Great Acid Movies #4: The TRIP (1967)

Boy meets boy meets pill meets Death!
In this case the one boy is Peter Fonda, disillusioned TV commercial director. The other by is Bruce Dern, the super creepy buddy with a house in the hills, who arranges Fonda's first play date, scoring tabs from Dennis Hopper (Fonda should have just hung out there!) and then heading back to Dern's place so Fonda can drop and Dern can hover over him and creep poor Fonda out. As Michael Weldon wrote "Would you trust Bruce Dern?"


The before and after scenes at dealer Dennis Hopper's psychedelic paint swirl house are amongst the pinnacle moments in psychedelic film. How lucky that generation was, being able to afford to lease beautiful old Victorian houses to lose their minds in. Fonda's bug-eyed, spot-on performance as the tripper has some great moments. Lucy's dad, Michael Blodgett is in it, though you can't see much of him (he's one of the lovers in the psychedelic love hallucination scene). Jack Nicholson did the script, and ain't no doubt he did his research!

In his big LSD peak moment, Fonda hallucinates his way into a plastic fantastic merry-go-round set, filled with the entire contents of what seems to be Corman's old prop room. There Fonda realizes he's guilty... guilty...of poisoning the well of myth with his bland imagery (he's director of TV commercials).

Fonda: 

Guilty... I'm guilty" 

Hopper: 

Yeah, but don't wallow in it, 

because it's weak and pathetic!

Susan Strasberg is only around in little bits here and there as the wife Fonda's about to divorce who still loves him; she's a maze of kittenish yearning and aching feminine sincerity in a pink raincoat; she makes you feel guilty and sad that you prefer LSD and painted go-go dancers to her simple charms. Anyone who ever broke a heart will feel Fonda's pangs and LSD really does amp up that feeling of you can't go home and you can't stay here, and you want to reach out, but hearts break every time you try to have anything at all.

And then there's all those hot zonked out love-vibing chicks. Far out! Free love central, but it's not free love in some sweaty Ratzo Rizzo/Herschell Gordon Lewis way; it's free love in a cool pretty Fonda hipster budding EASY RIDER way, with serious acting and a real sense of drugged interconnectivity, which was the style of the time.

That said, again it would have been better without Bruce Dern's creepy vibe as Fonda's guide, which Fonda would have been better off without. He gets so closeted creepy that Fonda--and we--begin to think he's trying to bust a "there's nothing gay about  two men touching" kind of DETAILS-ish move. He's all touchy and motherly and helicopter-parenting in a way that would creep out even an openly gay libertine with a thing for bad beards.

Once Fonda shakes Dern loose, well, things get better fast as a pretty boy like Fonda gets all the chicks if he can ever escape Dern's prison. There's a touching scene in which Fonda breaks into a stranger's house and helps a little girl get a glass of milk--and even the little girls dig him. He ends up in bed with one of the gals her met earlier at Hopper's pad, a BEACH PARTY-ariffic Sallii Sachse, who whisks Fonda away to her swanky pad to cap off a perfect evening with some fading light-show sex, all set, unbearably, to stock recording-ish New Orleans jazz.

Yeah the music is super lame, from the oddly named "American Music Band." They sound as if Corman fished their record out of the trash at a high school pep rally. It's the sort of thing Otto Preminger might put in SKIDOO. The absolute worst musical moment is that Dixieland jazz when Fonda's coming down, the kind of stuff Kevin Spacey might play to torture prisoners in THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS.

There's also some other lame stretches, silent footage which Dennis Hopper apparently shot on weekends out at Big Sur with Peter Fonda, a horse, and some props left over from THE RAVEN. They enact Fonda's trips of dying and being reborn in some haze of medieval costumery... it would be fine if the music was interesting, like Pink Floyd or "Dark Star" or something... but not roller rink organ and kazoos.

Peak:
Fonda hides in an all-night automated laundry and starts opening all the washers, as if he feels they need to breathe. He sees a woman (Barbara Mouris) in curlers, reading a magazine and waiting for her dryer to finish. She has been watching him and he starts slowly closing the lids in fear, like he's trying to hide the secrets inside from her prying eyes. And they start talking ("Let's, you know, really try and connect") but then Fonda sees a girl trapped in her dryer and tries to get her out, freaking out Barbara and sending him on the run again.

It's telling that Bruce Dern never actually took acid before or after this film, and in the talking head interviews that accompany THE TRIP on DVD he alone seems really out of it, kind of unfocused and cranky. One day cooler heads in medicine will discover just how important a good acid trip is for preventing Alzheimers and countless other maladies and problems. It's sad for Dern (he was a marathon runner at the time, and certainly seemed weird enough not to need it, in his defense) but perhaps apropo considering the futility of living for longevity as opposed to the brief sprint to the flaming finish line of lysergic glory, especially in the show business... and as John Lennon sang "all I can tell you is, it's all / show / biz."

See also my 2003 Popmatters review of the double feature with Psych-Out