Psychedelia, p.76
Psychedelia, page 76
A movie such as James Cameron's massively popular Avatar (2009) borders on fantasy, but manages to instill a strong human presence by making man both villain and hero. The aesthetics of its art direction are immersed in the psychedelic tradition, from the dazzling DMT glow of the night jungle during the first approach to the Na'vi tree village, to the frequent displays of loving bonds between the tribal people and their organic world. Unconcerned with artistic failures of the past, Avatar picks up and relaunches the 1970s' anti-military, anti-corporate, ecological hippie utopia, utilizing previously unseen visual resources to create an attractive package. Yet, for all its hallucinatory beauty and socio-cultural attraction, Avatar ultimately seems to flunk the Acid Test. It fails to transform the basic dualism of fantasy into the holistic synthesis of Psychedelia -- in fact it goes to some lengths to overstate this dualism for the purpose of involving the viewer, and in the process it loses its transcendental nature. While currently becoming the most viewed movie of all time, Avatar is likely to remain a work that psychedelicists will enjoy only via selected scenes, in which it captures a trip-like feeling better than almost any other movie before it.
Interestingly, Avatar's plot basically reverses director James Cameron semi-fiasco The Abyss (1989), in which benign aliens rescue a group of stranded humans from a catastrophe they've brought upon themselves. The Abyss, like Avatar, made use of startling psychedelic graphics and a hippie-flavored mood, but likewise failed to create a truly transporting quality. What these two noteworthy but ultimately problematic movies both lack, at least from a psychedelic perspective, is ambiguity. Ambiguity and ambivalence are fundamental characteristics of Psychedelia, the acceptance of which is a shibboleth to ascend the Platonist realms. The explicit dualisms and dichotomies of traditional Western story-telling fall flat within psychedelic culture; they come across as the marks of a crude, unenlightened mind. After the Jamesian revelation of multiple planes of consciousness, the potential for ambiguous cognition evolves as a natural bi-product.
At the time of its release, The Abyss was described by some as an imitation of Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, due to some notable parallels in the storylines. Like Cameron's movies, Close Encounters features some marvellous psychedelic scenes. A slightly surreal mood is established with the opening montage of bizarre incidents around the world, after which the mystique is condensed and inserted into the mundane reality of Richard Dreyfuss' protagonist. Perhaps the most profoundly psychedelic scene in the movie is where the local townspeople have gathered at night to watch the UFOs, a brilliantly staged and shot sequence which captures the charmed, awestruck mood of psychedelic neophytes in a more profound and original way than the Na'vi village approach in Avatar. Even with a brief touch of classic horror, Close Encounter manages to stay true to its acid hippie sentiments by refusing to collapse its cinematic world-view into a black and white dualism. The aliens and their intentions remain ambiguous until the last scene, as do the main characters who seem driven by irrational awe more than any conventional feeling. Close Encounters is a science fiction movie entirely devoid of fantasy genre elements, nor does it use its realism to present the dystopian nightmare of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or War Of The Worlds. The 'sense of wonder' that science fiction fans speak of is present throughout, and modern psychedelic cineasts should find it a most agreeable movie.
In line with this reasoning, it seems highly logical that the attempt to turn Frank Herbert's successful literature fantasy cycle Dune (1984) into a movie by a director (David Lynch) with a known penchant for psychedelic thinking, turned out to be less than successful. The troubled production history behind the movie is well-known, as is the fact that Lynch years later still insisted that the only problem with the movie lay in the final editing. While Dune novel fans have expressed respect for Lynch's efforts, most people seem to find faults with the movie that extend beyond anything salvageable at the cutting desk. In addition to the oddly cheap-looking special effects, an overriding problem is that Lynch's ability to create strange, psychedelic moods offer insufficient framing for a story populated by classic fantasy archetypes from the Joseph Campbell wardrobe. Watching Dune is a bizarre experience, as one is thrown from inspired scenes of surreal, ambiguous moods into poorly shot, 1950s-flavored alien battle sequences. The movie remains enjoyable because of its oddness, but contrary to Lynch's beliefs, the powerful fantasy backbone of Dune cannot be extracted from a movie whose most successful moments lie in its quirky margins. Fortunately, Dune turned out to be a mere bump in the road for Lynch, who would go on to make numerous movies loaded with the mundane surrealism and emotional complexity that psychedelicists admire.
