiences among common New Yorkers. His ‘treatise’ movies then took on increadingly heady subjects:  Hollywood stardom,  the nature of heroism in war,  the strained healthcare system.  The topper was Chayefsky’s flawless prediction of social chaos in  the evening news.

Altered States turns inward to take a pseudo-scientific look at the ‘questing’ aspect of the drug culture. Do psychoactive drugs alter the way the brain works?  The field of study is still wide open; it’s a safe bet that the biggest research in the area is by entities looking for tools for brainwashing, or mind control.

Chayefsky’s interpretation goes all ‘Roger Corman’ on the concept, making its drug-obsessed hero yet another pioneer seeking new revelations, like the unlucky Dr. Xavier of  “X” the Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Chayefsky’s creation is a supercharged update of a 1950s monster movie, bolstered with audio barrages of technical-medical jargon. The patter is delivered too fast to absorb, so our tendency is to stop worrying and accept the author’s fantasy story logic.

Director Ken Russell made that choice, to turn the flood of technical talk into an aural special effect. Chayefsky hated that idea and probably everything else that Russell brought to the picture. Preproduction had begun with director Arthur Penn in charge, but that collaboration quickly fell apart. Russell had the reputation of an uncontrollable wild man, yet Altered States feels well structured and blocked out. It tells its story clearly, involving us deeply with its characters.

In a way, it’s like Ken Russell’s spy movie  Billion Dollar Brain, an honest work for hire in search of a commercial hit. Unlike some of Russell’s period films and biographies, the visual flights of fancy don’t overwhelm the material. When the screen explodes in blazing surreal images, every crazy effect aligns with elements in the Chayefsky script.

The focus of Altered States is an isolation tank used for sensory deprivation experiments. In 1967, ‘boy wonder’ psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is doing official research at Columbia University but toying on the side with one of these tanks. Jessup is a obsessed with doing something meaningful. He falls in love with fellow academic Emily (Blair Brown) and moves on.

A decade later Ed is in a personal crisis, still unfulfilled by his day-job research inquiries. He’s tenured at Harvard Medical School and has two children but his marriage is falling apart. With his cooperative associate Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and the initially hostile Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), Ed picks up his old ‘investigate the brain’ project. He goes to Mexico to meet with an indigenous brujo, and delves into the mystery of Mexican mushrooms that reportedly yield similar psycho-spiritual experiences.

Ed’s trip is so powerful that he continues using the mushroom extract in conjunction with another deprivation tank back at Harvard. He becomes convinced that physical changes take place in his body, that his ‘deep memories’ of past existences are transforming him.

Well, they certainly are. In a leap of logic usually attempted in Z-grade science fiction, Edward Jessup at one point emerges from his isolation chamber as a primitive man. For several hours this feral caveman runs wild in the streets and invades a zoo. Continuing over the objections of Emily and his colleagues, Ed keeps up his regimen in the tank, and takes his own version of a ‘trip beyond the infinite.’  A deep dive takes him into an altered state, in which he transforms into some kind of primordial ‘soup.’

Thinking maybe that it’s time to quit, Ed goes home. But hey, he no longer needs external stimuli to freak out in the 9th dimension. In the middle of the night he ‘spontaneously devolves’ and keeps transforming before the terrified Emily. What can she do to bring him back?

Much of Altered States is outrageously impossible. Ken Russell attacks it as if the premise made perfect sense. The ‘impossible’ visuals in Ed’s hallucinations bleed over into reality; it’s as if our dreams could invade the real world, if we just concentrated hard enough, or if the right drug lined up our neuron-ducks in a straight-enough row. Carrying an absurd premise to fulfillment is a basic fantasy goal, and shows of this kind either pull it off or collapse in failure. I think that Russell brings it home. The performances are great all around. We wonder how many takes of machine-gun dialogue the actors blew, and if they thought nothing was working. Imagine the terror of the actors — could the production come up with the knockout audiovisual special effects fireworks needed to keep them from looking ridiculous?  That certainly happened to good actors back in old ‘B’ monster movies.

Excellent optical work and a truly terrific music score keep the hallucinations popping and the drama afloat. The most striking contribution is by makeup genius Dick Smith and his crew. The film’s ape man is extremely believable, and the later transformations of Edward Jessup — special makeup creations aided by optical enhancements — are terrifying.

‘Hypnotic Regression’ 

Before we unroll more words of the praise we need to harp one more time on the observation that Altered States is a 1950s monster romp, but fashioned with intelligence and inspiration. Substitute Hypnotism for drugs and an isolation tank, change the transformee into a woman, and the picture is awfully close to the second-tier horror effort  The She-Creature, from 1956. Both features resurrect a ‘primordial version’ of a person from eons in the past. Marla English becomes a female beast-thing from the dawn of time; Ed Jessup becomes a primitive man and eventually two or three forms of Primal Ooze from the dawn of life itself. When he suffers mushroom flashbacks, he alternates between himself and some sort of organic energy-thing that looks like human flesh ‘blooming’ into amorphous shapes.

Some Ken Russell musical extravaganzas are loaded with anarchic free-association montages. The hallucination-montages here are strongly motivated. Several bring forward specific religious imagery — Ed says that he sometimes dreams religious symbols, and his Mexican mind-storm is filled with them. Even when the images seem obvious, they make an impact. There’s easy-to-read symbolism too, as when Ed is struggling with a huge snake, that would seem to represent his frustration with his marriage.

It’s like Cinematic Sculpture. 

