Altered States (1980)
100 Best Science Fiction Movies from Slant
Magazine
#100. Altered States (1980)
Doctor John C. Lilly of the National Institutes of Health
experimented on himself with Hallucinogenics and used Sensory Deprivation Tanks
in the 1950s – 60s, which made him a “Me Generation” guru in the 1970s, a title
he was not apparently fond of. His work was well-known at the time, and has had
repeated popular revivals in the decades that followed. This is a quote from
the ill-titled book, "Tanks for the Memories: Floatation Tank Talks"
(1995):
"That's when I learned that fear can propel you in a
rocketship to far out places. That first trip was a propulsion into domains and
realities that I couldn't even recount when I came back. But I knew that I had
expanded way beyond anything I had ever experienced before, and as I was
squeezed back into the human frame, I cried."
Literalizing these dreams into Drama should’ve been a fool’s
errand, and perhaps it was, but what a wonderous errand it proved to be.
And
so, this film. One would’ve wished this film evolved more smoothly, but perhaps
its descent into behind-the-camera toxicity might’ve been inevitable. One can
ponder what would’ve been achieved had everyone had decided not to hate each
other, maybe it would’ve been a masterpiece, but the rage of cross-purposes and
the drive to complete it at all costs can, I feel, be felt in this energetic non-masterpiece.
It’s
a tale of Civilized Mores at War with Primal Urges, of Rationality at War with Desire.
It’s also a battle between a Screenwriter, among the greatest and most
powerful, but still only a Screenwriter, and the Director, hugely talented but
at the end of his rope and needing to re-assert his legitimacy. Both men were extremely
arrogant and uncompromising and this seems to ripple across the screen in this
SF/Horror film about a self-abusive Scientist who got way-laid in “man’s search
for his true self” (which is how the Screenwriter described the film).
Our screenwriter is Paddy Chayefsky, who first achieved
fame with Realist works likes “Marty” (1953), and later applied the tools the Realism
to wild, but solidly-grounded, Satires like “Network” (1976). Monomaniacally focused
and argumentative, he landed-up on one of the various anti-Communist Blacklists
back in 1949 even though he was never a Communist. It was something that should’ve
ended his career, but he got lucky, and embracing that luck, became increasingly
pugilistic.
Jumping forward to 1977, riding high on his
success with “Network,” he was having lunch with his fellow, famously talented
and irascible friends, Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner. They were sitting around a
table joking and complaining about what stories Hollywood Producers refuse to
tell. The ideas thrown around at that moment were mostly Farce, like a remake
of “King Kong” (1933) where Kong doesn’t die on the Empire State Building but
becomes a Hollywood Star, and in the ends even more unhappy -- you know, I’d
pay good money to see that film, but that wasn’t what came out of it.
Instead, echoing how Mary Shelly responding to
dreary weather and a Ghost Story competition during the Haunted Summer of 1816
and then wrote “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus” (novel 1818), Chayefsky
eventually chose to up-date Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Doctor
Jekyll and Mister Hyde” (novel 1886), infusing elements of the Myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice (most famous version was about 29 BCE, but it’s likely older than
that), setting it contemporarily and buttressing itself with then-cutting-edge,
but now viewed dubiously, Science.
Chayefsky viewed the resulting
novel (1978) as only a blueprint for the eventual screen play. It was as
thoroughly researched and carefully grounded as his masterpiece “Network,” but
the difference was that “Network” was based on Journalistic reports of
unethical conduct within the News Industry while here, in one of his few Fantastic
tales and his only SF, he relied of the absolute conceptual edges of
psychology, mixing in some anthropology and genetics. The evolving tale does become
increasingly Scientifically dubious, but that isn’t much of an issue in a
self-avowed Fiction; his cherry-picking of Science helped him get closer to
Theme.