After Hollywood's belated awakening to psychedelic aesthetics11, it wasn't long before the public was treated with the most explicitly hallucinogenic movie made so far: Altered States (1980). While other movies were informed by Psychedelia in certain aspects of form or content, Altered States made the psychedelic experience the central topic of the movie. Based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, who was so dissatisfied with the movie treatment that he removed his credit for the screen adaptation, its talky, intellectual style hardly made it a given for cinematic treatment. Such concerns may have been off-set by the expectation that a flamboyant and indeed psychedelic director as Ken Russell might pull it off. Few are likely to claim the result an unequivocal success, but with its thematic concern and hallucination sequences it is one of the mandatory movie experiences for the psychedelic among us, who are also likely to rate it in a somewhat differe nt manner from the regular citizen. Inspired by John Lilly's experiments with isolation tanks and psychedelic drugs chronicled in Lilly's Centre Of The Cyclone (1972), Chayefsky invokes a second topic of evolutionary biology not really dealt with by Lilly (though frequently discussed by acidheads like Leary et al), and comes up with a bizarre concept which needn't be detailed here. The drug references are numerous and even includes a scene involving DMT, yet there is a curious imprecision in the Mexican sojourn that otherwise forms the high-point of the movie. Just like the more recent Renegade, the hallucinogenic ritual presented is confused, blending elements of sacred mushroom and ayahuasca traditions that in actual fact have no cultural connotations. Irrespective of that, the visual trip sequence that follows is enjoyably psychedelic in its feel and look.
Somewhat like 2001, it appears that the studio didn't know what to make of Altered States, and rather than pushing it as a science fiction drug movie, much of the promotion focused on the love story between the two main characters. Supporting actor Bob Balaban also pushes the romantic, human interest aspect of the movie in a branch magazine interview from the time.12 The fear was apparently that the scientific themes would frighten away those not already put off by the drug themes. Concerns aside, word of mouth about the blatant drug use and the numerous bizarre scenes that Ken Russell predictably delivered made Altered States a much-discussed flavor of the month after its release, although the interest soon died out. Ten years later, it remained a cult title for drug aficionados only, none of whom claimed it to be particularly good'but it certainly was freaky. Scenes like William Hurt floating in a clear water-tank have become classic and was paid tribute to in a video by Beloved, one of the leading bands in England's acid house/indie dance scene.
There followed no major movies as thoroughly concerned with psychedelic drugs as Altered States, but throughout the 1980s a sub-current of hallucinogenic ideation informed a number of films made, primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm (1983) is forgotten today but combines inventive, trippy ideas with the brilliant special effects expected from his work on 2001 and Blade Runner. Joel Schumacher played around with some psychedelic visuals in his zeitgeist teenage vampire movie Lost Boys (1987), then explored the same field more thoroughly and consciously in Flatliners (1990), which featured a number of mostly frightening scenes clearly inspired by psychedelic aesthetics. A genuinely disturbing and thought- provoking movie was Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), which uses a convoluted narrative structure to present the effects of psychedelic warfare experiments in Vietnam. Highlighted by recurring creative, unpleasant visions, Jacob's Ladder contains many explicit references to LSD and the US military experiments with hallucinogens as reported in books like The Search For The Manchurian Candidate and Acid Dreams. Quite possibly the ultimate 'bad trip' movie, Jacob's Ladder is not recommended for psychedelic viewing, unlike most other films referenced here. A couple of interesting movies that pre-date the ethnobotanic infatuation of the '90s are John Boorman's The Emerald Forest (1985), a kidnapping drama featuring native use of DMT snuffs; and Wes Craven's intense The Serpent And The Rainbow (1988) inspired by Wade Davis' anthropological research to uncover the secret drug behind the 'living dead' phenomena on Haiti.
