Altered States: Visions and Divisions

Essays—

Oct 24, 2025

Fireworks crackle inside a cave. A snake tightens its coils around a man’s head. A couple in Edwardian dress eat ice cream against a backdrop of merry yellow flowers made sinister by their lush, inverse-perspective hugeness, while every instrument on the orchestral soundtrack goes on a berserker rampage in search of a tune. A slashed hand births stars. A blood-meridian sun sets. A lizard turns into a woman. Suddenly, though, the gorgeous, garish assault of image and sound gets slow, goes quiet. The woman, naked and basking, is observed by the man, lying not far away. He tucks an elbow under his head as sand blows in around them—perhaps the sands of time itself—and keeps blowing, collecting in billows and drifts against the two figures until soon they, too, are sand, briefly solid, briefly stone, before being eroded to weathered sphinxes, then less, their bodies just contours, then not even that, sad little hillocks of dust scudding away to nothing. If only Dr. Edward Jessup (William Hurt) were paying closer attention to his hard-won hallucinations, halfway up this Mexican mountain, halfway through this trippy tribal ritual, he might see that all he’ll ever learn on his fantastic voyages into the uncharted depths of the collective unconscious is contained here, in this scene playing out behind his dilated pupils, this atypically sincere little hymn to human transience within the phantasmagoric eternal. But then he wouldn’t continue his experiments. And we wouldn’t have the dippy, delirious Rube Goldberg machine that is Altered States.

Ken Russell’s 1980 film is gleefully baroque, as befits the sensibilities of its director, yet the story is simple, as dictated by the declarative, “mad as hell” impulses of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, of Network fame. Eddie Jessup is a respected psychopathologist who comes to believe that, by ingesting a powerful hallucinogen while in an isolation tank, he can access aspects of the human condition that have lain dormant since prehistory. Much to the consternation of his reluctant accomplices, scientists Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), he is proved correct, even at one point physically transforming into a simian protohuman (played by dancer Miguel Godreau in a grotesquely convincing full-body hair suit courtesy of makeup maven Dick Smith). But soon, the transformations and deformations are occurring unprompted, which is especially disturbing to Eddie’s wife, Emily (Blair Brown), a brilliant anthropologist who, despite keeping company with this cadre of geniuses, often seems like the only one in the room with a lick of sense.

Because as much as Altered States, through Jessup, searches for some singular, irreducible truth that will make all the chaos and suffering of existence meaningful, it is also about the sheer hubris of such an ambition, the grandiose—and here, very masculine—folly of it all. As directed by indefatigable enfant terrible Russell, who treats the gustier passages of Chayefsky’s screenplay with a giddy disdain that drove Chayefsky up the wall and off the project (and, some say, even hastened his death at fifty-eight, mere months after Altered States was released), the resultant movie walks a tightrope between pretentious self-seriousness and outrageous flippancy. It is hard to conceive of a film more dazzlingly, dizzyingly divided against itself—or one more appropriately so—than Altered States.

Perhaps it is oversimplistic to map out the movie’s split personality in terms of a battle between Chayefsky’s cerebralism and Russell’s corporeality, between the former’s smarts and the latter’s sensationalism. But it’s also fun, so let’s indulge and pit Russell, with his exuberantly intermittent relationship with good taste and his willingness to embrace camp as a legitimate mode of expression, against Chayefsky, the towering, blustering voice of a generation, born without a camp bone in his body. The project’s originator was Chayefsky; in 1975, with two screenwriting Oscars under his belt, for Marty (1955) and The Hospital (1971), and another in the offing for Network, he was a Hollywood unicorn: a powerful, bankable screenwriter in a position to be given—and of a temperament to fully exercise—an unusual degree of control over his projects. He imagined Altered States as something “epic, immense, never attempted before.” But also, in its critique of overreach by the scientific community, it would be of a piece with his prevailing fixation on institutions—the military, the medical establishment, the Hollywood star system, the TV industry—and their dehumanizing effects on the individual.

