By Matt Harries
(For the first part of Matt’s feature, click here.)
Onwards, to 1978, and LSD’s uneasy relationship with public perception continues with a pair of little known films that act as the unwanted flashbacks of the acid generation. In Blue Sunshine, the plot revolves around the premise that a group of individuals who took a particular brand of LSD back in the day (the titular Blue Sunshine) inexplicably and suddenly lose all their body hair, lapse into psychotic fugues, and embark on poorly choreographed ‘killing sprees’. The first of these murderous events implicates our hero Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), who spends the rest of the film running about ineffectually attempting to prove his innocence, somewhat aided by his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Sweeney).
There is an attempt to flesh this out with a flimsy ‘political thriller’ angle as Zipkin traces the original dealer of BS a few yards up the corridor of power, namely to budding congressman Edward Flemming (Mark Goddard) and his lumbering henchman (not to mention former BS devotee) Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young). The film then climaxes (comes down is more apt) with Zipkin, armed with a dart gun, stalking the now mainly bald Mulligan, who having earlier erupted into a hilarious sweaty rage caused by loud disco music, staggers like a cheap Karloff impersonator through the home-wares section of a shopping mall. In a manner wholly indicative of the lightweight nature of the film, it all ends with a few lines of portentous text which attempt to create a frisson of there being ‘unaccounted’ quantities of Blue Sunshine still at large…
The highlight of this lame but accidentally funny film is the performance of Zalman King as Jerry Zipkin. Tellingly, ‘Zippy’ gives a performance which is several microdots above anyone else for sheer bug-eyed, lapel grabbing lunacy, while his impressive mane gives the impression that he could break into alopecia totalis induced savagery at any point. The fact that he is completely sober adds unintentional humour to a weak but amusingly ridiculous film that is about as trippy as an episode of Murder She Wrote.
That same year saw the release of British horror Killer’s Moon. This low budget effort sees a bus load of school girls heading off to some kind of rural choir competition. Sure enough their bus breaks down and they are forced to walk into the depths of the cold night seeking shelter. As if their luck was not bad enough, there has also been a recent and highly embarrassing escape by a trio of killers from psychiatric confinement. Apparently this notorious bunch did not have to work hard for their escape, for despite their crimes they were in a very low level security facility. What is remarkable is that the treatment they were under was LSD based. This left them believing that they were not in the waking world but in fact dreaming, absolved from guilt, and literally free to carry out their murderous desires without consequence. Sure enough they happen upon the off-season hotel where our bus load of young lovelies is staying, and the blood soon starts to flow. Our terrible trio occasionally question the nature of their ‘dream’, and raise huge doubts over the efficacy of a course of treatment that had a decidedly 1960s quality to it in its rather permissive and drug based nature.
I Drink Your Blood, Blue Sunshine and Killer’s Moon are all pretty much low level schlock – films that are entertaining enough in a laughable kind of way, and pretty hard to take seriously. They share a number of similarities though – the left over bad vibes of the acid generation, reflected by the distinct connection made between LSD and the most hideous blood letting. Blue Sunshine seems to hint at the possibility of acid rearing its head in later life, perhaps a kind of paranoia over the potential of acid casualties, not just being the typical burnout type, but also anyone who took acid ‘back in the day’. Killer’s Moon casts grim aspersions upon the use of LSD in psychiatry, again reasoning that ‘freedom’ equates with some kind of unleashing of primal atavistic instincts. Acid had never been reduced to such low standing in cinema, cast out to cinema’s outer reaches, a vector for the unseemly excesses of a fallen generation. However that was all to change come 1980. Once again LSD was to find its place at the fulcrum of human evolutionary potential – with more terrifying implications than ever before.
To say that Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) is an LSD film would be perhaps be stretching the influence of that individual drug. In fact LSD is not actually taken during the film. Instead, entheogens, in particular Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric) and Ayahuasca, are the preferred psychedelics. However, despite not playing a starring role in the film, LSD can still be counted as a major influence, being of course one of the most widely used and intensely researched of the hallucinogenic drugs. Altered States is based upon Paddy Chayefsky’s book of the same name, which was itself based on the work of John C. Lilly, the American psychonaut whose research included extensive study of LSD and Ketamine. Bizarrely, he also gave LSD to dolphins as part of his research into larger-brained mammals. Another key area of his research involved the use of isolation tanks, and this combination of hallucinogenic drug and sensory deprivation forms the basis for Altered States. The lineage between Hoffman’s work and that of Lilly is clear, and it is within this historical framework that the film begins.
Doctor Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is a hugely driven and ambitious scientist who, in the spirit of Lilly, places himself at the centre of his experiments, floating in an old isolation tank as part of his sensory deprivation studies. His studies of schizophrenia convince him that madness may just be a different state of consciousness. Spurred on by his own hallucinatory experience, rich in religious allegory, Jessup clearly believes he is inching towards divine revelation. In order to facilitate even more powerful and revelatory experiences, Jessup turns to entheogens – substances used in a the shamanic rites of, in this case, a tribe indigenous to Mexico. Upon sampling the concoction cooked up by the tribe’s shaman, he experiences a series of bizarre and powerful visions. So, armed with a new fervour – and a good quantity of the sacred mushroom – he returns to the States, and the isolation tank.
