As we all know, the '70s in Hollywood is seen as a second Golden Era, where scrappy film school grads came into their own, using big money from eager studios to rope in a youth generation raised on a druggy counterculture vibe.
Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, they all went big ideas and bigger budgets by the time 1980 rolled around. Ken Russell, the iconoclastic British director was a bit older than this crew and spent the '70s breaking down boundaries with films like the controversial anti-religious bombast of The Devils and the more user-friendly, rock opera psychedelia of The Who's Tommy. Russell was also edging toward the mainstream by the end of the '70s, looking for a pop hit that mixed his opulent weirdness and some kind of sci-fi angle that Hollywood was gaga for, post Star Wars.
[Back in an era when movie posters were allowed to have paragraphs of copy on them for movie-goers to read. We'd be lucky for a full sentence nowadays.]
Russell adapted the sole novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (the genius behind Network) to the screen with his usual psychedelic aplomb. This is the story of Edward Jessup, a research psychologist (a striking William Hurt in his screen debut) studying schizophrenia by using sensory deprivation in an isolation water tank.
This deprivation isn't enough to get the out of body experiences he desires, so he travels to remote Mexico to experience a sacred drug ceremony. There, the natives use a special hallucinogenic natural potion to open up their consciousness. Jessup tries it and is hooked on the mind trip hallucinations.
Back in Boston, Jessup mixes the isolation tank experience with some of the mind-altering drug mixture from Mexico. This is when the film gets truly silly and Hurt's hallucinations manifest themselves physically. He starts to morph into a caveman/animal state, escaping the tank and running amok through the nighttime city streets.
Altered States is a whole lot of mumbo jumbo, psuedo-science but makes for a fun, dated ride through theories about "biological devolution," energy waves, and bad primitive caveman bodysuits. It's the dead serious, existential questions about the origin of man and men becoming godlike through drug and mind-expansion tools that all seems very '70s self-help meets heavy drug experimentation. Russell puts this through a filter of a glossy, FX-heavy sheen of the upcoming '80s wave of sci-fi, horror, and action films about to barrel through Hollywood and become the norm.
Altered States rides the tightrope between the two decades and between exciting boundary-pushing and schlocky fun. It's too silly to even get mad at. C'mon, we're all just energy, man! Enjoy the ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment