Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context

The recent discovery of cannabis traces in Shakespeare's old pipes only confirms it: old William was 'experienced.' It takes weird alchemical magic to write as potently as he did, which means mind altering heights not dreamt of in your dusty professor's tenure-sanctioned philosophy. My high pot-a-this? Will was experienced via the potent psilocybe cubensis mushroom which--lest we forget--grows naturally in the foggy climate of merrye England. Thanks to an obscure but enduring law stretching way back to the ancient times, it's always been an inalienable British right to grow, harvest, sell, and ingest all shrooms. I even saw some for sale at the Portobello Street Fair around 2003-4 right out in the open!!. I thought I'd stepped into an alternate dimension, the Notting Hill Interzone! Then a year or ten later came Ben Wheatley's A Field in England a shroomy old gloaming of a thing, and I knew at last how the Elizabethan Golden Age got its space cadet glow. No matter how adamantly they clench their jaws, trippers of today can't hold a candle to that Elizabethan lot: druid hold-outs, alchemists, astronomers, other alchemists, poets, plants and pie-eyed poppinscrabblers, a party so groovy even God got involved, to wipe out the evil Spanish armada as seen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. God hates buzzkills, Phillip!

And God-sanctioned explorations of the druggy British psyche have been flourishing ever since. Unlike America with it's tendency to overdo things, get lazy, then demonizes, trusty Europe just moderates and keeps all its potent herbs handy in its bag of collective tricks. In this they have seldom wavered up through the centuries, from the metaphysical poets to seances and fairy photography, ghosts haunting ancient castles, Crowley to Jimi Page, to ravers, love thugs, post-druids, neo-alchemists --a vast forward rolling spore network visible only through magical pupil dilation. In making them illegal, the 20th Century tried to induce a whole second Dark Age, to wreak the belated King Phillip's Inquisitor equivalent upon our young stoned psyches, but Elizabeth's tide-altering magic still sinks all narcs.

In the words of Peter Tosh, "let them be melted, Jahjah."

Some bedraagled Inquisitors squiggle ashore though, and take shelter deep inside the culture itself, and from there infects the psyche, which is perhaps that's why today's shroomer is seldom as full of fiery oratory as his forebears. Being on massive amounts of drugs seems to invalidate any insight or artistic breakthrough. Trained by pop culture to think he's 'just high' he never considers trying to transcribe his all-cylinders firing psychedelic madness or record it in coherently poetic dialogue. Lapsing into either incoherence or abstraction (a 'good trip' or a bad trip') with no grasp that art lies in between, these fledgling Boswells fall either into the bad trip asylum (Poe, Lovecraft, Thompson) or the good trip monastery (Ram Dass, Ginsberg), or worse, fake their way along in a kind of faux hip sandalwood snap (Eric Robbins, Robert Hunter).

Only the truly far-out there--too far perhaps, to ever just come rolling back all prodigal once their oats are sewn--can see the shadow of the devil even in the blinding light of God, and vice vera (Yeats, Huxley, Joyce). Only the truly far out--but not so far out they can't keep it together long enough to dodge the ambulance, prison and the strait-jacket--can hold off on an emotional reaction of love or fear, a 'this or that', a 'good or bad' duality trap; only the very few. can hold off on judgment until all duality is burned away and a whole second spectrum of shadow and light emerges (Blake, Shakespeare).

Shakespeare brings that layer of madness into perfect visibility for even sober audiences. They don't need the magical dilated pupils to see the fungal network when his language is there to bring that second spectrum up through the depths. Not all Shakespeare's plays are trippy, but they all have a Sgt. Pepper-type of playfulness when it comes to hip wordplay, continually doubling and tripling meanings, each quip laden containing ornate insults and bodily humor on one end and mercilessly accurate piercings of callow folly on the other. The ability to temper lacerating self-awareness with 'fuck it let's party' kind of gallows' humor wit is the most vital skill in the psychedelic arsenal, and there's no Shakespeare play more layered with this overlapping tide of meaning and counter meaning--none more taken over the edge into full night-tripping weirdness without lapsing into histrionics and babbling brooks--than Hamlet.

And no filmed Hamlet is more attuned to the druggy aspects than Zeffirelli's. No more vibrant, wild-eyed appropriately bonkers Hamlet than Mel.

What a supporting cast: Glenn Close is the queen mother, Paul Scofield the ghost dad, and a 23 year-old saucer-eyed tarot card come to life is Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia. I had forgotten all about how awesome she was was until the film poked up through on EPIX the other day. How did I forget? And why didn't I see the shroom connection back in the early 90s when I taped it and watched it around the clock? I was too drunk, too young, Shakespeare too dried in my mind from boring professors and white elephant productions, to fully soak it up. Not even sure why I watched it so often, except that it was great to watch drunk.

Oh yeah, Mad Max Mel Gibson in the lead was the reason, and ironically he's also the main reason today it's not more highly regarded compared to Olivier or Branagh versions. Mel was at the height of his action stardom in 1990, and typecasting being what it was/is, his valiant performance became merely a talk show punchline rather than a cause célèbre. It was a vanity project, they said. Vanity, Horatio? Didn't they mean frailty?

Frailty thy name is Mel. For he hath from the high horse fallen, and the wild-eyed craziness we always knew was really there under the wild-eyed crazy acting is now exposed. But doesn't that make this then the exact right time to re-evaluate his performance as one of the rare truly crazy Hamlets? Now we can taste the tang of acid in Zeffirelli's glowing air, can feel it twist and burn in our saliva, feel it slithering across the decades towards us like a dead king-eating, fractal-spewing, black hole wurm. We see now that Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet didn't just hit big with the free love generation because it tapped the war protest zeitgeist and was gorgeous to look at but because Zeffirelli bore down to the lysergically venomous poetry in it, so that time seemed to stop as heady madness cracked open the world's mean heart and set-a the dove-a free, and then it was shot down by an embittered, jealous Cupid.

Youth politics has changed since 1968 but you can still feel the psychedelic pulse in all Zeffirelli's subsequent work. Maybe he was always hoping, like so many of us, that his next film might strike the match that lights the fuse that blows his legend back to life. I reviewed the entire Zeffirelli canon for the Muze while I was newly sober, and seeing his long version Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972) over the same weekend made me a blissed-out, converted Christian for three days, and I wasn't on anything on but the 'pink cloud' of early sobriety - and acid flashbacks. I almost got my own bible or went to church before the spell wore off. So I feel, in a sense, Franco was my first AA sponsor, which might seem at odds with the psychedelic pulse motif I just talked about, but not if you've experienced both the pink cloud of sobriety AND the 'religious experience' that is a psychedelic "peak"--take it from me, there's not too much difference.

But what Zeffierelli really has is the painter's eye: the classical beautiful dusky painterly style that's almost cliched shorthand for 'art house.' His films pulse with a genuine connection to real Italian painting, stretching back to Michelangelo and the Renaissance; a sublime mix of natural light craftsmanship and genuine artistic-spiritual feeling seethes serpent-in-Eden-like and, from this mighty bulb, psychedelic illumination arises --the dilated pupil third eye point where death and transfiguration meet above the eyes of the tripped-out painter. He's the Italian William Blake! His films create the full spiritual potency of the religious experience, the Stendahl syndrome.

Mel Gibson's great genius in the lead is to use all his star wattage and (real life, it turns out) 'crazy eyes' Martin Riggs Mad Max Aussie wildman energy to bear on Hamlet's mood swings, rather than bury that wattage in some stilted bowing to the pillars of 'important' art (like a Brit or American would). He's fully aware that stuffed shirt critics are going to roll their eyes and--almost to spite them--rolls his own. Ranting and frothing like the dark bad trip cross between Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx's paranoid schizophrenic shadow, his Hamlet brings terrifyingly concise coherence to a miasma of late night drug dealer paranoia and the way the fear of death--normally down to a manageable abstraction--becomes terrifyingly vivid during the peak of a trip, compelling you to either get your war face on, like Braveheart, or cower and plead for your annoyed friend to drive you to the ER, like a wally. And then when morning finally breaks, you wonder, "is that the sun or a cop?" And when the band finally comes on after all that standing around, and the players finally arrive to catch the king's conscience, you rush to their holy fool distraction like a drowning man to scorched and dusty desert.

It's not for everyone, that kind of 'high strangeness.' You have to be drawn to it, called by an inner voice. Most people fear letting go to the extent such a journey involves (and not without good reason). They stammer excuses that they read LSD damages chromosomes and they want to have children with only ten fingers; or that they're afraid of going legally insane. What it really is, man, is fear of flying, and it appears in Hamlet courtesy of those men who lead Hamlet to the battlements where his father's ghost walks, then urge him not to follow where it beckons, as even seemingly benevolent spirits can turn into demons and lead off the parapet. How often have dumbass wallies on one too many hits jumped out a window thinking they could fly? Hard to say, as that sort of detail doesn't get reported in general, except through the grapevine--it's just another college student suicide otherwise. The kids who didn't jump are certainly going to be too cool to rat him out to the cops, even if he was a wally.

The thing with psychedelic drugs though, is dosage. A drop gets you high, but drink the whole vial and your psych ward-bound. Your only chance to avoid the bughouse is to get very, very drunk and/or gobble many Thorazine. And as far as I know they haven't made Thorazine for 20 years. That's why any good and responsible dealer takes care in prescribing. Give a sober nerd the same dose as a Woodstock-era Wavy Gravy and you've got either a complete breakdown (like that naked chick trying to crowd surf in Gimme Shelter) or worse, a guy who's not nearly as high as he needs to be (like Marty Ballin).

Thus the detailed caution of Horatio and the rest of Hamlet's entourage, that the father's spirit might be a trickster, the type who tells you three truths so that you believe the fourth (which is the lie) suggests that cognizance of this kind night-tripping trickster was common knowledge of the day --while in our current society it's known only by a very few maligned and scoffed-at fringe dwellers. That Shakespeare had this level of foresight in dealing with such bedevilment (a priest cautions the same thing re: the witches in Macbeth) indicates this was a time when people encountered supernatural trickster advisers frequently (I've encountered them too, been burned in the exact way Horatio worries about).

Black magic is all over Hamlet, as if Elsinore was Page's/Crowley's castle or NASA, i.e. the deep 'rottenness' in Denmark stems from Satanic root blight. We never see the odious Claudius given evil ideas by spirits himself--there's no three witches pronouncing him King of Denmark--but if they did, off camera, maybe it was a trickster spirit's a priori move-countermove to spur Hamlet's rash ghost-fueled frenzy of revenge just so he'd strike amiss and kills doltish Polonious instead, setting off a whole second arc of vengeance this time from Laertes on Hamlet, thus inaugurating one of those chains of sorrow that evil tricksters live for

All that said, Zefflrelli's Hamlet is not all supernatueal druggy madness, this film: it takes him a few beats for Gibson's Hamlet to snap out of his wan funk so the first few scenes are drippy dull, but bear with it for once dad's ghost lures our Mel up to the dangerous heights of the Stonehenge-tower battlements, shit gets real. When Mel comes back down he's like Moses glowing from his mountaintop. It's then Mel's genius madness kicks in, and it remains for the rest of his film. Just like Mel plays a great crazy person because he really is crazy, he performs Hamlet performing his madness as a way to hide his true insanity by conveying it openly (the way two negatives make a positive) a trick most seasoned trippers practice when forced to deal with (alive, sober) parents unexpectedly. Because after seeing his dead dad's ghost, Hamlet's already past the point of no return, no Thorazine will bring him back: arguing with himself, stalling, procrastinating, hallucinating dad wherever he looks, paralyzed with dread, he acts as we all would (hopefully) when compelled to kill our uncle in cold blood. 

Ophelia (her "young woman's wits mortal as an old man's life") follows in his lysergic wake; she's the girlfriend you convince to shroom with you but it's soon clear she's not going to handle it well at all, and you're too far gone yourself to talk her down. Soon she's taking them nonstop and babbling to herself, singing and dancing up and down the parapets. And then, rather than stand firm against her son's spittle-flecked lunacy, soon his mom, too, going mad--as if it's a contagious disease spread by Pontypool-style oratory.  



And as that dame of Denmark, a 23 year-old Helena Bonham Carter, is the most dosed of all Ophelias: super duper young and fetching, able to oscillate brilliantly between innocent, confused, thrilled, blessed, sexually aroused, distracted, crushed, and round-the-bend wavelengths, all in a single bounding wave of a chicken bone she thinks is a flower (but could even more easily be a thick psilocybe cubensis stem), Carter's game for whatever. Like all the best young saucy acting natural blue bloods of England (she's related to baronesses and prime ministers), she's got the kind of class that goes so deep she doesn't ever deign to be merely ladylike. Architecture of the era was designed to compliment her inherited genes, the rarefied poeticism of her cheeks and eyes. Unlike American actors who, alas, get stuck in the white elephant tar pits of bourgeois loftiness when doing Shakespeare, their bodies and tongues forced into all manner of unnatural poses, Carter swims in the language like an undulating fish. It's like that Hawks line: she's so good she doesn't feel she needs to prove it.

A lifetime of decadence and recovery has left me with a sharp eye for who's "been to the mountaintop," i.e. who's ever been 'experienced' in the Hendrixian sense. Gibson, Zeffirelli and Bonham Carter have all been up there, clearly, so when they plunge into heedless madness they do it way better than, say, the sober classical-minded Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh or Olivier or Leigh could (1).

That said, as far as the people who go to Shakespeare plays in America (i.e. the bourgeoisie) are concerned, the more classically highbrow the player, the better, for to them Shakespearean acting must at all times strive for white elephant underlined 'importance' and lofty carriage.

But Shakespeare doesn't need their protection; his work spits openly on such lionization and in doing so elevates itself higher than its forebears --as long as the actors and directors have been to that mountaintop, of course. It can also be as deadly dull as dusty death when that highbrow approach embraces the stilted and draggy as what the 'swells' came to see.

In 1948, mountaintop-been-to madman Welles' termite art Macbeth came to artier theaters but was overshadowed by Olivier's white elephant Hamlet the same year. Olivier's was how Shakespeare should be done, so the bourgeois critical body proclaimed. For Welles, 'done' was the key word. His Shakespeare writhed and pulsed but was never done, as eternal as madness itself. There was the feeling the stage-bound world he created was continuing after the credits rolled, that the next viewing might show a whole different film. Much as I revere Olivier's Hamlet, the best moments are with the ghost dad, who looms in full and weird armor enshrouded by fog and speaking in an echoing boom whisper, a ghost seeming to be flowing right out of Hamlet's fog machine brain. But Welles' entire film flows that way. (See Hallowed be thy Shakes).

Pssst, those stones in the moonlight look like me in about 20 years, i.e. rock, star-crossed, stoned dead - but an experienced space cowboy would just eye this specter and presume it's a hallucination... even if it's real, isn't it safer? 

Zeffirelli's dad ghost (Paul Scofield) flows farther than them all. Hamlet's woeful shattered superego, Scofield is like a bad shroom hallucination. Neither showy or surreal, he's allowed to blend into the darkness so that he may be the moonlight reflected on the mineral veins in the stone of the battlements. Up to the challenge of embodying that most horrified of souls, forbidden by some unseen master specter from spilling the secrets of just how fucked the other side is, Scofield makes the father both horrifying and horrified, the passer of the torch of mortality's great horror - the Medusa shield reflection of the fires of stonework hell.

And when Hamlet comes down from the parapet he's alight like that annoying kid who comes back from Burning Man or the Rainbow Gathering with dreadlocks, a dour but smokin' hot activist girl's phone number, and the feeling he's been chosen to keep the world green. For one semester's stretch he doth berate unreceptive ears with facts gleaned from phone calls with his allegedly corporeal Greenpeace girlfriend. Mel's Hamlet, crying "like a whore" and unpacking his heart with words (and pamphlets) rather than direct and violent action (blowing up a factory), is the woeful midnight tantrum of a lad who realizes no amount of feeling-- poured into his angry young poetry slam soliloquy notebook even unto whiskey stained margin--will undo the catastrophic damage his already crumbling American white male legacy hath wrought upon the whales of the world. Even if he pounds his plodding pen to plastique it would explode no illusion beyond popping the proud bubble of his own inchoate solipsism.

And in this analogy: the college drug dealer, drinking his way towards some chimera self-assurance, his each whiskey shot a fleeting but blessed deliverance from the dead father's terrible injunction, onus comes at a terrible price. He can't even make out with his mother in her bed for a hot sec before ghost dad's ghost pops up, dismayed at this halting of his son's bloody path. But dad, it's smokey!


In order for this all to become psychedelic though, it can't be told by the British, for the Royal Shakespeare Compan are too established and respectful (albeit not quite as drab or 'experimental' as America). Having nothing to prove, neither Italian Zeffirelli or Australian Gibson are inclined to be at all pious and restrained with this material. Their Hamlet is a raving but hyper-eloquent lunatic, the type to smash phones in hotel lobbies, leave anti-Semitic rants on answering machines, and trash hotel rooms in fits of manic pique, stabbing at the rats he sees in the walls and behind the paisley tapestries of his college dorm (but what about the Poloniuses hiding inside your skin, broh?). In typical Zeffirelli style, the dusky David Watkin cinematography uses natural light streaks sparkling with floating castle dust in real, dusky straw and stone locations.

Then, even better, maybe best of all, the at-first-unrecognizable, Ennio Morricone comes laying down a score that only becomes clearly his own (via wordless swooping Marni Nixon-esque top notes) only in mom's boudoir, which makes sense as it's such a giallo miasma of murder (stabbing through works of art), Freudian Oedipal insanity, vows of secrecy, maternal guilt, ghostly accusing, and existential alienation. It's a great scene: Glenn Close--despite the tightness of her hippy braids--makes a subtly unhinged queen, following her son's madness like a light off a cliff in the dark, her voice dropping octaves as the horror of the thought her dead husband is in the room, or that her son is about to kill her, or make out with her. Like Ophelia, she follows Hamlet into that blessedly cracked and melted mirror which--through the totality of its warp--undoes sanity's merciful blurring and throws the horror of the real into unyielding focus.

Author at left -Oakwood Cmty, Syracuse NY 1986

STRANGE ASIDE:

The graveyard, Syracuse's Oakwood Cemetery, is where I and my clique of fellow SU sophomores first shroomed (and then shroomed regularly) as college kids in the late 80s, and where we too found a skull, but it wasn't of poor Yorik, but H.B. Crouse one of the trustees of one of the lecture halls... and later on that week we read that some idiot freshman took it back to his dorm and started boiling the skin off (in the communal Flint Hall kitchen) so he could use the skull in an art project. Yeah man, eerie similarities. The morning/afternoon after we first hooked up (me still high on shrooms, natch), me and this gorgeous Italian-American crystal blue-eyed girl who shall be nameless (though I talk about her endlessly on this blog) saw the broken-in tomb and HB Crouse's skull sticking out, and I thought about climbing through the bars to get it (which the more limber of us could do and regularly did, that mausoleum being on the hill we all hung out on). but then she stopped me... and a day later we read about this idiot (above) getting kicked out of school.  I had thought the same thing, get in there, get the skull, boil the parchment skin and long thin gray hair (for hair really does keep growing after death) off in a big pot, and have the coolest of all skull tchotchkes. I was glad I'd listened to her though, then. For it would have no doubt cooled our budding love if naught else.

Man, that nameless crystal blue-eyed girl really did a number on me... so hot, so cool, ultimately so dumb... she could kill a big swinging group conversation stone dead with a single interjection. I didn't realize at the time how really pretty women are often damaged from excessive male attention, that they act like idiots almost as an unconscious passive aggressive dude repellant. And since they never need to develop the wits (frail as an old man's life) by which the lesser mortals up their appeal, they don't. It wasn't a stretch for me to realize her attraction to me, then in my the first flower of my alcoholism, paunchy and bloated, was part and parcel of this idiocy. Her beauty was such I could barely look at her without it hurting. Those clear light blue eyes with flawless white skin and wild jet black hair, I still feel my electric blood up its voltage just in thinking about her. She and I went westward after graduation to seek our fortunes, to Seattle. Shrooms told us we were broken up on afternoon at the Seattle aquarium after about a year. I moved back east to my rotten Jersey Denmark basement, my parents shaking their heads over my erratic drunken unemployment. And only then (as you know from my incessant mentioning) I realized I loved her. If it wasn't for Night of the Iguana who knows where i might be today?

And when this version of Hamlet came out, the same year, I taped it and watched it over and over, though at first it wrankled, for it was painful seeing Max Max so hampered by conscience against a foe so worthy of his usual unthinking vengeance. He should have chained Claudius's foot to a car about to explode and left him with a hacksaw and five minutes on the clock, like he done did to the Toecutter!

In between TV access (my dad watched a lot of golf, baseball, and football), I smoked and drank in my parents' dark cellar and wrote this girl endless letters. Only decades later did I realize how easy true love is when so one-sided and far away. On Facebook, I see she's married, she's old, her hair gone wild gray; she's dowdy like an Anna Magnani. But in 1990--ah, she was still so hot--I wrote her such letters from my boomerang ensconcement down in that troll king basement as would wilt the most iron rose to mulch. I got a phone call one afternoon whilst half asleep in a dopey drunkard funk--twas her new husband! He promised to kill me should I ere I write again. I was furious and hurt, but obeyed, my love wounded gravely until my own insanely jealous wife, ten years later, forced me to make a similar call, to a girl in Seattle-- a different one--ah, and then I had my first and only 'white-hot rage' moment - which is like you literally go blind - it's like your eyes become a TV that goes to popcorn static. I felt myself lunge towards her as if to strangle her, and then snapped out of it. Funny how you hear these phrases 'temporary insanity', 'white-out', 'white-hot rage' and just think they're prosaic.

Ah life, like Shakespeare, never offers one absurd staged scene-within-a-scene lest its dark twin later appear, warped and ill-woven as if to mock the first, hence the conscience of the king-catching drama Hamlet writes (the artist's version of vengeance?) mirrors the scene Ophelia is forced to play to lure Hamlet into confessing his love and intent while their fathers watch from without. Polonius's strategy here is eerily similar to when I first had dinner with the aforementioned hot girl's Italian-American parents in Carmel, NY; after dinner the dad plied me with wine, drinking along as I downed a giant bottle and got more and more wasted. I thought we were bonding, but they were testing me, the mom counting my drinks on a note pad. They worried I was a drunk... or rather, they 'found out'. The dad though, was delighted as well, to have an excuse to drink so much. His father had a problem too, and when that old man would do shots with me later at our graduation party, I'd catch shade about it, as grandma had to clean the sheets the next morning, for his bladder was not strong as a young man's wits.

I mention all this, why? For it all climaxed in 1990 --a magical year - the big hair 80s disappearing into the past. As if a herald, Zeffirelli's Hamlet arrived, and symbolizing the death of the home perm, Gibson's hair was legions better than Olivier's super short and creepy uber-short blonde bangs. Mel has bangs too, but they fit cuzza the beard, and his wild man eyes.

As for the recent anti-Semitic deep end of Mel; well one can't play crazy as well as he does unless one is crazy to start with, which is the problem with so many British interpretations--Brits ain't crazy like Australians, even those born, like Mel, in the U.S. As if the role's too much for him, normal Gibson--early Mel--seems overwhelmed and weakened by the flowery language, but then the deep end beckons, when it's time to go big, Mel dives in. Splash. His Hamlet's obnoxious, the type you never want to go out and see movies in the theater with, because he's always shouting "this is the part where..." But he's brilliant and legit crazy, and a man who can be legit crazy onscreen is worth a thousand spoilers off it.

And there it ends... I refuse to give away the ending, or influence your findings. I will say that all enduring works tend to be universal, organizing one's own history like a transparent overlay, and so it has done the same to mine. See it on an ergot-encrusted rye cracker and peanut butter and think of me as I used to be in our old rooms at Allen Street, pacing to and fro with my bong and bass, and driving the neighbors to the point of sad distraction. Oh wait, that's Sherlock Holmes, not susceptible to the gibbering unspeakable elder god things in heaven and earth, more ghosts and machine elves, and absinthe demons-- than are dreamt of in fairy photography! Watson, the needle... is dusty. The charm's unwound, so wind it up, and patch thy wounds with wondrous strange sounds. We will speak further... in the past.

NOTES
1, I rag on Olivier a lot - BUT he does deliver a great termite Shakespeare on film//video performance, and that's, strangely enough, while in disguise of blackface and a voice lowered a full octave as OTHELLO (1965). Though shot on video, it pulses with an off-the-cuff energy that makes it feel like it's all happening in real time, with a great 'go on forever' settting sun orange sky and a superlative Iago in Frank Finlay; though Welles' OTHELLO finally looks good on a remaster which will be on Blu-ray hopefully soon, he's almost out-Wellesed by Olivier here, acting-wise.

A Stoner Shall Rise: SHROOMS, THE LOVED ONES, CABIN IN THE WOODS

Oh my are the demons ever colorful this season. Clad all in pink and wrapped up in bizarre incestuous serial torturer pair bonds in ways shows like DEADLY WOMEN on Investigative Discovery dream about. It makes me understand the frailty of demons and the necessity of pot for modern survival and to blazes with anyone who'd tell you different. To blazes with those not blazin'...

SHROOMS (2007) had been staring me down from my Netflix Streaming cue for years now, since before you or your grandchildren were even born, in a way, so finally I went for it one soggy afternoon, sprinkled atop a peanut butter and cracker to mask the taste. But, aside from a talking cow and some nice Irish gloom, the trip was a bummer, more muddled than that stale yellow film feeling I used to get trying to snap into action through taking--as these kids did--shrooms on a rainy camping trip when I was so full of whiskey I could barely talk, and yet painfully sober, stuck with people I did or didn't like as companions that never understood what I was trying tray abthing haren't sewa theem? Whoa, I thought I'm guess hard tripping was!

You know how it is, those soggy six AM Sundays after the bars are closed and only stupid college kids and burnouts take shrooms to get over the hump, 'cuz it worked... once. And whoa, that stupid college burnout, baby, is maybe you. And the goddess of the fungus takes one peek down your flooded basement soul, senses your weakness and decides rather than heal your wounds, to lay into you like a bitchy girlfriend-mom hybrid... for eight miserable hours. And even after her cruel relentless mockery mellows out and your closed-eye hallucinations fade back to normal blurry bands of gray, even then you can't sleep because by then its three in the afternoon and the third eye visuals, sink-holes and leprous faces keep picking at the scabs of your soul.

But hey, there's a film called SHROOMS, and no, here the shrooms don't really cause evil in and of themselves, in fact they're kind of a red herring. But they're there. They're not going away. The trouble is, maybe these campers should have been smoking pot instead, and passing around some whiskey and just calling it a day. Shrooms can be hit or miss, pummeling you or protecting you, depending on the spore's magic mood, and of course set and setting are so important. A sunny day with your favorite people at, taken a few hours after a light lunch, at, like, three PM, with good music and incense and some minor butterflies over the excitement? That's ideal. But pot never fails us... just as it never quite succeeds. That's just part of its deal. Pot's hangover is included in the high, there's no misery deferred and returned with interest at a more convenient time. It's pay as you go. Shrooms though, are paid off in installments for weeks, or else you end up drinking and taking more to taper off, and that never works.

The signifiers and signs of horror meanwhile (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are now so beyond cliche they don't even need to be tied to anything substantial; having a stoned hipster gesture towards them with his thumb is enough. The hipster's thumb is the new black and CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) has taken this idea farther than anyone yet this year. Metatexually refracting the cliche of attractive high school seniors heading off to the woods for R&R, T&A, death and Lovecraftian abstraction, cometh the humble stoner--the inevitable fifth or seventh wheel in gangs of young people heading off into the wilderness since that obnoxious brother in the wheelchair in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1977).

In this sea of cliche, this stoner shall rise. As the smoke rises, man, so the stoner...


And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, in exploring this character, horror has recognized its target audience and isolated a common thread that runs counter to general programming: the insider realization that pot protects you from evil. All along we were right to be paranoid, man, things are all... weirder and more perverse and vile than we imagined in our trippiest delusions. And Mary Jane's loyal sheepdog sanity never abandoned us and won't now.

And as so often happens, this concept is literally true as recent studies show. 

