Spoiled pilgrim versus hippy girl

We meet Jamie at a Santiago house party. He looks like an unusually tall child but must be at least in his early 20s. The luggage under his eyes speaks to a penchant for partying that’s confirmed by his faux-cheerful complaints about the lack of good coke and weed in Chile. He seems to know a little Spanish but doesn’t much bother with it. He’s kinda cute, but also childish, arrogant and impatient. He brags an awful lot about stupid shit, keeps wedging his readings of The Doors of Perception into casual conversation, has a way of taking up more than his share of space and expects everyone to adhere to his timetable, even when he doesn’t. Jamie’s played by Michael Cera—perhaps it takes a Canadian to fully embody the Ugly American.

Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus and 2012 was churned out while Cera and Chilean writer/director Sebastián Silva (The Maid) were trying to complete their other recent collaboration, Magic Magic. It’s an enjoyable comedy with a strong sense of those very particular friendships that develop when you’re young and traveling, when eagerness to find companionship and lack of fluency in any shared language helps to forge otherwise unlikely alliances. It’s shot in an uninspired but functional style, like a well-lit home movie—the handheld camera mostly just points at whoever is talking. The scenery becomes quite lovely however once Jamie is taken by three Chilean brothers (Juan Andrés Silva, José Miguel Silva, Agustín Silva) to the coast. Along the way they search for San Pedro cacti from which to extract mescaline and find themselves picking up another errant American, a wildly flamboyant flake named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). Jamie actually invited Crystal to join in on their excursion when the two met at the aforementioned house party, but he forgot all about their encounter sometime between inviting hookers over to his place for supper and sleeping in. When Crystal turns up as planned Jamie keeps trying to ditch her, but the brothers, far more gentlemanly than Jamie, insist on letting her stay.

With those brothers relegated mostly to the background, alas, Crystal Fairy mainly focuses itself on the contrast between the damned Yankees: Jamie, the selfish if amusing and intermittently affable prick, and Crystal, the sort of cosmic traveler who blesses objects, claims past-life recognition, is ostentatiously down with nudism—at one point, after catching sight of her ample bush, Jamie dubs her Crystal Hairy—and, for all her attempts to impose New Agey rituals upon every situation, is just a very nice person. By the film’s end, which involves a rather forced moment of deeper sharing between our quintet of hallucinating campers, we’ll see that Jamie and Crystal really aren’t so different after all. The script is pretty undercooked, but the performances feel very lived in, the character types and their drug experiences resonate, and after a few early scenes that make it uncomfortably easy to mock Silva’s sole female character, the film finishes with a gesture of genuine empathy for all involved. Unimaginative, but not a bad trip. 

How science made a monkey out of Dr. Jessup

Did seeing Altered States (1980) on VHS help prompt my teenage enthusiasm for drug experimentation? I’m fairly sure that Aldous Huxley, Rimbaud, myriad musicians and the Beats probably beat it to the punch, but the film’s protagonist, played by William Hurt, certainly seemed to encapsulate precisely the sort of dazzled longing for chemical-induced transcendence that wooed by hungry young consciousness. Until he goes ape, at which point things get pretty silly. But that’s nearly two-thirds into the movie, and by then it already had me. I still retain enormous affection for Altered States and am happy for whatever excuse to revisit it. 

Hurt remains central to the movie’s appeal, his baby-blues and beatific arrogance. He introduced a new, liberal ideal of Aryan beauty, ambition and intelligence. He must have been pleased that for his big screen debut he would play an irresistible genius. Eddie Jessup is a whiz-kid professor spending all his spare time in a sensory deprivation tank, studiously chronicling his head-trips to his dutiful bearded lab buddy Bob Balaban. The movie starts with Jessup just floating there in the tank in silence, the embryonic hero-shaman. His next big entrance has him surrounded by warm white light in the threshold of a party full of pot-smoking academics halfway through the organ solo of ‘Light My Fire.’ He quickly corners, or rather kitchens, Emily (Blair Brown) the second-smartest-prettiest person in attendance; within hours he beds her, the sex accompanied by religious visions; post-coitally he confesses his psychic need, the childhood realization on his father’s deathbed that death is a harrowing void, so best to break on through to the other side while still kicking; within two months Emily’s proposing marriage to him.