The ‘light show’ hallucinations are finely-crafted graphic montages, with striking hyper-real imagery achieved via traveling mattes, intense micro-cinematography, and special props like a Devil’s head, a ram with a cluster of multiple eyes. Numerous shots of a Doré-like traditional Hell, with souls in torment among volcanic fires, are said to be taken from Fox’s 1935 drama  Dante’s Inferno. Didn’t Fox repurpose them from a silent movie, perhaps an Italian import?  A forest of crucified martyrs sends us back to look at a concluding montage in Fred Zinnemann’s  The Seventh Cross.

The best hallucination imagery is beautifully crafted to communicate Jessup’s expected obsessions with sex, mortality and the obliteration of self. In a composition that betters much of Salvador Dalí a reclining Ed admires a nude Emily, who lies on the sand in a pose much like an Egyptian sphinx. They both transform into sand statues, and a howling sandstorm reduces them to gentle dune-marks on the desert floor. What better illustration of the impermanence of relationships?

Altered States plays its relationship scenes in an almost docu fashion, but given frequent stylistic flourishes. Ken Russell doesn’t shy away from imagery that rhymes with things in the script — while prepping to ingest the weird mushrooms in Mexico, Jessup camps out on a scenic mountain with big rocks that resemble mushrooms.

In 1967, Ed Jessup makes his entrance silhoutted in a doorway, backed by a fanfare of The Doors’ Light My Fire … there’s nothing subtle about Emily’s attraction to him. Their ‘complicated’ relationship a decade later stays on the margins — they love each other but they don’t talk much. Ed’s obnoxious way of relating to Emily makes him an incredible pain in the neck.

The two isolation tanks we see are old iron objects that remind us of factory boilers or Navy diving bells. The isolation research seems to be happening in a steampunk environment. We can see viewers tuning out the gobbledygook in the technical dialogues. When Jessup becomes that caveman, the audience may resist making the leap of acceptance … not because it’s 100% unacceptable, but because the caveman he becomes is almost half his size. We still think in terms of conservation of matter.

This time, Eurydice saves Orpheus. 

The primordial ooze form of Jessup is another leap of faith, as what we see looks like an unexplainable miracle event — or just a non sequitur. Uh, how exactly did the whole room turn into a sauna knee-deep in Jessup Soup?  If Arthur and Mason had video recordings of the event, it would be as if Kubrick’s Star Gate were observed in action, in a University lab. By this time even Emily knows that her hubby Ed has straddled a gap between our reality and some kind of spiritual soul continuum … but she’s not afraid to join him there, to drag him back.

Adding to producer Howard Gottfried’s good work for Paddy Chayefsky is the wise council of producer Daniel Melnick. No second-stringers were hired for this show. This is the first film score by the musical heavyweight John Corgliano, and it garnered an Oscar nomination. It really brings Ed’s drug hallucinations to life, while avoiding all previous psych-out clichés.

Finally, there is the brilliant work of makeup artist Dick Smith, a pioneer who created more classic work than anyone. One has to ignore some of his IMDB credits of the 1950s, as some  work by another ‘Dick Smith’ is not his. Starting with the boxing movie  Requiem for a Heavyweight, he was the go-to guy for the most difficult makeup problems of the 1960s and decades thereafter.

The film’s caveman is utterly convincing, but ape makeups in general weren’t about to impress viewers familiar with the Planet of the Apes movies. Smith and his assistants went Way Over the Top with the final Jessup transformations, that needed full cooperation from William Hurt and Blair Brown — distortions of facial features and arms and hands, all of which had to be startling but not absurd. The final blob-transformation of Jessup, is truly scary — Jessop instantaneously changes form when he crawls and stumbles down a hallway, pounding his fist on the wall in an effort to regain ‘corporeal control.’ The optical embellishments and perfectly matched jump cuts ‘sell’ the crazy situation well.

Did too many audiences find the psycho-spiritual transformations too much to swallow, or was the movie poisoned by press talk quoting Chayefsky condemnations?  We stayed involved because Russell’s actors and the effects keep everything on an intensely personal level. Ed is slipping away into an altered physical state, and only Emily’s distraction, motivating him to retain his identity, can keep him from leaving forever.

The takeaway message for is us that the flighty Jessup IS in love and only the love of his devoted partner can save his sorry intellectual soul. We don’t think the finale is a storytelling dodge, we think it’s a rejection of the cynical pessimism that ruled in the films of Horror / Sci-fi / Fantasy. A good old fashioned physical bond saves Ed and the movie.

Reading about the unhappy production of Altered States, we get the feeling that Paddy Chayefsky expected to direct his films through their official directors, and found both Arthur Hiller and Sidney Lumet to be acceptable ‘collaborators.’ The descriptions of Chayefsky’s desired visuals for the hallucination sequences either sound impossibly vague, or like the dreamy abstract cosmos-scapes in Terrence Malick’s  The Tree of Life.

Ken Russell was a different can of worms completely, a cantankerous and uncompromising director that didn’t like being told what to do. We think he followed the letter and spirit of Chayefsky’s text as far as he could take it, and then did what everyone should have expected him to do, make it his own. The film’s radical ideas eventually give way to a humanist statement, one not too remote from a previous movie about isolation tank experiments, Basil Dearden’s 1962  The Mind Benders.

Setting aside the infighting and backbiting about who cheated who in the production, we very much like what we see and hear in Altered States. The movie introduced a new star in William Hurt — he looks impossibly young and strong — and gave a fine part to the talented and deserving Blair Brown. It takes us to crazy places and brings us back in one piece. It certainly has a strong attitude against mind-altering drugs, unless one is suicidal. We only hope that Ed Jessup doesn’t wake up the next morning, transformed into a  mushroom man.