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In Ken Russell’s 1980 movie, “Altered States,” a young, smug Bill Hurt—pursuant to his ingestion of a murky brew of hallucinogens south of the border—enjoys a series of life-altering experiences. First of all, after a vigorous session of campground coitus (bless their hearts, the young, in the urgency of their rosy-cheeked lust, never seem to notice the grit and the sand flies), his lovely, honey-haired girlfriend, Emily, slowly morphs before his dilated pupils into an iguana! ("Whoa! Get back Mama!" thinks Bill.) A really big, meaty one with long, snakey tongue and fat, spiny tail. Luckily, no locals happened by, because rural Mexicans really appreciate a nice, plump, fresh iguana--which they call "pollo del desierto"--and in her current state, Emily, even after being skinned and cleaned, could easily have filled the tacos, chalupas and enchiladas of a large campesino family for several weeks to come.
Come morning, the mystery deepens as Emily vehemently denies turning into a 150-pound reptile.
Oddly intrigued by this initial hallucinatory event (if it was a hallucination), William buys up several plastic gallon jugs of the mystic liquor from the local sun-wrinkled shaman, and embarks upon a steady regimen of chemically-enhanced enquiries into his "true self" back home. Coincidentally or not (the film, and indeed my own personal history, implies a causal link), this parallels his own steady regression (evolution?) from a pedantic, self-important graduate student into a capering, meat-eating chimpanzee (or it could have been a bonobo). He eventually wakes up in the monkey enclosure of the local zoo with an antelope ear hanging out his mouth. Reasonably enough, once he's been bailed out, de-loused and had his teeth brushed, Mr. Hurt is now convinced he’s on the trail of something big, perhaps publishable along the lines of Carlos Castaneda, Shirley MacLaine or Mitch Albom. Emily, however, is starting to get petulant over what she calls his “childish shenanigans.”
So far, so good: to this critic, it all rang achingly true. But where most directors would now shift gears into a conventional Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore, "He says, she says" romantic comedy, Ken Russell bites down to perform a frightening dissection of the human psyche. Now comes the climactic series of scenes for which the movie is famous.
Disregarding Emily's growing peevishness, Mr. Hurt proceeds with his experiments. He also stops eating nutritious foods; neglects his household chores, personal hygiene and PhD dissertation; and leaves the toilet seat up after using the bathroom. Finally, under the influence of a mega-dose of mojo juice taken in a sensory deprivation tank (which looked a lot like an ordinary Maytag washing machine), Bill shockingly devolves into a large, electrified blob of protoplasm which plops out of the washing machine door to shriek and flop around the laundry room floor like the Pillsbury Dough Boy doing "Flashdance." In this last altered state, Mr. Hurt viscerally experiences the epiphany that the prime-mover permeating all biological life is not pure, bright-light, God’s-love, transcendental consciousness, as so many of us had hoped in our youth, but is instead nothing more than throbbing, hysterical, all-pervading terror.
Have you ever sat in a theatre where every throat opened in unison to wail "No!"? I mean, besides the sequence in "There's Something About Mary" in which Ben Stiller gets his "frank and beans" caught in his zipper?
Just so: the door swings opens on a scene of excruciating nightmarishness. Emily stands on the threshold, staring with revulsion at the flopping, electrified blob: Christ! How the hell did this get in the house? She pokes it tentatively with a mop; she stamps her feet. “Shoo! Get!” But when this powerful display of female ire engenders no response other than a higher tone of shrieking, it belatedly dawns on her that this writhing man-sized gob of protoplasm is nothing more than her own ever-more-exasperating sweetheart. Sigh. “Oh, for fuck's sake, Bill, what next?” After transferring the wet clothes into the dryer and stuffing a second load into the washer, Emily gathers the crackling, pulsating blob into her arms and through the healing power of a good woman’s love returns Bill to human form.
Bill clasps his darling fervently to his bosom and exclaims, "You saved me. You redeemed me from the pit...I don't want to frighten you, Emily, but what I'm trying to tell you is that moment of terror is a real and living horror, living and growing within me now..."
Wow, that does sound like bad boogie. A chastened Mr. Hurt flushes the last fruity half-gallon of daddy's bad medicine down the toilet, finishes his degree, finds a job in Defense and impregnates Blair with a baker's dozen of curly-tailed babies (drug damaged genes). The Reagan era begins. The End.
