Laurentiis of Drug-rabia: DUNE (Great Acid Cinema #43)

Caught the last half of DUNE on Showtime after a groovy nap and it was good enough I had to watch the first part "on demand." I hadn't seen it since freshmen year of college when it was on the Student Union marquee, back when if you wanted to see a movie and were living in the dorm, you had to go to the auditorium in HB Crause Hall and pay $2, and it was on the big screen and projected from a 16mm or 35mm print and blah blah man we were so much cooler then. I had just gotten high on hash before going in, back when hash was hard to find as a freshman and blah blah, and man, I really loved it, really vibed with old DUNE. Couldn't figure out why it had drawn so much critical flak back in its troubled history and initial theatrical run. Maybe in order to love its self-important complexly-incoherent trippiness you had to be a trippy self-important innocent yourself. Either way, it blew my mind --not that I was secure enough to admit it (in 1985, as in now, it's not 'cool' to love DUNE). 

But this second time, 32 years older, no longer afraid of what cool older kids might think of me for liking DUNE, and not fully awake from that nap even now, I'm man enough to confess that watching a strapping young Kyle McLachlan, in a form-fitting, dusty and dusky ribbed dark black suit, riding atop a giant sand worm (a real one, not CGI) as the thunder cracks, the sand churns, hearing--like it's been buried under their surface of Arrakis all this time-- an electric guitar from composing band Toto crackling through the hitherto uncharacteristically guitar-less orchestration like the blazing ray of sun of a Pacific NW springtime- well it blew my half-asleep cool adult mind. 

Directed by David Lynch  + produced by Dino de Laurentiis = a match made in heaven, not just for BLUE VELVET. Snooty critics and Herbert purists wouldn't believe that at the time, though. Today, decades of cheap CGI have made--in hindsight--even the most unconvincing miniature work of the 60s-80s seem endearing and wondrous. Yeah, I may be half-asleep even now - (the dreamer must awaken...but later) but that's the best state to approach surrealism in. Movies that suck to a straight/awake mind sometimes make beautiful poetic sense to the one who is nodding off in his movie chair. See a film by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin a few times and you will agree - in the right hands, an unbearable snoozer of amateurish banality becomes a wonderful dream once its sludgy non-pacing has lulled you unconscious. See a David Lynch movie in the theater and even the projector light above your head, or the stickiness of the floor, becomes as weirdly surreal as what's onscreen. It's not about figuring out what the film "means" it's about letting go of meaning entirely, so that the immediacy of the entire experience manifests and reality as you know it widens in a spasm, the way an acupuncture needle in the right place can cause a tight muscle to spring loose and cause your epidermal cells to ripple on the opposite pole of your meridian.

Consider the weirdness of DUNE: we open on a bald sister psychic asked by the "emperor" to psychically eavesdrop on the thoughts of a 'navigator' (a Metaluna-headed giant slug swimming in a big brown fish tank) escorted by a flock of austere leprous monks with cracked-egg brains--who file into a wildly psychedelic golden throne room carrying a Grand Central concourse entrance-cum- 30s diner train car betwixt them--then the windows open and the navigator swims out of the murk up against the glass to address the emperor via a translator device that looks like a 20s radio microphone (see top image).

Knowing nothing about the books to prepare you, to be thrown into this scenario from the first scene is a sink or swim moment that causes most viewers to fall right to the bottom and never be seen again. But if you can imagine being, say, Bill Burroughs, high on heroin and hashish, hiding out from 'the Man' in a crumbling Art Deco theater in mid-town Manhattan, watching a 40s Warner Brothers costume drama, i.e. the kind with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I receiving ambassadors of the evil Spanish Inquisition, then suddenly DUNE becomes its own kind of awesome. You can practically hear old Bill's voice imagining the ambassadors as uptight narco squad slugs; suddenly this old familiar very straight-edge costume drama becomes more alien than an old stack of Weird Tales pulps. In its total otherness, DUNE might even be a film actually made on another planet, one where the burnished dusky Art Deco Grand Central concourse oyster bar Illuminati 1939 Worlds' Fair Dali fever dream decor never went out of style, just matured along a separate tributary from the sci-fi we know. Even (or especially) if from certain angles you can see all the gold fixtures (right down to the gleaming highlights) are painted backdrop, slowly peeling in spots under the glare of the kliegs, this shit's truly psychedelic. Lynch + Laurentiis = batshit crazy

The guitar of Toto made me think of another pic produced by Dino de that rocked a most bodacious rock score, FLASH GORDON (1980). One of the most brazenly cockediddly-dude insanely unforgettable rock and roll soundtracks in history, by the Queen, enables a similar mythic arc to DUNE's. There too, an off-world 'deliverer' come to a strange planet to unite and free the oppressed people from an evil galactic emperor. Though it didn't have a rock score, Dino's 1982 CONAN did have an almost Erich Korngoldenly pervasive and bombastic De Falla's La Bruja interpretation. And instead of an evil dictator and a deposed rightful ruler/messiah, it had a fisher king permutation asking for help from a thuggish mercenary against a kind of combination Charlie Manson / pied piper snake god. Dino de Laurentiis did ORCA too, which had a swooping vocalizing Ennio score that gave the whole thing a swooning sense of epic tragedy, letting us know in advance that the monster, the shark, was going to be Richard Harris, not the whale. Dino! I feel your guiding hand, it's holding an electric guitar!

Now in 2017, aired on Showtime in tandem with Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, the true psychedelic yield of DUNE comes forth, like a giant newt with the cranium of a Metalunan mutant and googly eyes of a giant monster squid. Acting as a kind of intergalactic MTA, folding space through their swimming in gaseous clouds of the psychedelic spice, they blow from their icky Burroughsian orifices big plasma balls at images of planets and in doing so dissolve the space betwixt them, a kind of butterfly wing / tsunami / Dustin Hoffman folding a blanket thing. And they expect to have their fog of spice fresh and churning for their troubles. The film doesn't get much help trying to decipher all that, even with Virginia Madsen's coyly apologetic voiceover. You do get some weird-ass sights, giant worms, morgue extras who can't keep their toe-tags still and a five year-old Alicia Witt dancing with a curved knife like a pint-sized Kali.

PSYCHEDELICS = SPACE TRAVEL

DUNE offers a universe free of trite morality - so a 'concubine' or 'consort' can still be a nun, and choose her children's gender through sheer will, and they're not bastards but heirs to the throne. And trying big doses of spice while on Arrakis leads you to bond with far-off elements of the planet and prolong life -- not feel paranoid your mom will find out at dinner and send you to rehab, or that the cops will pull you over. In short, it's an actual 'sane' future, the sort envisioned in 60s psychedelic mysticism and via practices like remote viewing. The internal voiceover aspect (we hear people's thoughts) doesn't bother me because for 1) theres so much telepathy going on and 2) Shakespeare adaptations by Olivier and Welles, both do it. And 3) The use of sound waves and voice as a weapon serves to rearrange how we think of language in speaking. People do not blather in DUNE. Spoken words carry heavy import, so inner monologues become a whole second tier.

And even stronger than 'the spice' there's a liquid made from the bile of the worms of Arrakis, "the water of life" equivalent to, in a sense, eating the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle-- times a million--all the preparations and anticipation of danger making a fine parallel with smoking, say, DMT or 50x Salvia Divinorum. Unlike our civilization's own dismissive attitude towards drugs and psychic powers, in DUNE they are a long-recognized part of reality; drugs are not treated with disrespect and fear, and psychonauts are valued for their shamanic contribution to the good of their houses. Is this part of the reason the film was so initially panned in the US, its year of release being during a peak of "just say no" ant-drug hysteria? What about, too, how it shows women in positions of power, as good fighters who need not be babied and protected from the world but who can control minds with their mastery of the "weirding way"?

It's all too common, alas, to find irrational critical vitriol heaped on any film that offers a positive view of drugs and strong women. The knee-jerk reaction towards any film that condones psychedelics and matriarchies is that it must be panned, banned and put in its 'proper' ash can. STAR MAIDENS and ALL THAT GLITTERS are not even on DVD! The latter hasn't even been on tape or shown... anywhere! Free the matriarchal structured sci-fi from uptight fanboy damnation! 

Luckily DUNE, being a 'David Lynch Film,' endures. So though we have a straight white male hero Christ figure, his mother, Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis - left) is a badass who's taught her son the bulk of his fighting and telepathic skills. He can kill with a single cutting word, how matriarchal is that?! As a super-human genius of the Bene Jesserit sisterhood, his mom is a figure unique in western literature and film. Only Jet Li's mother in the FONG SAI YUK compares in cool capability. And just having an array of holy sisters in positions of power and authority (a fully matriarchal lineage within the DUNE universe, covering both sides of the clash - there's a reverend mother within even the Fremen) makes the film worth seeing. One of Lynch's great strengths is his comfort around a large cast of female characters whose roles transcend gender norms while still retaining their sex appeal. 

PSYCHONAUTS OF THE GOLDEN CRESCENT

Time has been kind to DUNE politically as well. In 1984 all it reminded us of was LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but today--after 9/11--it seems most prescient. The character's weird names all carry a Muslim root and the word 'jihad' is even used. We should remember that Lawrence of Arabia was working for the British, and was plenty mad when they betrayed all his promises to the Saudis, but could do nothing about it. He came home and sulked. Osama bin Laden on the other hand, went all the way, like Kurtz; a rich son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, he chose to live deep in caves with desert nomads and fight the First World super powers (first Russia, then 'us') through sabotage and terrorism, very much like a certain Paul Atreiades. Not that this itself redeems either Osama or DUNE - but it shows the way creative vision always comes from somewhere, be it the Akashic records or the Golden Crescent opium trade. A nicely paranoid post (by 'OsamabinladenreadDune) in the Fortean Times notes the worms resemble the jets used to ram the towers and the year of the big change in the story is 10191, i.e. 09/11. Whoa, bro.

Silver Strain - The Jihad of Muad'Dib

I don't think DUNE inspired actual terrorism, but at least one fish of my Pisces brain believes in the Akashic records, which Frank Herbert surely accessed. So while Lynch's film may not be perfect, it is 'connected' to a divine source - and if you doubt it. Read the book, or go to the alternate realms of consciousness yourself, and thou shalt know.

LYNCH's ICK FACTOR

Alas, to my mind the main issue with DUNE today isn't the condensed fragmentary confusion of the narrative (that explains itself after the third viewing) nor the STRANGE INTERLUDE-ish inner monologues, but the ick factor with the lengthy torture and sadism and gluttonous evil laughing scenes with Baron Harkonen "the floating fat man" - and his family and toadies in their ugly world - the towers of which resemble skyscrapers done up in pre-code two-strip color Warner Bros. horror film pinks and jades, and light from within a giant front porch bug zapper.  I loathe their kinky blue-black outfits, and am not tickled by with the fat ugly brother (son?) and evil overacting bloated father, and wild-eyed Sting, like a Malcolm McDowell Caligula, stepping out of the steam bath in nothing but his metal jock strap, letting his relatives float around him in a delirious incestuous homosexual spice-fueled mad lust, a lust finally sated only by pulling out the nipple plugs on some little red haired boy. Lynch tends to have these dark disturbing scenes, which Todd McGowan would call the fantasmatic underside to the mundane collective real, but there is no mundane 'real' in DUNE, so it's just too much overacting and pussy buboes. And too much garish red hair. It's clear these Harkonens are supposed to be the hated Irish. 

The Italian fascination with red hair goes back to the giallos of the 70s, of course, and here it seems to reach a kind of incestual-ancestral zenith from which it can never return, especially after the grotesque scene with a distressed mouse sewed to the back of a cat, or something (I fast forward past it and don't look - being traumatized by it back at the HB Crouse Hall), nor do I like seen people eating strips of meat cut from a trussed up dead cow, or cleaning out the open sores and leprous acne from Harkonen's drug-ravaged pan, all for no other real purpose except to provoke disgust and loathing, for reels on end. We can connect these stretches to the house where Frank has stashed the son and husband of Dorothy Vallens in BLUE VELVET, or One-Eyed Jacks in TWIN PEAKS or some other den of hyper-intense debauchery (the red stains on the mouths of one people in league with the Harkonens reminds one of--naturally--gluttonous winos). Lynch's absurdist relish for the grotesque horrors of the fantasmatic tend to get bogged down in the depths of bad, sludgy fake laughing and wile lighting, but here it's even worse, as Baron eats his beautiful boys, or drinks them, and then gloats and laughs in a point of rich hysteria, thus lumping homosexuality in as just another disgust-generating depravity.

That said, one must admire the insane commitment of Kenneth McMillan as the evil baron (though I won't show a pic of him here, as he's too gross) who plays his scenes as if he's been peaking on a massive dose of cocaine for ten years straight. Floating around like the kid full of blueberries in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, he and his party milking and crushing and otherwise destroying an array of (actual or puppet) living creatures in an orgy of odious gluttony, his only real competition in unadulterated odium is perhaps Albert Cole in THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT. I'll always support evil laughing fits and a chance for Sting to make with his crazy eyes but even in the 80s, sooner or later even the sickest freak watching this shit goes "Okay, David, we get it - these red-headed creepy Harkonen are the bad guys. Can we move on to the pretty people now?" On the big screen, a little repulsiveness goes a long way, and one almost senses Lynch expressing his frustration at Dino's meddling by upping the quotient. If he can't inspire us and move our souls to alternate realities, he can at least leave a slightly traumatic and grotesque imprint.