There are of course a vast number of movies with psychedelic references or sub-themes from the past few decades, and tallying these is of no particular interest; instead one can simply observe that after leaving its impression on creative minds in a string of generations, The Psychedelic Experience is a permanent addition to the art of movie-making, its present felt either as an immediate topic, as an inspiration for visual and aural effects, or as a model when trying to instill surreal atmospheres. The last aspect in particular should be of interest for the psychedelicist, who knows that the recreation of a trip situation is a much more complex and artistically challenging affair than simple optical affects like halos and trails. When David Lynch revolutionized the TV series format with Twin Peaks (1990-91) he also introduced a palette of emotions and moods that had only very rarely been captured before, especially on television. Underneath its arresting and entertaining small-town crime story, Twin Peaks is loaded with mysterious subtexts and references to both Psychedelia and the occult. Lynch's higher inspiration appears to come from a lifelong meditation practice, along with his obvious natural creativity, yet it's interesting to note the thinly veiled portrait of Terence McKenna in Russ Tamblyn's Dr Jacoby of Twin Peaks. Except for a couple of deliberate sidesteps, essentially any movie in Lynch's oeuvre can be considered psychedelic in mood and style, although not all of them pleasantly so.
Another independent and occasionally quite successful director with a certain psychedelic predilection is David Cronenberg. His most obvious contribution is the movie of William Burroughs' 'unfilmable' Naked Lunch (1991), and while its reception among both critics and fans was mixed, it is a vital experience. A thoroughly psychedelic Cronenberg effort which went by somewhat unnoticed was eXistenZ (1999), a multi-layered science fiction drama that combines several of the director's trademarks – body/machine interfaces, unpleasant graphic images, distortions of reality – with an eerie atmosphere that hits the almost-real zone vital for psychedelic appreciation with good precision. Like Jacob's Ladder this may not be a suitable title for higher-state viewing. Appearing like a jocular inversion of Cronenberg's freaky nihilism, former animator Terry Gilliam occasionally allowed his psychedelic sides to take control for part or even the full duration of his works. His most successful films The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys are also his most conventional, while the bizarre inventiveness familiar from his Monty Python cartoons provide memorable scenes and peculiar, psychedelic moods in Brazil (1985), Baron Von Münchausen (1988) and the lesser known and occasionally gruesome Tideland (2005). Parallel to Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Gilliam's take on Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998) becomes a specific interpretation of a book that many have different views of, yet psychedelicists will undoubtedly enjoy it, not least for including one of the most convincing LSD hallucinations committed to film, when a hotel carpet pattern comes to life.
While the 1990s were generally a good decade for mainstream movies, there was not much of progress in the field of psychedelic cinema. The huge psychedelic reawakening that occurred within the triangle of rave culture, cyber-punk and neo-shamanism left very little traces in contemporary movies, and in a sense it was like the late '60s all over again. Millions of young people were discovering Ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms and DMT and an instant dialogue with the contemporary music scene was initiated and constantly developed. With the occasional exception, such as The Beach (1999), mainstream movies and TV shows were concerned with entirely different topics, and it looked like yet another big wave of Psychedelia would go by without any significant marks on the cinema features of the period. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) was ostensibly psychedelic up to and including a peyote drug ritual, yet closer examination of its frantic pulse and cynical view of humanity reveals the aesthetics of cocaine rather than hallucinogens. A cokehead movie disguised as an acidhead movie, dazzlingly directed but spitefully nihilistic, Natural Born Killers looked like mainstream cinema's leading bid on the new psychedelic zeitgeist, inaccurate and unworthy as the connotation was.