When I saw the movie almost twenty-five years ago, I thought, “Bummer, Billy boy, but we all have bad trips—I’ve had some doozies, oh boy, let me tell you—so stop whining and get back on the horse.” ("Horse" being a sophisticated reference to drugs among the cognoscenti.)
But as the decades passed and I continued to ponder the movie's lessons, it crossed my mind that a more realistic denouement might have had the Giant Gila Monster of Female Disgruntlement doing epic battle with the Quivering Blob of the Male Fear of Adulthood. (We could also squeeze in the Carnivorous Chimpanzee for a bestial three-way of socio-political metaphors. And let's add in a mysterious space obelisk for that eerie space-obelisk ambiance.) As the primordial struggle rages back and forth against the backdrop of spinning, shuddering, sloshing appliances (and the dark obelisk)—just picture, if you will, the thrashing of tails and crackling of electricity, the trumpeting of rage and squeals of fear—we let the credits roll, allowing each viewer to project that ending he or she finds most satisfying.
But since we have the time, let’s back up and analyze Mr. Hurt’s "revelations" one at a time.
First of all, as those of us blessed with long-term significant others know, one doesn’t need to chew peyote or datura root in order to experience the metamorphosis of girlfriend into iguana, though, admittedly, mind-twisting drugs can exacerbate an already uncomfortable state of affairs. Indeed, there are any number of situations and male behavior patterns that almost inevitably precipitate the same female transfiguration -- the third-world camping trip vacation when she wanted to go to Venice is actually one of the more common. For what it’s worth, with Jeannine, I’ve personally found that if I let her get up first in the morning—brush her teeth, shower, put on a little make-up and have her first cup of coffee--before I unglue my eyelids, and then confine my repartee to “Yes, dear, of course, dear, uh huh, mmmm, whatever you decide dear. Here's some more money, dear”—then the odds of her turning into a hissing reptile are significantly ameliorated.
Mr. Hurt’s second epiphany, the so-called Chimpanzee Identification Syndrome, is now classified by The West Coast Association of Psychologists as an authentic “self-knowledge event” for those of us males in sales, middle management, academia or politics.
And, of course, the fundamental reality of all-pervading terror typically becomes apparent to almost everyone today sometime between enrollment in kindergarden and graduation from junior high school. Don’t we all go round and round the Mulberry bush of life, gleeful and blithe as innocent toddlers of conspicuous consumption, until that inevitable moment when the rabid weasel of reality pops up and shows its toothy smile? Turning us into squealing blobs of protoplasm. This occurs even without substance abuse, though studies have now conclusively proven that certain drugs, TV shows and conceptual art pieces--especially when paired with minds of a certain fragility (mea culpa)--not only hasten the rude epiphany (of infinite fear as the essence of life) but enhance it with special effects of especially vivid, gore-drenched dreadfulness. Depending on your taste for such things, this may be considered a side effect, benefit or simply a risk worth taking.
(Fundamentalists and conservatives usually opt for a drug-free and more patriotic hate-faith-and-gun-based gore-drenched dreadfulness. I personally believe there's room for all kinds of horror within the family of man.)
But the core concept of "Altered States" is encapsulated in one brutally straightforward point: hasn't the thrill of "Knowing Thyself" -- of "Truth with a capital T" -- worn progressively thinner with the passing years? Some rocks are better left undisturbed and unturned. The crystalline trough of self-knowledge teems with amoebas and spirochetes. On the horizon line of the future...hairy, hungry Morlocks (capering around the space obelisk). And those of us who have have broached our forties and fifties must seriously consider making the switch from the intrinsically unpredictable “vision-quest” family of hallucinogenic drugs to a more era-appropriate cocktail of anesthetic, rose-tinted pharmaceuticals. Such as the fortunate blend of anxiolytics, antidepressants, penis-pumpers, laxatives, diet amphetamines and medical marijuana that I swallow, snort, smoke or inject each day at religiously specified times. All readily available from your online Canadian pharmacy. While this soothing milkshake of benevolent prescription chemicals doesn’t eradicate the panic, impotence and Republicanism that dominate the new millennium, I do find that it dampens them down to almost manageable proportions.
And that, my sweet chickabee, may be the most elusive, and appealing, altered state of them all.
"Medicines are nothing in themselves,
if not properly used,
but the very hands of the gods,
if employed with reason and prudence."
Herophilus
Henry E. Panky
Grab a Club, Dear Friend,
& Dance with Me Around the Mysterious Space Obelisk
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