But this can be solved, this Harkonen vileness circumvented as if through magic:

Scroll! Scroll through past the unpleasantries. 

Their bit of the plot is followed easy enough this way -

 and to scroll past the horrors is to know true peace.

Have you On-Demand or the DVD?

Scroll through, Moad Dib, 

Scroll the Harkonens into Oblivion!

I scroll until Paul and his mother are being taken out to the desert to die by two of the Harkonen's men, that's when it becomes awesome; watching Paul's mother seduce one of the guards into cutting her bonds and stabbing the pilot via her use of a deep throaty voice (the 'weirding way') makes all the forwarding worthwhile.

WOMEN and FREMEN

Everett McGill always seemed kind of useless as the sad sack forlorn lover of Peggy Lipton in TWIN PEAKS, but here in DUNE with his deep voice and solemn-but-not-dour manner, he brings great mythic depth to the ornate and no-frills mythic dialogue of Silgur, leader of the Fremen. Most people couldn't get across stilted, strange lines like "Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even Gawd has never seen!" But McGill makes them work flawlessly. The ever-wooden Sean Young-as Paul's Freman lover-- smolders too, with lines like "Tell me of your homeworld, Usul." It's as if she's learned nothing in all her other post-BLADE RUNNER roles about the craft of acting. But like it did in BLADERUNNER, once her hair is down it stays down; undoing her tight hair makes her come alive with a breathy carnal intimacy that sucks the viewer right up against her. Young delivers confessions of love and experesses concern over Paul's taking the water of life (No man has ever survived it, only women, which in itself is badass. Sorry boys, this shit will kill you.)  And here in the misty dust of the Fremen's underground universe, Francesca Anna's dark eye make-up, hair all loose and half tucked into her tunic, is gorgeous and haunting.

Sean Young's luminous presence, and the cool desert suits, bring the art direction in the Fremen scenes to a dusky earthen hue from which deep blue eyes blaze most becomingly; for the next barrage - and some of the dosed montages seem to be forced to repeat imagery, the idea of the sister being born prematurely while Paul's mom is taking the 'water of life' and tripping her brains out, and thus sister becoming a wild telepathic super killer, is divine. And getting high on all this spice has made Kyle McLachlan so much hotter. Maybe the light is just more flattering on this world, but as he grows, as the 'the sleeper awakens' - the baby fat of earlier scenes is gone, replaced by angular leaner jawline. A star is hatching from its egg right before us. He really is the Ashach Backhalcharacn, or whateverthefach.

In other words, dear friends, check it out on demand and see if it's better the second time. If you've never seen it, I'd say go right to the second time and never worry about following the plot. If you can't manage that, well, just relish in the fact that--simply put--there's no jokes or smiles or anachronistic winks at the audience in DUNE, yet it's never sanctimonious or plodding. You can't argue with a messiah who sends his five year-old sister alone into the imperial spaceship on a mission to slice up an evil baron. These things go a long way. So long in fact, you may not appreciate them for 33 years. But now Alicia Witt is older and hot. Kyle is an institutio, and the worm turns through the guts of time's beggar king, conquering all, even endless shots of stunt men being blown up as they run along the sand at night, over and over, and over.

THE WILD (Analog) WORLDS OF DINO DE

from top: Flash, Dune (x2), Conan (x2) Flash Gordon, Barbarella (x5), Diabolik

And it's real crime is that in all this while, we've never seen another film where to celebrate victory a child dances in slow motion waving a curved blood-soaked dagger as exultant electric guitar chords twanging her victory. Lynch may not know how to play well with others, and may have let himself be too casually destroyed by lack of final cut, but after all- if not for Dino and DUNE there'd be no BLUE VELVET]. And without that, would there even be a TWIN PEAKS? Without Dino, would there be such a rich CONAN, such Masonic high-weirdness in FLASH?

The great Sean Kelly shared a bit of observation with me about Dino de Laurentiis, noting he spends so lavishly on sets and costumes he runs out of money half-way through production, so what starts out as grand and mind-boggling beauty on lavish sets ends up as unconvincing miniatures and third rate effects, wires showing, mismatched backgrounds, etc. You can see it, for example, in the way everyone drips sweat under all those furs in what's supposed to be the arctic at the climax of ORCA, or the way closer looks at the emperor's golden throne room reveal so much of the ornate gold finishing are actually 2 dimensional clapboard paintings that start to peel and buckle halfway through the scene.

That might have seemed like a problem at the time, but in the age of CGI, the acoustic tactile effect of real shit in real time forgives a whole mess of problems. We can always sigh and moan and wonder 'what if' Jodorowsky's version was made, but hey- his films aren't perfect either. His work is like a sledgehammer to reality-- he reaches in and pulls the guts out of the screaming virgin of the real, yet even as he boggles the mind, he can cause eye rolls with his sense of the puerile and shock-for-shock's sake. This Lynch-Laurentiis-Herbert version might not be perfect, but it rocks. It might be incoherent at times, but it's beautiful. In its unique look and courageous bizarro conviction, it stands alone in a sea of shiite; its only neighbors on its giant hill crest, CONAN, FLASH, and maybe BARBARELLA. 

What do they have in common? Dino de Laurentiis, whose gorgeous slightly megalomaniacal bliss comes from the ability to act like the entire bloody history of oppression, of Catholicism and the War on Drugs, never happened. Ruling in a world free of burdensome petty 'proper' morality, he offers something fantasy cinema can find nowhere else: real resonant full-bodied Old Testament Nietzschean moxy. In Laurentiis land, women do their own killing and are fine with it; drugs can exert their effect on consciousness right out in public; the worm is eaten; the tiles glisten with serpentine splendor; and the electric guitars break through the clouds, illuminating at --long last--something. 

Whatever it is, however much it cost, however cheap it looks, doesn't matter. It is the Ketlalblachmannicanch! 

Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

As the age of Pisces ends, and June munches through its seed pod servings, and apocalypse-- according to nearly every ancient culture--approaches, now more than ever we must ask: Are we going to go out in style, like Slim Pickens riding his H-Bomb stallion. or like that old married couple who can't stop fighting about which way to turn even as their car goes roaring off a cliff? Pick Pickens, America, and then buckle up for these awesome flashback-inducing documentaries that explore the area where psychedelia, psychopharmacology, quantum entanglement, God and literature all mix.

I've rated them at the end of each description for saliva-thickening aspects, i.e. that aftershock, pre-trip flashback tingle when your mouth feels electric and your saliva slows to an aching crawl and your teeth start to clench, your pupils dilate and the hairs on your neck rise. That flashback saliva thing is sometimes annoying, it brings a lot of emotional baggage (remembering the lost highs and peaks in a deep, painful imprint way it took me decades to get over) which is why I sometimes avoid these sorts of films, even though they are the very foundation of this blog's raison d'etre! 

Today, for example, being back at work, I feel hungover and sad, just from the flashbacks induced by this first film:

Magic Trip

(2011) Dir. Alison Ellwood
***

In 1964, three years before the summer of love, an era when, as Jimi Hendrix lamented, there was only surf music on the radio, Ken Kesey, famous for his acclaimed Cuckoo's Nest, went on a magic bus trip with an orange juice bottle spiked with LSD, a group of friends and lovers, and speed freak Neal Cassady at the wheel. Did beauty and truth ensue? Perhaps later, but in the beginning their magic bus looks more like it's embarking on one of those early 1960s surfer journeys, as in The Endless Summer, with everyone's all buzz-cut and folkie and wearing big unflattering red and blue striped shirts. He comes across mythic in Kerouac stories but in person, beat relic Neal Cassady seems to be like just some twisted methed-up townie ("he would never shut up" someone notes) and the bus keeps breaking down, and there's endless goofing instead of fixing, and the usual sexism, so the smarter girls, get out at the first train station and head back to their 9-5 jobs. Smart move, ladies! I've often wished I could do that when our band tours would start out badly, but if you do bail, then you're left out of the myth, presuming there is a myth, but how would you know back at the pupae stage? It takes years and you never know who amongst the horde of idiots gibbering in the back is going to turn out to to be the Thomas Wolfe or Kerouac or whomever will immortalize you in decades to come. Anyway, pass that damn orange juice!

Yes, the good acid is finally dispensed at an Arizona watering hole, the color 16mm film is loosed from its can and finally myth takes wing. Highlights include: epiphanies at Yellowstone because of a sign that says "Beware of the Bear" ("it used to be about being aware of the bear, but now it's just beware," Kesey laments); nervous "We're the only white people here" moments at a colored beach in Louisiana; a cold welcome at the Ivy League estate of Tim Leary (office-mate Albert-about-to-be-Ram-Dass is nicer, thankfully); a world's fair that imagines America as an all-white Jetsons tail-fin miracle that's already outdated by the time the pranksters pull in; the growing disenchantment with speed freak Cassady and his friend, the morose drunkard Jack Kerouac (Allen Ginsberg comes off as nicer, thankfully), and so forth. Kesey explains that the drugs were "part of our American personality -- you try go down deeper in the ocean and higher in the sky - these drugs were opening us up to new landscapes." No shit, Sherlock!

I guess you had to be there, and twisted yourself. But that's the deal --you need to be twisted to appreciate the beauty of the Magic Trip, but you'll never be as twisted, apparently, as they were. Because--as they so clearly like to think--they broke the mold. They were doing it to discover America, and then America did it to emulate them, and now we all want to glom onto their speedy Zen kicks because we read Dharma Bums and it moved our assemblage point and opened our third eye. But dig, man, our eye will never be as open as theirs (they think). They took it as far as anyone could, so now you better sober up and just read Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That's the sour note being struck here, because--after a trumped-up pot bust got him jailed--Kesey cut a deal to renounce the acid. He was bid play his pipe and lead the rats out of town. He decreed this all had been a test, "the acid test" and he and his pranksters 'graduated' and the hordes of thrill-seekers and runaway dirtbags that descended on the Haight like a plague of locusts did not, the test was over, they failed because they were absent during test time. And now the allotted times is over. Turn in your pencils and go home, o errant wanderers, go back to your parent's Christian basements.

Zane Passes!

But is it really that simple? I'd vote we need to start recognizing the historical importance of today's dirty hedonists as legends in progress! Instead of putting Kesey's magic bus into a museum let's teach the kids to paint their own and go easing down the road. Why should the rantings of Kesey and company be gospel and the rantings of today be 'just' ranting? When Kesey notes "this wasn't literature anymore, this had jumped off the pages... and onto the streets," we can snicker at his cliche'd idealism and believe it at the same time, because the truth often comes caked in soapy crap. "Something is happening that is so new," Kesey says about the establishment's knee-jerk demonization, "they're scared beyond any power of reasoning." Asked whether he regretted taking acid for that Stanhope experiment that started it all, Kesey notes, "I think it's a good experience, every time you see more." Hey man, it's your trip.

Saliva thickening: 6.666

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

2012 -****

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohm! In case you were born in some insane dimension where all the keys to chemically-enhanced enlightenment have been made into felonies for no real sane logical reason you should know Dr. Rick actually got legal clearance to do DMT studies by the big Health Overlords. He recruited dozens of subjects and gave them massive doses of DMT in a safe space, and then recorded their impressions once they cam back to reality. The results? Mind-blowing but inconclusive, raising more questions than offering answers. Luckily this documentary helps us realize the only answer to whether hallucinations are real or vice versa is that real itself is a meaningless phrase. If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists suggest--it is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's experiments that he now feels a little guilty. Is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah or an apex predator Albert Hoffman? Other heads talking include Daniel Pinchbeck and the 'other' McKenna...Dennis, and there's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscope eyefuls.

Joe Rogan narrates, in black and white to give the illusion you're watching this in fourth grade science class, which you should be. I donated money to help get this film finished!

Saliva thickening content: 10

2012: Mayan Prophecy 

and the Shift of the Ages

 2009 - ***

Dude! I remember this as being good, but man they do show a lot of the same stock footage of natural disasters over and over again, especially some shots of a fire bravely eating away the side of a building. I dig the use of the Terence McKenna timewave study, though, and the idea that 'inner time travel' will one day be the new back, if you get my weird meaning. Because it's made in 2009, they're a little more confident in their doomsaying than some of the more recent Mayan docs, and even so they realize that the future lies within, not without. It may take light years to get to the next galaxy but that's only if you need to lug your body. If you can go with just your mind it takes less than no time at all. In fact, time itself reverses so you get there before you left!

Salvia thickening content - 3.9

Robert Thurman - Buddhism.

2-Part Series - ***1/2

There's big arguments between trippers and 'hardcore' Buddhists about which path is 'correct' -with hardcore Buddhists insisting that drug epiphanies, meditation 'shortcuts,' don't 'count.' But to me that's absurd. Even if, as they say, LSD is the helicopter ride to the roof of the mountain (i.e. we get to look but can't stay long enough to legally change our address), so what? In our ADD age, no one wants to waste their time meditating if it's not going to pay off. So let them go see the mountain and be sure there actually is a destination to work towards. That's what happened with Ram Dass, after all, and his documentary, Fierce Grace, is also on Netflix, if you want to go in that direction. And there's a Wavy Gravy documentary too if you want to go in the other.  I'm still at the crossroads, hanging by my left foot.

Because ultimately if we dabble in psychedelics in search of the truth, and that truth leads us to an ashram, but then we don't go in because we don't want to join a cult and the cult doesn't think we came there honestly anyway, then were we ever really truth-seekers or were we just bored and young and psychedelics and meditation offered a way out of our depression in the time before SSRIs? And are the cult members really humbler than thou or just pissed they didn't dare use your quicker method to get to the same place? And if we shun the ashram with its commitments and robes and many-armed deities, might we instead become addicted to the sound of helicopters, always hoping this next ride up to the top of mountain will be the one where we can get out and stay, skipping in the process all the chapters about self-discipline and humility?

It's the clinging to the skids of expectation, dragging our Apocalypse Now heads through the palm trees, it's the tired feeling when you see your 300th punter waving a glow stick and saying under his breath "OmanI'mtrippin'sohard" and you feel like you're still wading in a sea of melted kindergarten crayons while ever-younger kids ask you for doses. Better to just jump out the window and hope you fly, like Superman. That's what all the hysteric anti-drug crusaders think LSD makes you do anyway...

No worries about any of that, though, or enduring any dogma, grandiosity, judgment or incoherence when listening to Uma Thurman's dad, the great Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. You would think an old white guy, with a glass eye and a gorgeous movie star daughter, speaking for an hour and a half via a two camera set-up wouldn't be so riveting, but his tongue speaks much wisdom, and since it's sheathed in scholarly wit and humble perspective it goes down smooth as the pangs of truths you feel you forgot rather than never knew. And if you still don't think Buddhism is trippy, just realize that before she married Thurman, Uma's mom was married to... that's right.... Timothy Leary. Tibetan Book of the Dead, thou art connected!

 Through powers of pronoia I've traced the whole Uma lineage back to benevolent Nordic alien ancestors who helped manipulate our DNA so that there could be gorgeous blonde Swedes, who helped the original Buddha clean the land of reptilian demons so modern day humans could get a toehold, and who then opened up the still-developing human mind with the most potent of angelic wand taps, the doctor's delivery room spank of wisdom. I you dare to believe it! Let the music leaf off the page and finally become aware... of the bear.

Saliva thickening - 11.2

'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
  (Read more)

"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012! 

Die like an Eagle: ENTER THE VOID (2009)

ENTER THE VOID is the first drug movie of the 22nd century, so far ahead of its time it's behind it. Centuries from now humans will look at it and laugh: how little we knew of the afterlife, of the fourth through ninth dimensions! Gaspar Noé's warper is the first receding light in the void of what we don't yet know about death. A little over two hours, it's five hours too long. It renders all pornography obsolete, dicing and slicing at fear and desire until nothing is left and everything is revealed. I imagine this film in a room with the films of Americans of similar ballsy-mindedness, like Vincent Gallo, David Lynch, Larry Clark, and Darren Aronofsky--all of whom have a similar push me-pull you thing going with drugged-out sex workers and heartbeat/rapid breath-synched sound walls--and I imagine them all getting jealous and competitive like it's James Dean on planetarium day.  If they were all playing chicken, only Gaspar would have the guts to sail off the cliff.. laughing all the way. Whose car are you going to ride along in, even if it is kind of battered and has those fuzzy day-glo dice? Sometimes day-glo is enough, and guts all over the windshield, and roller coasters, MILFs, MDMA, DMT, GHB, music box Bach, urns, car crashes... No, no, Noé, you had me at goodbye!

The term 'liberation' means different things to different nations, and people, but in every sense of the word there's something liberating about the traumatizing violence in VOID (I'm glad to say there's no brutal rape scene--at least in the cut I saw--so sensitive poetic males like me and the mentally challenged janitor at the end of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN can rest easy). That's not to say there's no trauma, but it's a productive kind- the kind you feel at the bottom of a K-hole, or after a day of dry-heaving through the bottom of a four week bender, a feeling it can't get no lower, a feeling you've reached your AA bottom and will be telling of this day for anniversary meetings in the years to come and even though no seaweed mermaid mom taxi will come to take you away down the comode pipes it hardly matters, since absolutely nothing worse can happen to you. It's the blacksmith on the Pequod showing off his epidermis: "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar." Now you're free of scorching! It's what enables MARATHON MAN to throw a fortune in diamonds at Laurence Olivier. Away, away, into the selfsame sewer sea. And it's Ahab, beckoning you follow those diamonds down. Now that you're free, Tokyo.