The story was built around Dr. Eddie Jessup, (John
Hurt) as Mystic as much as a Scientist, who turns his back on wife Emily (Blair Brown) and two
daughters to dangerously self-experiment. This echoes the Real-World Horace Wells, who, in pursuit of painless Dentistry, abandoned
his wife and two children, secluded himself and engaged in dangerous
Self-Experimentation. He became Addicted to his own Drug concoction, and
finally, in Manic Delirium, attempted to mutilate two women he encountered on
the street. When sober, realizing what he’d done, he confessed and committed
suicide in 1848. This case almost certainly inspired Stevenson’s “The Strange
Case …”
Eddie uses Hallucinogenic Drugs and a
Sensory Deprivation Tank in quest to find the core of his being. A lot of
people were doing that during the “Me Generation” and some had positive things
to say about their experiences, but others suffered extreme Anxiety, Hallucinations,
Bizarre Thought, temporary Senselessness, and Depression.
Chayefsky’s research leaned heavily on Lilly. Though
Chayefsky seemed to admire Lilly’s work, he was writing a SF/Horror story, so Chayefsky
built a bridge from Research to the Fiction (whether he was aware of it or not)
by resurrecting the long-discredited Evolutionary theories of Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck, and explicitly demonstrated the power of one’s own unbridling Will to purposefully
rewrite one’s own Genetic code, even though that Will was Unconscious.
Eddie de-Evolves into and
Ape-man and commits acts of violence. This scene was based on (and exaggerated)
an experience Lilly reported after he and his colleague Dr. Craig Enright when
they shared Ketemine, “while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank,
suddenly ‘became’ a chimp jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five
minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, ‘Where the hell
were you?’ He said, ‘I became a pre-hominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So, I
was trying to scare him away.’"
Later still Eddie is reduced into a Primordial Ooze.
Later still, he was at risk of disappearing into
Pure Energy.
As the situation becoming increasingly desperate, Emily
becomes his Savior, a sex-reversal from Orpheus and Eurydice. It is ultimately
not tragic like the Myth or the above-mentioned Mr. Wells: Eddie is saved
though the power of Emily’s love, and that’s a Myth I think we all want to
believe in.
Lilly
wrote in his memoir “Dyadic Cyclone” (1976) of his relationship with his partner, “Is it possible to merge two centres, two
cyclones, one male, one female, in such a way that there can be a rising, quiet
centre shared by both?”
The film’s climax literalizes this,
with Eddie converting into Energy
and Emily risking her life to bring him back into a more Human form, is
especially memorable. This striking scene that
was repeatedly borrowed, notably in the musical video for “Take Me On” (1985,
the band was A-ha) which is considered one of the masterpieces of that decade’s
expressions of that media.
This is a film is radical in every turn, except its
morality. Like a Kurt Vonnegut novel, it is subversive in form, but solid
grounding in a conventional sense of where Humans belong in the Universe. Like most
Fictions since the 19th c, morality is responsibility regarding others,
so working for a cure for cancer is good, but wanting to be God is bad.
Eddie has abandoned his wife and two daughters for
higher truths, his search for himself results in him losing himself, or as
Emily tells him, “You’re a Faust-freak, Eddie! You'd sell your soul to
find the great truth. Well, human life doesn't have great truths. We're born in
doubt. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive. And one way we do
that is we love each other.”
In another scene, Eddie inadvertently condemns
himself by expressing the hollow narcissism of abandoning his family to “find
himself” (a phrase used often in that era, most often by those who dismissed the
idea and uttered like the speaker wanted to spit):
Eddie: Emily's quite content to go on with this life. She insists she's
in love with me - whatever that is. What she means is she prefers the senseless
pain we inflict on each other to the pain we would otherwise inflict on
ourselves. But I'm not afraid of that solitary pain. In fact, if I don't strip
myself of all this clatter and clutter and ridiculous ritual, I shall go out of
my fucking mind. Does that answer your question,
Arthur?
Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban): What question was that?
Eddie:
You asked me why I was getting divorced.
Arthur:
Oh, listen, it's your life. I'm sorry I even asked.
In yet another scene, Eddie says, “Ever since we
dispensed with God we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless
horror of life. That first self is real. And I’m going to find the fucker.”
Chayefsy secured a remarkable deal, nearly $1 million
and creative control, and a Script-writer having creative control was a
privilege reserved for almost no one. As it turns out, that creative control,
though that was in the contract, proved of less value than he thought because he
didn’t have the physical strength to fight across the long and troubled Production.
He’d suffered a heart attack in 1977, before the novel was published, and
hadn’t fully recovered by the time he needed to go toe-to-toe with Production
realities.
