Weird Wednesdays: Altered States

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Modern life seeks to squash our spiritual selves into commodified containers, offering a million forms of escapism but few avenues for truly transcendent experiences. Peeling back the layers behind our collective existence involves immense risk. For some, the search for spiritual truth  becomes a call to the void, leading to solutions ranging from the orthodoxies of organized religion to the hedonism of sex and drugs.

William Hurt plays one such seeker who runs the full gamut of these possibilities in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). It’s the closest the British auteur ever came to a standard genre film, his first Hollywood production after a whirlwind ’70s that produced The Devils, Tommy, and Lisztomania. Its swirling brew of hard sci-fi, creature feature, and midnight-movie headtrip makes a prime recipe for the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday program. 

“German title: The Hell Trip,” co-host Laird Jiminez quipped on his way off the stage after introducing the film. An over-the-top translation perhaps, but not far off the mark. The WW crew scored a luminous 35mm print for the occasion, the ideal medium to experience Russell’s spectacular analog visuals.

The film opens with Hurt’s character Edward Jessup, a brilliant but haunted psychopathologist, floating in a steampunk-ish isolation chamber. Amid eerie aquatic gurgles, the shot tracks back to Jessup’s colleague Arthur, played with nerdy gusto by Bob Balaban. Arthur helps him out on these psychonautical sensory deprivation trips with bemused detachment. Jessup thinks they’re on to something, but struggles to explain what it might be. 

The research goes nowhere. Jessup falls in love with a doctoral student, Emily (Blair Brown). Life happens, kids, divorce. A decade later, Jessup ends up lost, sick of academia. He decides to cast off his middle-class doldrums to try tapping into the stardust once more. His increasingly obsessive quest leads him to Mexico, where he procures a psychedelic potion from the indigenous Hinchi tribe.

Network scribe Paddy Chayevsky wrote the source novel, basing the story on counterculture scientist John C. Lilly, inventor of the isolation tank. The writer and director reportedly didn’t get along. Chayevsky refused to allow a word of his dialogue to be altered, and Russell responded by directing the actors to mumble his least-favorite lines through mouthfuls of food. The resulting line readings are truly hilarious if you’re looking out for them.

Incredibly, this is Hurt’s first performance on film. The camera loves this man’s face. (And the rest of his bodacious bod-if you’ve seen his ’80s work, you know.) As he rants his primordial mythos amid the groovy pot-smoking milieu of late ’70s academia, we find ourselves hooked on whatever it is he’s looking for, even as his methods become more and more reckless.

The actors create a strikingly organic chemistry. Chayevsky surrounds Jessup with supporting characters of varying enthusiasm, from Arthur’s nerdy cheerleader to skeptical colleague Mason (a hysterical Charles Haid) to Emily, who just wants him to settle down and help raise the children. We become invested in them as friends, colleagues, lovers, confoundingly wrapped up in each others’ lives.

This firm foundation in reality allows Russell to blast off into his patented flights of visual pyro-jism without losing his footing. The hallucination scenes gain extraordinary power from being rooted in the world of scientific procedure, with clearly defined norms and ethical considerations. The layered optical effects and split-shock editing are among the most impressive visual effects ever produced, even more so considering they were achieved without digital tools. 

Nearly 45 years on, Altered States sparks synaptic connections rarely felt in big-budget movies. The Weird Wednesday crowd laughed with uncertainty at its operatic emotions and theatrical dialogue, only to be stunned by the first hallucination sequence, a hyperkinetic assault on par with the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nothing warms a cynical moviegoer’s heart than hearing hyped zoomers exclaim, “Why don’t they make movies that look like that anymore?”

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