But finally a movie arrived that summed up much of what was truly going on, and it was adjusted to its time in a much more deliberate way than when Kubrick saved the face of late '60s trip movies via 2001. The Matrix (1999) was an instant breakthrough, a broad assault of cinematic invention that never loses sight of its anti-authoritarian, humanistic, modern and indeed psychedelic message. For those who wish to, the opening minutes can foster an interpretation of the entire movie as a mescaline trip, via some appropriate pop culture pointers. Of course, the more blatant psychedelic metaphor that no viewer will miss is the choice between the red pill and the blue pill, where the former delivers an awakening to another reality than the one currently inhabited. The Jamesian revelation is at play again, but with a twist, as the red pill's alternate reality turns out to be more real than the baseline reality the protagonist is familiar with. This experience of seeing the world as it really is, is an observation in the psychedelic tradition that can be traced back to the ground zero of Albert Hofmann tripping in his Swiss garden. An ingenious twist of The Matrix was to combine the Jamesian revelation with the unmasking of a phony, corrupt society in a classic counterculture manner, although the factual reality behind The Matrix turns out to be even more artificial and unpleasant than what lysergicized hippies accused Western government states of being. In proper psychedelic fashion, after a death-rebirth experience the hero reaches a transcendental state that penetrates the artificial veil, and his perception of the revealed world is strikingly similar to the 'pure energy' impressions of a high-dose LSD trip.
Extending the analysis over the history of science fiction, one will find elements of both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 behind the sickening machine world of The Matrix, but the seamless internal logic of the script and the dazzling cinematography makes such references seem irrelevant during the actual watching of the movie. The vertiginous strength of its central dystopic vision, the sense of style and the shrewd integration of various contemporary trends ranging from computer games to rave culture, made The Matrix win its viewers over long before the finale, and for this reason it was also given credit for more originality than is actually there. Nevertheless, The Matrix rests upon a backbone derived from psychedelic counterculture in a way that hadn't really been seen in a major motion picture before. Appropriate to a release year of 1999, it is the natural conclusion to an exciting fin de siècle decade dominated by urban underground cultures, but even more significant may be its power as a prophetic rallying call for anti-authoritarian enclaves and psychedelic initiation rites, marking a beginning rather than an end, as it looks around the corner into the next millennium.
In view of its cult-like admiration and status as one of the highest grossing movies of all time, cynical young Westerners familiar with the mechanisms of political correctness came to expect an 'inevitable' backlash to the subversive themes of The Matrix, but the expected counter-reaction never gained much traction. Instead the early 2000s saw an accelerated propagation of digital underground cultures and the continued growth of new psychedelic generations, while the benign socio-political climate of the '90s hardened considerably. A few years past its premiere, the movie's radical message seemed more prophetic than ever, while its technical inventiveness and reality- testing themes inspired a number of successors, some (like Christopher Nolan's Inception from 2010) introduced even more radical ways to examine the impact of the Jamesian revelation. Alas, the subsequent instalments in the Matrix series itself managed to deflate and, in the atrocious third part, actually negate much of what the first movie had stood for, but this is a disease of the movie business with no bearings on Psychedelia.
4
The occurrence of a mutation or similar unprecedented change within an ecosystem is not, by itself, enough to permanently affect the course of its population. In order for the classic evolutionary pattern to play out, the mutation must be accompanied by a change in the habitat which favors the mutationary effects. In other words, the fact that a giraffe is born with an abnormally long neck would have no evolutionary impact unless there was also an emerging scarcity of low trees with edible leaves. This necessity of two converging factors is often overlooked when traditional theories of evolution are presented, yet it provides an intriguing model for the general dynamics of change. Applied on socio-cultural processes, as an example, the bi-causal paradigm uncovers parallels and divergences which may help understand the shifting ways that psychedelic drugs have been received by modern Western societies. The new drug, such as Dr Hofmann's LSD-25, represents a mutation which has been introduced into the socio-cultural organism, not just once but in several generations. Only when the environment is in a particular mode of change which favors The Psychedelic Experience will a Hofmann-type mutagen have any effect on the socio-cultural evolution; at other times, its existence will have essentially no impact.