Arthur Penn was the first person slated to Direct,
but Penn left production because he found Chayefsy difficult. The studio was committed
to the project and went through a long list of potential substitutes, including
legendary names like Orson Welles and Steven
Spielberg. They finally chose Ken Russell,
a recognized talent, but far more popular in his
home of the England than the USA. Russell really wanted to work in Hollywood because
he wanted bigger budgets for his increasingly ambitious productions.
Before secured this gig, Russell thought he might
never get hired again in Hollywood because his most successful films were
controversy-plagued (“Women in Love” (1969), “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils”
(both 1971), and “Tommy” (1975)), and also had string of serious failures. His
immediate prior film, “Valentino” (1977 and I think the first made with
Hollywood money) was a hit in England but bombed in the USA. He later said,
"nobody in Hollywood would give me even a B movie to direct." He was,
in fact, this film’s Producers’ twenty-seventh choice for the Director’s chair.
But Russell brought something special, maybe perfectly
in-line with Chayefsky’s vision. Chayefsky was a Realist straying into the
Fantastic, while Russel was an over-indulgent bad-boy skilled in infusing
Surrealism into Naturalism. On paper, this was a match made in Heaven, but in reality,
it didn’t work out that way.
Russel was accused of plotting against the infirm
Chayefsky. According to Producer Howard Gottfried, Russell was confident that
he could get rid of Chayefsky after a certain point, so he’d remained polite
and deferential during pre-Production but then “began to treat Paddy as a
nonentity" and was "mean and sarcastic."
Russel described the physically infirm Chayefsky as "the
monkey on my back was always there and wouldn't let go … I couldn’t work with someone else judging
everything I did. Chayevsky told me, ‘I’ll just be on the set as a benign
influence.’ The producer said, ‘How do you spell benign, Paddy?’ He answered
‘W-I-C-K-E-D’ He was joking but he wasn’t joking.’
Critic Pauline Kael, who didn’t like the film, and
had some knowledge of the behind-the-scenes strife, described the film as a
conflict between, "Russell, with his show-biz-Catholic glitz mysticism,
and Chayefsky, with his show-biz-Jewish ponderousness."
Chayefsky had the power to fire Russell, but this
far along, with so much money already spent, he faced hardened opposition. He
was told that if Russell was fired, he’d have to take the Director’s chair
himself, and he knew he wasn’t strong enough to do that.
Chayefsky raged at actions by Russell that seemed deliberately
insulting to his work. Russel hated the dialogue, found it "soppy,"
also “ponderous, pretentious, and labored.” Stuff like:
"There's really very little literature on this type of
research. There's good people in the field: Tart, Ornstein, Dykeman, but most
of it is radical hip stuff, drug culture. Obviously the first thing to do is to
set up some kind of sensible methodology to see if we can't study these
experiences in controlled laboratory conditions."
Russell wasn’t allowed to rewrite it, so to shorten
the dialog scenes, the Actors were directed to engage in overlapping dialogue, speak
their lines while eating, or talking very fast. Russell denies any of this was
meant as an insult and insists some of it was Chayefsky's idea.
Russell,
“One problem with Paddy was that I don't shoot scenes as he was used to having
them shot in other movies he has been involved in. I try to avoid the covering
shot, long shot, close-up technique. Instead, I try for long, fluid sequences.
''Also, I don't think Paddy had ever been involved with
a director who wasn't malleable. He would make suggestions, and I would listen
courteously, and then disagree. Paddy hated the lighting, for example, and he
didn't like the color scheme of some of the sets. 'I can't use your eyes,' I
told him. 'I've got to use my own. In any case, there can be only one director
on a picture.’''
Finally, Chayefsky withdrew from the production and
demanded his name be changed on the credits; he’s listed under the pseudonym
Sidney Aaron.
I think Russel was likely correct, this was a film about
important things, but at its heart, it was still a Monster Movie. All Fiction
demonstrates Philosophy, but Fiction isn’t Philosophy. One can’t dramatize
Immanuel Kant’s “The Metaphysics of Morals” (1791) any more than one can
dramatize the counter-work by Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy
of Morality: A Polemic” (1887). Shifting from Chayefsky’s rhetorical into something
more Pure Cinema allowed the ideas, by definition Surrealistic, allowed them to
be as dream-like as they needed to be.
