Altered States: Nutshell 20th Century

I’ve taken the Ken Russell plunge. First, The Devils (1971), the writer-director’s valediction to Catholicism, to which he’d converted in the 50s, by way of a real-life story of possession and Richelieu-ian Machtpolitik in 17^th-century France. Then Altered States (1980), his cusp-of-the-80s tale of one man’s quest for truth. In this case, however, megalomania breeds not Ahab’s destruction but supra-Boomer self-realization.

On the other side of tech guru ayahuasca tourism and peyote churches run by Mormon conmen, this paean to the human spirit falls a bit flat. Our story follows Eddie Jessup (William Hurt), a research physician associated first with Columbia and then Harvard who meets and marries a beautiful young physical anthropologist, Emily (Blair Brown), who works on primates. Severed from his youthful Christian faith by his father’s death, Eddie obsesses over fundamental human experiences, especially visions. He opines that schizophrenia is not real but instead represents some access to the beyond. His way of researching limit experiences? Not Bataillean human sacrifice or Crowleyian sex magic, no. He suspends himself and his subjects in sensory-deprivation tanks for hours and hours at a time.

These experiments, however, do not go far enough. While at Harvard, he learns of tribes in central Mexico who stick to the old ways, notably by drinking a powerful, mushroom-based elixir to trip out and enter “the crack in the nothingness.” His journey with this herbal stew and the deprivation tank will eventually lead him to discover the missing link between man and monkey. You’ll have to suspend some of that ole disbelief to follow this one.

The basic process of realization is simple: religion wrong, spirituality wrong, evolutionary theory tinged with genetic pseudoscience correct. His final journey so fundamentally transforms him that, despite his troubled marriage to Emily, he chooses her in the end, affirming life and its value rather than any quest for an absolute. Nietzsche stands vindicated. The mystics have their jaws on the floor.

The issue here is not Russell’s conclusion per se. What struck me is how closely his film, based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, follows the trajectory of American religious seekers in the 20^th century. We move from the traditional, Christian religiosity of much of early 20^th-century Europe and America toward the psychedelic yearning of the spiritualists, Beats, hippies, and seekers to Steven Pinker and the whole cohort of contemporary tech gurus.

There is one critical difference: Eddie reaffirms his humanity rather than, like say Brian Johnson or Elon Musk, denying or attempting to transcend it. But how convincing is that reaffirmation after staring into the abyss? I leave that for the viewer to decide. For my part, the whiplash from primate cum nihilist to anthropophilos was just so, a Nietzschean dream rather than a justified reality. He sees horrors beyond comprehension and by sheer force of will finds his way out of the void and into the arms of monogamous love. Good luck.

For all my pickiness, I rush to add that this is a beautiful film. Russell’s abstract montages and harsh shadows over characters framed in their own isolation yield a film pleasant to the eye and engaging to watch. I’ll just come out and say it: it’s worth seeing.

But here I am in 2025, not 1980. And its predictions, pseudoscience and body horror aside, seem to have come true. Have they taught us to love?