Whereas in The Trip, Peter Fonda’s Paul experiences revelatory visions and religious allegories, they pertain in the most part to his own personal interior world. In Altered States, Jessup’s fascination with these inner perspectives extends only as far as they enable him to tap into something more profound, something as old as life on earth itself. “There are six billion years of memory in our minds”, he exclaims at one point. As he begins to experiment with the Mexican mushroom and the isolation tank, Jessup relays his experiences of travelling into mankind’s evolutionary past. Things go further than mere hallucinations though, Jessup seeming to devolve into a primordial state and undergo ever greater, more physically dangerous transformations that threaten to annul him from reality as we know it.
Altered States is in many ways an extraordinary piece of cinema. We witness brilliant minds churning forth dialogue at high speed; ideas and arguments and counter-arguments which we have barely the time to digest before they are gone. Swept up in this tide of scientific boundary-pushing, Jessup’s relationship with his fellow academic wunderkind Emily (Blair Brown) becomes so much “clatter and clutter” to him. Far from being grounded by his status as a father and husband, the concerns of his own life take on a secondary status to the extraordinary inner life witnessed during his experiments. These are represented with some of the most intense visuals ever seen on the big screen, representing a large hit of director Ken Russell’s twin obsessions of sex and religion, a heavy dose of apocalyptic intensity, and some truly out-there interpretations of pseudo-science. For the first time we are witnessing some of the potential of research begun almost forty years previously but once again, it is hard not to detect a cautionary element behind all the craziness. In selling his soul for the great truth, Dr Edward Jessup almost loses any vestige of his own humanity in the process.
We now arrive at the last film of this epic trip, and fittingly we have come full circle. Nearly 20 years after Altered States, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas was made. In attempting to adapt Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 book of the same name, bringing a tale of such mind-bending excess to the big screen would require an alchemical blend of talents to make it work. For this director Terry Gilliam of Monty Python eventually wound up as the director, while Johnny Depp produced one of the most memorable performances of his career as Thompson. Benicio Del Toro was equally impressive as Dr Gonzo, the name given to Thompson’s real life partner in crime Oscar Zeta Acosta. In the same way the cast was a propitious mix of talents, so was the drug supply as detailed by Thompson himself in the book;
“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”
So, like Altered States, this was not strictly speaking an LSD film. However, it takes more of a leading role this time, as Messrs Thompson and Gonzo take the concept of field-based research to a whole new level – indeed ‘Gonzo’ was the name of the kind of journalism that Thompson pioneered. Like John C. Lilly before him, he believed in placing himself – and LSD – at the very epicentre of his story. The story, if it can be called a story, follows the twosome as they embark on a drug fuelled rampage through Las Vegas, literally laying waste to two hotel rooms and the aforementioned supply of substances, ostensibly in the name of journalism, Thompson’s assignments being to cover a cross-desert motorcycle race, and later the National District Attorney’s conference on drugs. Of course, describing the action in this linear fashion only tells half the tale. The whole trip is literally that – a psychedelic journey deep into the conservative, booze-addled heart of the American Dream. Thompson’s purpose is not lofty, in the sense that Edward Jessup or Albert Hoffman had lofty ideals. Nor is it a cautionary tale, or not in the common sense. For although we see the pitfalls of almost indescribable excess, we also get the distinct impression the protagonists are often having a whale of a time. Certainly their experiences are deftly presented by Gilliam to show both the brain meltingly hallucinatory and yet the equally bizarre reality that is everyday life.
Unlike The Trip, with Fonda’s character an psychedelic neophyte, Thompson is a man with an appetite and capacity for drugs – as well as all the attendant carnage that ensues – well beyond that of the average person. There is though, a certain truth to be revealed by such excess, such pushing at the soft boundaries of reality. The ‘truth’ as such, espoused by Thompson, does in the end spell a kind of death knell for the dreams of the LSD generation, circa 1967;
“What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture. The desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
For Thompson the highest point of the so-called acid culture was a time of wonder, a time when it was enough to say you were there, that you were alive at that precise time – whatever it really meant. But LSD advocate that he was in some ways, the idea that anyone could spend a few dollars and find enlightenment was shown to be inherently false. For Altered States’ Dr Jessup, he too discovered that in the ultimate search for the self, there were no comforting absolute truths which to gain succour. The final truth he discovered is that there is no final truth. It is his wife Emily, who refers to the pain Jessup feels after experiencing his journey of anti-discovery;
“We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems…”
Who knows what Dr Albert Hoffman envisioned when he considered “who we were meant to be”. The cinematic journey undertaken by LSD, or the acid culture of the 60s that came to define it, is one which mirrors mankind’s own search for truth. A creator of pure fear; a tool of great insight and wonder; a guide on an out-of-body journey into our evolutionary past. Or perhaps, just a fine way to ‘freak out’. Courting both the scientist and the hippie, an object of both fear and wonder, LSD has inspired generations of film makers. Perhaps its greatest lesson is that for all that truth itself is transitory, it is the enduring human experience, in all its multifaceted glory, that is the only reality we need concern ourselves with.