And so, a mooted King Kong sequel (which he was working on unseriously with his friends Bob Fosse and Herb Gardner, a trio self-dubbed Boredom, Whimsy, and Flash, and let’s just say neither Fosse nor Gardner was Boredom) became Chayefsky’s eighty-seven-page solo treatment for a new riff on Jekyll and Hyde by way of Frankenstein and the writings of the psychedelic pioneer Dr. John C. Lilly. Chayefsky’s track record and the box-office domination at the time of Steven Spielberg’s woo-woo sci-fi epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind meant he and producer Howard Gottfried could sell the script rights to his extravagantly abstract movie for nearly one million dollars. Chayefsky expanded the treatment into a novel—published in 1978 to minimal fanfare—then digested the novel into a screenplay, and first tapped Network’s Sidney Lumet to direct. But Lumet took another gig when a contract dispute remained unresolved. “If I had done it,” he said later, with regret, “perhaps none of the heartbreaking things that happened on that movie would have happened.” Chayefsky and Gottfried then settled on Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn, but after a few months he, too, was gone. “It was fine with me that Paddy had approval over the script and any changes,” said Penn, “but for him to veto what I was doing, or to intervene in areas where he wasn’t knowledgeable or even competent, was wrong. Set and camera angles, my ass . . .”

The list of potential replacements for Penn reads like a litany of late-seventies Hollywood legends, and it’s impossible to say how far most of those conversations went. Orson Welles, Fred Zinnemann, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Arthur Hiller, Sydney Pollack, and Nicolas Roeg are all name-checked in Chayefsky’s biography. He had lunch with Spielberg—the mind, if it weren’t a bit tired of boggling by now, might boggle anew at the thought of what Spielberg’s Altered States would have looked like, not least because for all his talent for wonder and feeling, Spielberg has never been much for the cinematic exploration of interior dreamworlds and fantasies. On some level, Chayefsky, whose most garlanded successes are memorable less for imagery than for speechifying and characterizations accomplished through dialogue, must have known that Altered States required a filmmaker who could go beyond the page, even though in practice it was his peculiar, self-inflicted torture to regard each word he wrote as unalterable scripture. Boredom, more than ever, needed Whimsy and Flash.

Enter Ken Russell, lousy with whimsy and flush with flash. Initially a director of offbeat British TV dramas and biopics, Russell had made his big-screen breakthrough with Women in Love in 1969, and then, with films such as The Devils (1971), Mahler (1974), and Tommy (1975), established his notoriety as a mercurial talent with a divisive current of perversity and transgression running through his work. At the end of the seventies, Russell was having his own monster-movie issues, experiencing the collapse of his Dracula project after the poor critical and commercial reception of his first Hollywood-backed film, Valentino (1977). For him, Gottfried’s call was a godsend, rendered only slightly less divine when he discovered he was apparently the twenty-seventh director approached. The lure of coming to Hollywood with a large-for-the-time fifteen-million-dollar budget that may as well have come paper-clipped to a note exhorting him to “just go nuts!” was powerful, but even then Russell had reservations. After meeting Chayefsky for the first time, he called his wife, worrying: “I can’t work with this man. He’s a complete egomaniac.” “Then you should get on just fine,” she replied tartly. Reader, they did not.

To understand the Russell-Chayefsky breach, you don’t have to look much further than the very opening shot, even before Richard Greenberg’s eternally cool title graphics slide onto the screen. Altered States begins with the view of an isolation tank described in the novel as “nothing more than a coffin-like bathtub made of plywood and lined with aluminum.” The screenplay echoes that image, also making explicit that the tank’s interior is very, very dark. And so Russell’s vision is a betrayal from the get-go: the tank he shoots is upright, steampunk-metal, and absurdly, illogically, yet undeniably picturesquely, lit from within. Jessup, in blackout goggles, can be seen though its porthole, his face speckled with electrodes, floating in a fishbowl like one of Pink Floyd’s lost souls—an appropriately prog-rock reference given the film’s music-video aesthetics and the skittering sounds and noodling atonal theatrics of John Corigliano’s superb, Oscar-nominated score.

