Altered States – The Journey – tape 564

Now here’s an interesting film. It’s Altered States, directed by Ken Russell, and it was a troubled production, as might be inferred from some of the credits.

The first, and biggest clue, is in the writing credits. “Written for the screen by Sidney Aaron, based on the novel Altered States by Paddy Chayefsky.’ Chayefsky himself was better known as a screenwriter, so you might wonder why he didn’t adapt his own novel. Well he did, but he had his name taken off the film because he so disliked the end result. Russell called the writer “Impossible to please”.

Another possible red flag is the credit “Associate Producer Stuart Baird”. Baird is more usually seen as a a film editor, and has been known to be called in to help rescue films which “aren’t working” so I wonder if his credit here is evidence of a studio attempt to help with the editing of the film. Wikipedia suggests so, listing Baird as the actual film editor.

This was star William Hurt’s first film, and he plays Dr Edward Jessup, a professor of psychology who becomes fascinated with sensory deprivation leading to altered states of consciousness. His hallucinations in the tank are the first big clue this movie is directed by Ken Russell.

He meets Blair Brown, another PhD, and they quickly marry, she because she’s madly in love, and he seemingly because he’s awkward with people and can’t think of a reason not to.

Cut to a few years later, they’ve got small children, but the marriage isn’t happy. She’s due to go to Africa for a year, and he’s going to Mexico to research psychoactive drugs, and they’re intending to separate.

In Mexico, Hurt participates in a ritual involving psychoactive mushrooms – cue another insane Ken Russell hallucination sequence. Hurt becomes convinced that the drugs, and the sensory deprivation, are the key to unlocking some kind of species memory going back to the beginning of the world. It’s a search for ultimate truth.

Charles Haid plays his skeptical colleague, horrified by the loopy notions Hurt is putting forward, but enough of a scientist to supervise the experiments. Bob Balaban is his rather more receptive colleague.

After one session, Hurt is pulled from the chamber with blood all over him, and unable to say anything more than grunts. X-rays show his throat has changed shape. As grumpy George Gaynes says when shown the X-Ray plate, “He’s a goddamn gorilla”

After a later experiment, he reverts to a primitive state and runs around the city.

Ultimately, the film ends with Hurt almost reverting to a blob of protoplasm, only being saved by the redemptive love of Blair Brown. As Hurt himself says, “The ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.” I can’t help wondering of the story was written by someone under the influence of mushrooms. A very serious film that ends up deeply silly.

After this, recording switches to The Journey, a documentary sequel to Fourteen Days n May about a British lawyer’s attempts to prevent an american man from being executed, attempts which proved futile as the man was executed.

The followup follows the lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, as he revisits the case, trying to find the actual perpetrator of the crime, and eventually finds the man most likely to have been the murderer, who, although he denies any involvement, appears (to Smith) to absolutely be the right man.

It’s everything that NPR’s recent podcast Serial wanted to be.

BBC Genome: BBC One – 14th September 1988 – 21:30

Following this, there’s an advert of the Radio Times, then the start of Sportsnight, with the olympic flame getting nearer to Seoul, borne aloft by Sportsnight’s own Archie Macpherson.

The tape stops shortly after this starts.

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