Chayefsky mostly declined to be part
of the notorious public debate that followed, but he did tersely express his
distaste for the film and promised never to watch the final cut. It’s likely he
lived up to that promise because he died only a year later. Enraged fellow-screenwriter,
Joe Eszterhas, insisted it was
of a “broken heart.”
The line between Chayefsky
and Russell’s contribution is pretty clear. Chayefsky provided a hell of a
story, and insisted on the casting of the two leads, Hurt and Brown. This was
Hurt’s first film, and Brown only marginally better known, so both were huge
risks on such an expensive production, but both proved marvelous. (This was
also Drew Barrymore’s first film as one of the daughters, but that part was
tiny.) Russell obviously worked well with those actors, but shifted the film to
the wholly visual, providing hallucinatory sequences alive with color, sound,
and utter bizarreness that remain unmatched even today, with our much superior FX
technology. It features highly sexualized Religious imagery, high tea in the
Garden of Eden with an aggressive serpent, Crucifixions and Creatures with too
many eyes. There’s a particularly beautiful sequence were naked bodies become
sand-sculptures that are blown away in the wind. Time lapse-photography and
extremely early-in-the-game but well-executed CGI give us the birth of the
Universe and the emergence of the Human.
There were other problems as well. At
the time the Dean of Hollywood FX was John Dykstra but,
for reasons unclear to me, he quit the production. Also, the production was
shifted to a new studio. With each behind-the-scenes conflict, the budget kept
ballooning.
The new FX guys were David Domeyer and
Chuck Gasper, and their work proved remarkable. This was late ‘70s, early
1980s, where almost all effects were practical and/or in-camera because the barely-invented
CGI couldn’t actually do that much yet. There was also great FX make-up by Dick
Miller and an uncredited Rick Baker, much of which was torturous for Actor Hurt.
Absolutely everything was laborious. Russell said, “There are scenes in ‘Altered
States’ that are on screen for a third of a second, and they took perhaps three
days to shoot. That’s $30,000 or maybe $300,000. They are expensive. In this
case the studios realized the visuals were very much key to the story.”
Anyway, the final budget was $15 million, which means more than “Star
Wars” (1977). The visual effects remain arresting even today, but it was the
sound that drew attention at the time, with two Osar nominations, Sound Editing
by Arthur Piatadosi and Original Score John Corigliano. As a large percentage
of Russell’s previous works were Musicals and/or biopics of famous
Musicians/Composers, so the devotion to sound and music was as predictable as
the devotion to Surrealism.
Retrospectively, the film is described by Chayefsky’s supporters and a
“bomb” and Russel’s supporters as a “hit,” but based on my research it was neither,
it was break-even on original release, and developed a cult-following later being
well-timed to take advantage of the emerging VHS market. Critical response was
mixed, but even those who disliked it admired Russel’s visual achievements.
Critic Roger Ebert, hostile to most of Russel’s previous films, highly praised
this one, “one hell of a movie ... I was caught up in the headlong energy.”
Unfortunately, Russell’s next to films really did bomb, forcing him to
retreat from Hollywood and return to England.
Despite being at loggerheads over so many things, Chayefsky and
Russell shared one mutual goal, to create a new “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)
but exploring Inner- instead of Outer-Space. Though much of the action is set in
a fairly mundane world, it featured four long and ambitious FX sequences. To
appreciate what that constitutes, try to think of a SF film, more-than-thirty-years
old, set on then-contemporary Earth, that has more than two big FX sequences?
Most good films only need only three great scenes (may they be FX or dialogue
driven), “Altered States” offers more than that.
Maybe the final
product evokes more frequent guffaws than triggered by “2001 …” The former was grounded
in realistic Science and then moved on to speculative Metaphysics while “Altered
States” started with popular Pseudo-Science and then went even further. This is
a remarkable film that maybe fails because it’s grounded in this once believed
to be Transformative but eventually proved wanting. It still holds up though,
Russell made it more visually arresting as his other films and his blood-enemy,
Chayefsky,
made it many times more mature than most of Russell’s other films. It’s more
than a curiosity of another era, it also prophesized to why that era was doomed
to pass into disdain.
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