Altered States (1980): Ken Russell’s primeval Hollywood trip

There’s a lovely extra on this Criterion 4K disc of Ken Russell’s Altered States. It sees the director appearing on a very leisurely chat show where the host is taken aback at how nice and softly-spoken the director of such notorious cinematic provocations as The Devils, Women in Love and The Lair of the White Worm is. Probably every director of extreme cinema gets similar reactions – well, except the ones who are dicks – but it seems particularly relevant to Altered States. Not only is this Ken Russell’s take on the Jekyll and Hyde myth, its production was marked out by furious behind-the-scenes disagreements that don’t really make their mark on the finished work at all.

Before we get to those, let’s take a moment to appreciate the immediate pleasures of Altered States. It is a special effects movie, albeit of a kind which simply could not exist today. Made at the beginning of the ’80s, a decade which saw movie stars ascend to new levels of behind-the-scenes influence and earning power, it stars a promising young theatre actor who’d never appeared in front of a camera before, William Hurt. (There’s another notable screen debut some way down the cast list – a pre-ET Drew Barrymore) It is a science fiction film, of sorts, a fantasy, of sorts, and a romance of an extremely odd kind. Its real genre, though, is the one accidentally invented by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke: the big-budget ‘head’ film. The visual effects sequences include visceral body-horror transformations by Dick Smith, but they also include plenty of psychedelic drug trips, frequently rendered in a similar blotchy, hyper-colourful style to Douglas Trumbull’s work on 2001 and The Tree of Life. Like those films, the ideas are meant to be as much of a focus of wonder as the imagery.

Which is probably what drove a wedge between Russell and his screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky. Chayefsky was then riding high after winning his third Oscar for Network, a rare drama film that achieved the level of quotability normally reserved for comedies. He had become a standard-bearer for the right of screenwriters to be seen as auteurs, and he was keen to be on set as often as possible in order to ensure Altered States stayed true to his vision. The strange thing is, as film historian Samm Deighan notes in her commentary track, the result isn’t that different to what Chayefsky wrote. The writer took his name off the finished film, but before it was made he wrote a novel, also titled Altered States, which allows us to see what an uncompromised, unadulterated Chayefsky version of this story would have looked like. And the answer, according to Deighan, is pretty close to what we got. This is where the clash between Russell and Chayefsky transcends mere Hollywood gossip and becomes a window into what fascinated that talk show host so much – the character of Ken Russell, and how it impacts on Altered States.

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Janet Maslin, in her 1980 New York Times review of the film, made a sharp observation: “The direction, without being mocking or campy, treats outlandish material so matter-of-factly that it often has a facetious ring. The screenplay, on the other hand, cries out to be taken seriously, as it addresses, with no particular sagacity, the death of God and the origins of man.” I would tend to agree that Russell’s direction is a better example of his work than Chayefsky’s screenplay is of his. I also think this is what disturbed Chayefsky so much: without changing much of the script, Russell had folded it into his ongoing exploration of destructive genius. Eddie Jessup, the character played by Hurt, is a scientist rather than a composer, sculptor or painter, but we can still see the outline of all those biopics and documentaries Russell made of great artists in his character arc. He is a genius who goes too far, becomes bestial, unpalatable to the people he loves.

As ever, Russell is capable of being disgusted by his hero’s excess while also venerating the insight and wonder it produces. Some people used to dismiss Russell as prurient for this kind of thing; these days, when you’re expected to pick a side between disavowing the art or excusing the excess, it comes across as a remarkably even-handed attitude. Had Russell not abstracted the science in Altered States, treating it almost as a performance piece, the film might have dated badly. Chayefsky’s inspiration for Jessup’s character was John C. Lilly, who became famous in the 1950s as the inventor of the isolation tank. He later became infamous for a series of absolutely bizarre experiments on dolphins, convinced that cracking human-dolphin communication would be the key to a hypothetical successful contact with aliens. He flooded his laboratory and filled it with dolphins, who he occasionally dosed with the LSD he was such an evangelist for. He also developed a belief in an entity called the Earth Control Coincidence Office, which he believed was an extraterrestrial intelligence that caused apparent coincidences on Earth.

It’s rare that you can describe a Ken Russell film as toning down its real-life inspiration, but there we go. According to Deighan, one of Chayefsky’s complaints was that Hurt appeared too eccentric from the outset, a criticism Stephen King also made of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in the same year. But he is nowhere near as weird as the real John C. Lilly. And the ironic thing is, Russell is actually very good at capturing what Chayefsky described as the “academic bohemia” of Lilly’s scene, the long tail of hippie culture living on in Reagan-era scientific institutions. Chayefsky felt Russell was sabotaging his dialogue by having characters talk over each other, or eat as they spoke, but it brings Russell’s first American studio picture surprisingly close to the naturalistic, discursive, documentary style of New Hollywood that Chayefsky had helped define. Ultimately, Altered States is a redemptive film – more redemptive than Russell normally manages in its final moments, and also redemptive in the sense that it triumphs over the difficulties of its production. It remains a singular oddity, becoming more distinctive and precious the further away we get from it. It’s primeval and wonderful.

It would have been nice to have something about the real John Lilly in the extras – Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens have just completed a documentary called John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office. Still, what we get is full of insight about the film, from Deighan’s fact-packed commentary track to the new interview with special effects designer Bran Ferran. There are also archive interviews including one with Hurt and the above-mentioned, delightful talk show appearance from the much-missed Russell. The greatest special feature is, ultimately, the 4K transfer, which will turn your HD television into a psychedelic portal into man’s primordial origins. Or something.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – ALTERED STATES