Aronofsky reaches for the scars, the diamond-tossing in the heart monitor undertow of THE WRESTLER and the eye-rape editing of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and the collapsing tent of Marion Crane identity in THE BLACK SWAN, but he's still too American not to flinch or sync his key lights. If he could let all that go, America might finally have as much sex and vacation as France. Instead we get a hungry ghost monkey on our back screeching "show us your tits" at random intervals, chasing all our opportunities away. The fraternité thing enables the French to embrace the surrender, the weening, the realization that chasing your little death down the red light district alleyway, or racing through the airport to give a proper goodbye kiss to your departing Aniston, isn't going to postpone facing the Black Swan demon in the mirror.

The French get the joke, because they know the sting of occupation.  America has not yet admitted complete defeat, while France has done the 12 steps, from Vichy to la Resistance. In World War Two France forked over its lunch money rather than getting its beautiful hair sullied in the pissoir and so they saved Paris from being bombed. Americans fought and died for French freedom, from afar, and read Sartre. "We were never freer than under German occupation," wrote Sartre. He was right. America has never been occupied, so it can only get jealous, cocky, dopey, demonizing, and deny that Sartre's brand of Leopold jackboot Sacher Masoch freedom is worth a damn. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, that's step one of AA. America's still down to party, why, you got a bottle? We don't have a prollem! YOU godda prollem!

I imagine America staggering like a slow-witted kid trying to find his way out of a candy store, and clearly so does Noé -- otherwise why was it so important the lead characters in ENTER THE VOID be Americans?  And why Tokyo, a land who got its ass kicked in the war, worse than any other, and so learned a few things about not going into the militaristic jingo light blindly just because its pretty like a mushroom (psilocybe, cloud, or shitake --it's all the same in the end).  The Japanese are a people fond of flash and Tokyo under Noé's floating spirit camera becomes a land of pulsing red light district fornications, abortions, drugs, and ratty little snitches who should go kill themselves and do us all a favor. On a double bill with LOST IN TRANSLATION, the meaning of being Bill Murray becomes clear. He's the closest thing our current cinema has to a Bogart, staring into the void of death with a wry smile.

When things actually die though, the French notice. When you surrender, lose your lunch, and lick the boot nice... and clean... then you feel the pain, because you are involved in mankind. You know the bell tolls for thee. You're not afraid to meet the eyes of babes. You can dance if you want to... even leave your friends behind, and use the pole without being stoned as a slut by your peers.

stripper, hold the 's'

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), our dead free-floating POV in the film is not only a dumb American, but a flatliner, a depressed monotonal zombie hipster. Oscar's stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is, however, terribly cute, though she seemed blurry and far away in the film, a condition understandable in the wake of a terrible car crash that took away their parents at a very young age, but inexcusable in the post-modern wake-up world of ecstasy-addled po-mo Nippon. My question then, is this: what kind of dead parents are Oscar's that they don't come get their son at the pearly gates station when he floats down/up? This film may take place in Tokyo but it's the most searing indictment of American small town hypocrisy since DOGVILLE. Even beyond the grave, parents are self-serving deadbeats.

I knew VOID was something I had to see and review here, but I was dreading Noé's intensity, his glee in exploiting brutality. But no artist better understands that the moviegoer's gaze is itself a ghost in the narrative, longing to permeate the silver screen and be re/born into the simulacrum via its favorite movie starlet's womb. Aren't we, when dead or watching horror films, forced to watch helplessly as our future mother or some girl we don't know is killed or sexually mistreated and all we can do is beat on the glass screen door and scream? But though VOID is drenched in fuzzy sex, I found it more sad than sleazy, like both sexes were just biding their time, exploiting each other--enslaved to the sparkling dollar store bardo like UGETSU or EYES WIDE SHUT. Oscar's sister can handle herself fairly well in the trade; it's Oscar's POV that has the issues. Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the copulations and floating into light bulbs like Hitchcock's camera might if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO; we never know what his free-floating POV is thinking. We just see what he (or rather his third eye lens) sees. Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat where reincarnation can occur and he can get back in the game again, our POV eye drifts towards through what Buddhists call the 'sidpa bardo', the land of darkness where the flames of love draw lost souls hoping to hop the interdimensional fence and be reborn, the way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one door off this shitty flesh pot parking lot of slide show life flashes. Doses... doses.

This essay was really long, but I edited it down, and down, and down. Let me just say that as your doctor I recommend this movie very highly, but if you have panic attacks, epilepsy or nervous disorders, make sure your fully and properly medicated in a legit Rx fashion before entering.  And just remember, wombs may look nice and relaxing from the outside when your ephemeral and a ghostly orb and stranded in the hungry ghost plateau, but once the placenta busts and the crying starts, it's the same old Hell... I mean heaven! Heaven... sorry god, Christ, and sponsor. Heaven.