ALTERED STATES Directed by Ken Russell; Screenplay by Sidney Aaron
This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It's an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit. The film changes tone, even form, with its hero's every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer's mind out through his eyes and ears. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States.
Eddie Jessup (William Hurt) is a professor at the Harvard Medical School. Years before, he had studied the nature of schizophrenia by immersing his subjects—and later himself—in a dark tank of warm water. Now, continuing his experiment under the apprehensive eyes of his wife Emily (Blair Brown) and his colleagues (Bob Balaban and Charles Haid), Eddie determines that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states. And that reality can be externalized." He imagines, or remembers, himself as primitive man; he becomes that lithe, voracious ape-human.
He views the birth of the world, of the soul; he enters into it, becomes it. Clearly, the experiments of this modern mad scientist have got out of hand —and too far into himself. Can he return? This is a question whose application here can be debated and debunked by those familiar with the work of Dr. John Lilly, the behavioral scientist whose use of tank therapy prefigured Eddie's. But most moviegoers will be enthralled by the fiction in this dazzling piece of science fiction.
Still, this is a love story? Yes: of man as the eternally curious child and woman as the maternal source and resource. It is also, implicitly, the story of Jesus and Mary. Eddie is consumed by the dream of transcendence, of return to the modern godhead of the self. He is off on a perilous trip down through the memory of the race, and his only connection to reality is the umbilical cord of his need and, finally, his love for Emily. He often curls naked into her side as if wounded, seeking succor, reliving the Pieta. Again and again, Eddie dies and is reborn; each time he finds the action frightening, and "supremely satisfying." At the end, the couple fuse and are redeemed through the power of love. Altered States opens in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day.
One expected some kind of combustion from the meeting of those sacred zanies, Paddy Chayefsky and Ken Russell, but one hardly dared hope it would be so splendid. Chayefsky had already veered from the nice-guy naturalism of Marty, onto the fast track of madhouse satire: