THE CURBSIDE CRITERION: ALTERED STATES

This is one that freaked me out as a kid, so I was glad to revisit it as an adult and put some demons to rest, so to speak. Speaking of demons: it didn’t put me on edge the way that, say, The Exorcist did, but it was still mind-bending to my adolescent mind when I first saw it on HBO in the early 80s, thanks to our neighbor who messed with the cable box and got both households free access to the channel.

Based on the novel of the same name by Paddy Chayefsky, who clashed with director Ken Russell and had his credit changed to his actual first and middle names, Sidney Aaron, Altered States tells the tale of psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt), who begins experimenting with sensory deprivation in a flotation tank.

He dabbles in the practice as a student at Columbia University, aided by his colleague Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban), before deciding to do full-fledged experiments over a decade later, while a tenured professor at Harvard. In the meantime, he has married Emily (Blair Brown) and fathered two daughters, only to find his marriage on the rocks.

Edward decides to throw himself into the work, visiting the Hinchi tribe in Mexico and learning about their sacred mushroom, which basically causes you to go on a gnarly trip, man. He returns home with a sample of a potion created with the mushroom and uses it in his subsequent sensory deprivation experiments.

The combination of the two really takes him over the edge, much to the alarm of his colleagues, Arthur and Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), and he begins to regress into a primitive state. But is he really undergoing the change physically as well as mentally? That’s the question that fuels the story through its second and third acts.

Altered States is very much a product of its era, when the last vestiges of the hippy movement led many people to wonder about the nature of consciousness in various ways. I imagine it’s still of interest to many people — it is to me — but I wouldn’t be surprised if kids these days laugh at such notions. After all, we’re now in a world where you really can talk to HAL-9000, with all that such a notion entails.

Criterion’s new 4K UltraHD + Blu-ray set marks the film’s debut in 4K, and it looks just as wonderful as you might imagine. If you could go back in time with a 4K setup and watch the film in the theater and then come home and watch this new 4K, my guess is you’d get a comparable experience during the second viewing. It won’t be exact, but anyone who says they can remember exactly how this movie looked in the theater in 1980 must also be drinking a magic mushroom potion.

This is my first time with Altered States on home video, but my understanding is that previous editions have been pretty bare bones when it comes to bonus features. To rectify that, Criterion has included four extras on this disc, along with their usual booklet, which contains a new essay by film critic Jessica Kiang.

First up is a new commentary with film historian Samm Deighan, which is one of those usual “film class on a disc” tracks that I always enjoy. She gives a thorough discussion of the movie, and if you said at one point “Hey, that’s John Laroquette!” don’t worry, she gives him and other actors in minor roles their due too. She mispronounces a couple names, which might set some people on the Internet off, but they need to calm down too.

Next is a new 26-minute interview with visual effects supervisor Bran Ferren, whose work on Altered States was his first Hollywood assignment. He does a great job of explaining how the film’s old-school special effects were created, which actually had a little assist from computers at the time.

Also found here are two archival pieces, the first a 26-minute 1980 episode of The Paul Ryan Show in which the host interviews Russell about not just this film but also his career up to that point. It’s a fun chat, and if you want to see an example of the Dark Ages of home video, check out the quality of the film clips used here.

Finally, we leap ahead to 2009 for a six-minute slice out of a conversation between Hurt and film scholar Annette Insdorf. I assume we only get this edited bit because it was the only part relevant to Altered States, but it would have been nice to get the full discussion, if that was possible. Hurt is certainly a great interviewee, like Russell.

The film’s trailer rounds out the platter.

– Brad Cook (@BradCWriter)

Criterion Collection; Altered States; Ken Russell