Chayefsky hated the tank design, hated the poetic license of the lighting, and soon came to hate Russell with a vigor only mildly impaired by his own failing health. Weakened by a heart attack and fresh out of director vetoes, Chayefsky abruptly abdicated. He remained involved from a few thousand miles away but removed his name, crediting “Sidney Aaron” (his real first and middle names) instead. The contretemps was probably not helped by Russell’s irrepressible nose-thumbing. As he would recall, “Some of the things [Paddy] wanted were impossible to do, one being an object that was traveling through space and it was black, blacker than the blackest black . . . Well, I just looked at it and I threw it out, because it’s not possible to do. And instead I had a goat with six eyes.” (The goat, in fact, has seven eyes.)

“In hindsight, if I knew he was going to be such a putz, such a miserable son of a bitch, I would never have recommended him,” said Gottfried, later, of Russell. But for a miserable son of a bitch, Russell sure could inject joyous, rascally energy into his imagery, and alongside his masterpiece, The Devils, Altered States stands as a pulsating testament to an imagination so abundant it seems to overflow the visual plane to become an all-body sensory experience, dedicated to the out-of-body sensory experience.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness. Hurt, too, in his first feature performance, is astonishing, burbling through Chayefsky’s cinder-block dialogue at breakneck speed—a solution to its jargonistic incomprehensibility that becomes a character attribute, outlining a man whose mind moves faster than language and who endlessly transmits and never, ever listens. His Jessup is a fascinating contradiction combining garrulous mad-scientist zeal with the helpless solipsism of a newborn, who can make sense of the world only by seeing it, touching it, tearing off chunks of it and tasting it for himself.

And though her role is quieter, saner, Blair Brown is equally impressive as Emily, who, while her husband has been transcending reality, has herself been mired in it, solo parenting their two daughters (one played by Drew Barrymore in her first role) in Africa while also conducting breakthrough research on baboon behavior, yet retaining the bandwidth to love him. And, when the time comes, to rescue him from the abyss she warned him about back before they married: “You’d sell your soul to find the great truth. Well, human life doesn’t have great truths. We’re born in doubt, we spend our lives persuading ourselves that we’re alive, and one way we do that is we love each other.” Eddie’s response is to deflect with a comment about dimethyltryptamine.

A man who cannot believe what he has not experienced for himself may be a good definition of a scientist, but in another light it’s also the definition of a fool, one doomed by his own incredulity to waste precious swaths of his life proving what everyone else understands to be self-evident. “Leave mysteries to those equipped to deal with them” was Russell’s grumpy assessment of the film’s moral, which is pretty apt for a project that sends an all-star team on an odyssey to transcend all known boundaries of scientific possibility, only to have them come back clutching a message so trite it could be sponsored by Hallmark: in the end, it is all about love. It’s a conclusion that elicited hoots of derision, not entirely unmerited, from contemporary critics and that, forty-five years later, could be summed up as a variation on a popular meme: men will biologically regress to prehominid form and beyond to avoid saying “I love you.”

But that’s true only in the sense that Vertigo is the story of one man’s triumph over acrophobia, or Jaws of a dude taking a circuitous route to conquer his fear of the water. Altered States is about more than a guy getting around to commitment. It is also, with serious, dedicated lunacy, about getting high—and when you drop a tab it’s not to get somewhere but to go there, not for the destination but the trip. So drop the tab. Lick the toad. Swallow the pill. Huff the glue. And if you still don’t get it, try it again, only double the dose. In the visionary, divisionary world of Altered States, there are only those who exult in its voluptuous, vulgar, vibrant excesses and those who haven’t come up yet.

Altered States: Visions and Divisions

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