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esteeb.art · @esteeb.art@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Altered States 6/10

<strong>LSC 11 Week 1: These Go to 11 Week<strong> It’s Letterboxd season again and I kinda wish I was starting with a better movie. The theme for the week was Maximalist Cinema which means, as far as I can tell, movies that ascribe to a “more is more” philosophy in terms of aesthetics or plot. Movies that go out of their way to assault the senses and have no chill, essentially. I was not familiar with the term aside from inferring that it was the opposite of “minimalism” because I’m a smart boy who kind of knows how words work. Nor was I familiar with the film <i>Altered States<i> or the work of its director, Ken Russel, other than hearing <i><a href="https://boxd.it/1inI">The Devils</a><i> was a pretty good movie. I’m not sure why I picked this one other than it was available to me, the point of this exercise is to watch stuff we wouldn’t otherwise and I blinked at the idea of watching something animated (not exactly outside of my comfort zone). Also I’m probably the only guy on Earth who would watch a movie specifically because it features William Hurt in the 80s, a tendency that has served me pretty well in the past. Not so much this time, though. <i>Altered States<i>, in brief, is about psychology professor Eddie Jessup (played by Hurt) who wants to break past the limits of human consciousness. His methodology largely involves isolation tanks in conjunction with hallucinogenic substances. He finds that the psychotropics available to a Boston white guy in the late 60s aren’t quite getting him where he needs to go. So he travels down Mexico way to commune with a tribe of indigenous people he hears have the real good shit, that “tap into genetic memory”, Assassins Creed type shit. The tribespeople are more than happy to have him take part in their rituals and Jessup does indeed have the trip to end all trips and smuggles a bit of the good shit with him back to Boston to see if he can make some more and use it in the isolation tank. He does this, much to the chagrin of his research partner, enabler and sidekick played by a bearded Bob Balaban, and then things start to get weird. There’s also a romance with Blair Brown in there somewhere. I want to start by saying the first 2/3rds of this movie is pretty cool. What we see is an intelligent, apparently very sexy and mysterious man of science struggling with the kind of questions that science wasn’t really designed to answer. You know, stuff like <em>“Why are any of us here?”<em> and <em>“Why did my dad die of cancer?”<em>, questions that, not coincidentally, are usually reserved for philosophy and, specifically, religion. There’s a real sense that this is a movie that is interested in examining a world that has abandoned the notion of God without figuring out what to replace him with. This push and pull of what science can teach us and what religion can help us understand and the often times frustrating shortcomings of both are precisely what Jessup is obsessed with, and we get to watch him slowly descend into madness trying to break into the space where the two spheres converge. Also notable that this movie was a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to deconstructing the concept of “genius”. It’s made clear pretty early on that Jessup is a brilliant but deeply disturbed guy, a veil we only ever get glimpses behind in his romance with his long suffering girlfriend and eventual wife, Emily (Blair Brown). The movie leaves it up to the viewer whether Jessup is a unique and special genius or just a scared boy who refuses to go to therapy. All this heady, philosophical work is the under girding for the movies’ other feather in it’s cap: the psychedelics. Jessups trips are wild, with lots of nasty green screen video collages and obtuse religious symbology. The connective tissue of the movie feels tense and uneasy, understated even, just for it to explode into a cacophony of bright colors and oppressive arrhythmic scores. And even when the movie veers into, as I’ll get into in a second, ridiculous territory it’s easy to appreciate the amount of care put into making this movie absolutely insane. All of this is carried by strong cast with, mostly, good writing to work with with the exception of Blair Brown who gets stuck playing the kind of girlfriend/wife you usually only see in rock biopics. She does her best with the material but it’s hard to latch onto a character who only seems to be able to be the emotional sounding board for the male protagonist. <strong>Spoilers for the end of a 45 year old movie after this.<strong> When people tell you storytelling devices that they hate, one that is pretty high up on the list is “it was all a dream/inside someone’s mind”. I’m not one of those people but I get it. It makes what you just watched feel pointless somehow if it isn’t handled correctly and, to be clear, it is not handled correctly very often. A close but much more tolerated cousin to this is the “unreliable narrator” mode of storytelling. It keeps the audience on their toes looking for clues as to what “really happened” once the cat is out of the bag and rewards multiple viewings. I only bring this up because there’s a third and, in my opinion, more annoying member of the family. That is where you are lead to believe that you are in one of the first two devices but, as it turns out, it’s all real! Literally <i>Twilight Zone<i> stuff and I’ve only ever seen it work outside of that show like...twice. When it doesn’t work it’s like the post monster reveal problem times ten. Altered States is this third thing. I have never been more pissed off to find that everything in a movie was real in my life. There’s no more mystery, no more looking for symbolism or deeper meaning. Just a tedious slog through the literal. All that philosophizing and teasing about the meaning of life and religion and trauma and truth? Gone. Instead we get the third act of a much much dumber movie where the only question we are examining is <em>“What if<em> 2001: A Space Odyssey <em>was a guy?”<em> veering wildly into a bonehead creature feature where William Hurt literally turns into a caveman and a star baby or whatever just to be redeemed by the power of love in an ending so abrupt it felt more like the whole movie rage quitting itself. The visuals are cool and Bob Balaban fireman carries William Hurt which is something that I wouldn’t have thought possible if I didn’t see it myself, so it’s got that going for it. I don’t really know if finding out it was all in Jessup’s mind or something would have been better, it probably wouldn’t have because that trope is trite for a reason. But what I think is most egregious and intolerable trope of all is an ultimately stupid movie posturing at being profound.

#lsc11 #lsc11 week1 #movie

Published 2025-09-09 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere