Altered States Alert
Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) is a psychophysiologist who in 1967 is probing his own altered states of consciousness in an isolation tank, first in New York and then at Harvard. His assistant, Arthur Rosenberg, wires him to EEG and EKG equipment and tape records his accounts of what he is seeing, feeling, and experiencing. His wife Emily, an anthropologist, and Dr. Parrish, a colleague, are concerned about Eddie’s obsessive desire to locate in his inner space-time “the first self” and ultimate truth.
Jessup travels to Mexico where he takes part in a sacred mushroom ceremony performed by primitive Indians. The drug intensifies his journey backwards into time. He returns to Harvard and uses the mushroom potion in conjunction with his tank experiments. He hallucinates into a primitive stage of human development. Jessup then brings his ape being into the present and goes on a rampage, killing a security guard and escaping to the zoo grounds in Boston. Realizing his sanity has snapped, Jessup reprograms his love for Emily and defuses his animal self.
Director Ken Russell, who is hooked on human encounters with fantasy and the surreal, has a field day with the visual and dramatic components of Altered States. Film buffs who have reveled in the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey are sure to go gaga over Jessup’s psychedelic trips in the movie. The visual effects by Bran Ferren linked with the discordant, eerie music of John Corigliano are wild and exotic kaleidoscopes of color, movement, and energy. They contain images of nature undergoing explosion, animals, monsters, and weird sexual and religious visions.