Flash-forward to prestige gigs for both at Harvard, two kids and a martial crisis, and Jessup’s off to the arid Mexican north to hang with Indians and swallow some bubbling brown hallucinogenic concoction that looks like mole but seems meant to resemble ayahuasca. (Wrong hemisphere, but whatever.) The stamp of director Ken Russell, maestro of overstatement, is most clearly seen in the hallucination sequences, which are largely very literal-minded and corny, though there are startling moments, such the extended sequence in which Jessup and Emily lay still on a cave floor, in fetal and sphinx poses, respectively, while a sandstorm first engulfs them and then erodes their bodies down to dust. That bit is about as inspired as Altered States gets, but let us praise the movie for its likable supporting characters, such as Charles Haid's ornery, perpetually gasket-blowing doctor-assistant, and its remarkable fleetness, the way it gallops through exposition without stopping for breath.

The script and source novel were by Paddy Chayefsky, though he would withdraw his name from the finished product, for reasons one can guess at. I haven’t read Chayefsky’s book and thus can’t comment on Russell’s treatment of it, but could anyone, even, say, David Cronenberg, have convincingly realized the story’s final third, in which weird science makes a monkey out of Jessup? Taking more and more of the Mexican brew and spending more and more time in the deprivation tank, Jessup learns the hard way that regressive states of consciousness can be externalized. The movie becomes a little like Cat People (1942/82), with Jessup morphing into a hairy, aphasic version of Iggy Pop, going to the zoo, and slaughtering a goat before waking up naked, incarcerated and temporarily amnesiac. Eventually the movie remembers that it’s actually a love story, which is sort of endearing. Yes, yes, it’s mostly ridiculous, but I can still fantasize a version co-directed by Stanley Kubrick and Henry Jaglom, and I can still let myself fall under its audacious, strangely earnest spell. The movie's title being an instruction as much as a description, it helps, of course, to get totally loaded first.   

     

Hitting an optical nerve

As we descend deeper into the rabbit hole of our increasingly intimate relationship with screens, this crepuscular realm where more of our interaction with the world can be done in physical privacy, while privacy itself has become more public and interactive, a movie shot in Toronto 30 years ago, about a exploitation cable executive who dabbles in obscure pornography and winds up using a stomach vagina as a weapons storage device, has emerged as one of our seminal reference texts.

Videodrome (1983) is both prescient and personal. Along with The Fly (1986), it’s among the most idea-saturated and emblematic works from the singularly imaginative David Cronenberg. Yet it’s anything but ponderous; fleet and funny, perverse and propulsive, it’s a genre buffet: speculative fiction fused with horror fused with neo-noir, at times downright pulpy in its heavily underlined portent. Think of the moment where Nikki Brand (Blondie’s Deborah Harry) brands her breast with a burning cigarette, and Max Renn (James Woods), her lover and our anti-hero, repeats, “Don’t, Nikki, don’t,” as he reaches hungrily out to take a pull. 

If what transpires after the taboo TV image-induced hallucinations override Max’s mind and body resists breezy synopsis, the set-up is relatively straightforward. Weary of soft-core costume porn, Max, president of Civic TV, “the one you take to bed with you,” is looking for “something tough” to give his struggling network an edge. (An amusing bit of overstatement: Max uses the word “something” five times in one short speech to his fellow execs while a movie poster with the word “SOMETHING” in gooey letters hangs right behind his head.) Max finds that special something in a pirated signal showing fuzzy, chillingly unadorned scenes of torture and murder. The show’s called Videodrome. “It has a philosophy,” says one of its characters, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” Max catches a glimpse and wants more, but the makers of the broadcast seem to want not to be found. At least, not easily.

The signal’s sourced to Pittsburgh—home, incidentally, of George Romero and Night of the Living Dead (1968)—but it turns out access to Videodrome might be found right in Max’s backyard. He seeks out the enigmatic shut-in media philosopher Brian O’Blivion (a character explicitly inspired by Marshall McLuhan), who pontificates about the power of television exclusively from a television—even when O’Blivion appears on a talk show he only does so as a disembodied head on a television. Once Max makes (indirect) contact with O’Blivion, his mind and body begin to succumb to Videodrome’s more troubling, if exhilarating, effects. He discovers a subterranean criminal broadcasting conspiracy. He recognizes his body as a malleable shell and becomes an advocate/terrorist for something called “the New Flesh.” At one point he penetrates a bulging TV screen with his head. Later a guy explodes with pulsating tumours. There are also a lot of dancers in silver unitards and moustaches performing at an optician convention. Things get a little weird.

As influenced by William S. Burroughs as Naked Lunch (1991), Videodrome, whose many progeny includes the hypno-TV conspiracy of They Live (1988) and the killer videotape of The Ring (1998/2002), keeps gazing into the future even now, blurring fantasy and reality, questioning the role of the body in an increasingly digitally manipulated existence. So much the better that the film unfolds in what is so recognizably a Canadian city in the decidedly analogue 1980s, reminding us that its ideas are not indebted solely to Steve Jobs and YouTube. The New Flesh has been creeping up on us for a very long while.