Previous Post HERE'S a recipe for fun: Start with a screenplay written by Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter of Network. Give it to Ken Russell, the director of The Devils and Tommy. Recruit a top-flight cast headlined by William Hurt, delivering the single-most out-of-his-skull performance of his entire career, and Blair Brown, back when she was at the absolute zenith of her white-hot thermonuclear goddesshood. Set Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky at each other's throats over how the material should be presented, which isn't at all difficult to do given that Ken Russell shares Garth Marenghi's view that all writers who use subtext are cowards, and demand that the actors emote and recite their lines with enough intensity to jumpstart a supernova. ??? PROFIT!!! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I GIVE YOU ... ALTERED STATES: Go ahead and watch the whole thing. All 102 minutes of it are up on YouTube. I'll wait. Ever since John Hefner treated me to The Ninth Configuration, I've wanted to return the favor with a similarly esoteric cinematic experience, and goddamn, but this is a great head-trip to share with the rest of the class. I probably shouldn't admit how strongly I identify with the character of Eddie Jessup in this movie. I've never harbored anything akin to his youthful religious convictions, but my lifelong obsession with unexplained phenomena stems from that same failed seeker impulse. As a little kid growing up in the '80s, I devoted YEARS of my youth to researching Bigfoot and UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster, because every time I paid attention to the "real" news, it was all about the arms race and the Ayatollah and AIDS and acid rain, and all I could think was, "There must be more to existence than just ... this." I also probably shouldn't admit that I've had relationships like Eddie and Emily's. Not in terms of Eddie's clinically detached treatment of their relationship itself — indeed, I tend to be overly demonstrative in such relationships, to the point that more than one girlfriend has told me, "Don't tell me you love me until you mean it" — but rather, in terms of Emily acting as Eddie's lifeline, straining to tether him to consensus reality. What sucks about relationships with failed seekers is that we often wind up putting the ones who love us through hell, but as much as we love you back, it's a constant struggle for us NOT to subject you to that bullshit, because it's in our nature as failed seekers to dive headlong into the abyss, in the compulsive hopes of finding we're-not-even-sure-what. In that sense, Blair Brown's character serves as a sort of existentialist equivalent to Mary Jane Watson, because she suffers to support her husband's Quixotic quest more than any woman should have to. Perhaps that's why the power-of-love ending to their story feels so real and earned, rather than hokey and clichéd, because they've both crossed profound cosmic boundaries just to be together again. This one's worth watching, folks. Yes, it's got some obvious nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but everyone from a-ha to South Park has been inspired in turn by its own ending: Share this one with someone you love enough that you'd be willing to go sane for them.

I couldn't get into it enough to watch the whole thing, but I watched some of the freakier bits. And they were pretty freaky. But I guess the audience was rewarded with a very fine nude backside of Ms. Brown at the end, and so that probably took the sting off of things for the less cerebral who saw this in a theater. She makes a convincing argument for staying flesh and blood.