 What is even more troubling is that the United States Government actually did a secret follow up-study on the Virginia findings, in the mid '90's. When it only served to confirm the results of the 1974 research, and showed that THC (one of the main active ingredient in cannabis – and the one the government loves to hate), when administered to mice, protected them against malignancy, true to form, our government attempted to bury the results. Fortunately, a draft copy of the study was leaked to the journal, AIDS Treatment News, and the media covered the story. An excellent article by Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, covers this part of our shameful history. (more)

I can't really reveal what happens in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS since 'holy shit! no way! Really? O man!' reactions are so essential, but I will quote Gregory Cwik's article on it in the current issue of Acidemic's Journal of Film and Media: 

"... after Halloween was labeled a morality play, its character's seemingly punished for acting immorally, smoking became a death sentence for horror characters. Instead, Whedon's pothead uses his bong as a weapon against the enemy. Maybe its a sign of changes to come." 

Maybe it is, if we kill enough old people first, by which I mean those who think it should be illegal (because they have never tried it). Maybe their personal embargo serves us not them. Unable to keep food down after chemo, they nonetheless refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only truly safe and effective remedy. They die sooner and so can't vote anymore, and progress moves forth. Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you, and that doctors sometimes are barred from recommended holistic and herbal remedies, as the AMA won't acknowledge their effectiveness (having never tested them, because tests are too expensive and herbs can't be patented so there's no return on investment which is a bit like saying water isn't good for quenching your thirst because we can't patent it... yet). Fail to realize this and Darwinian nature shall take its course.

Ignorance of a law doesn't make you immune, only weed does that. Is there any better reason why the law is so scared of it?

In the recent Aussie tor-por prom-com THE LOVED ONES (2009) pot brings a hot Goth girl Mia (Jessica McNamee) and a nervous hipster together for prom. I shan't discuss the 'main attraction' of the film, a protracted torture sequence, but suffice it to say that torturer Lola (Robin McLeavy) is a stunning psychotic presence, bringing so much whacked-out gusto she single-handedly elevates the whole production to near-cult status. If HEAVENLY CREATURES' Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey were Horace and Rebecca Fem in THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), McLeavy would be the locked upstairs brother, Saul. Maybe you don't get that reference, but if you don't you should see both films fast, before it's too late.

Lola's unwilling prom date-torture boy is the beautiful boy Xavier Samuel, whose best bud is the smart aleck stoner Jamie (Richard Wilson), a hipster nerd with fearful, darting eyes who snags Mia for the prom. She proceeds to smoke all his pot, embarrass him in front of distrustful teachers. and look askance upon his chosen corsage... but she also "puts out," even if it's kind of a train wreck version. For better or worse, hotness and reefer heal all wounds. Having dated a girl who not only looked a lot like Mia but was just as bi-polar and brilliant and sexy and crazy and burning every bridge I ever built just to watch the fire (then crying that it was so sad, then laughing, etc... but who cares because she was so damned hot yeah you tell yourself that but gradually your own emotions start to buckle under the strain of her DSM-IV), I can vouch for the realism of McNamee's fearless portrayal. For all the damage our time together wrought upon the life I had built, it ranks as the most romantic, swooning, delirious year of my life, even if it lasted only a few weeks, tops.

It was all good, the love far past the point of bearability, but then her polar cap shifted. And torture commenced.

Now that I'm older, crippled by the psycho bitch stalker of time, hobbling around with the TV blasted and a sense of irrelevance hanging on me like a wet afghan woven by elderly skeletal hands, the boiling water lobotomy wiping out everything but the archaic recesses of my frozen Swedish heritage. And my hands! My elderly carpels and metacarpals twisting like the yellow lines of a woebegone stretch of Mad Max Aussie highway, I finally relate to Mia's level of discontent and the tragic self-cutting of the Kristen Stewart-Hillary Swank lesbian lovechild, Xavier, and of my own past DSM-IV-quoting love in ways as prosaic as a summer's day. It all coincides perfectly with that Saturday night fall depression when all those days wasted kicking it with the TV for endless Blu-ray moviethons instead of going to the beach come back to haunt you.

The eyes, Manolo. They never lie.

That's because psilocybin can awaken spiritual visions but also conjure nightmares that can creep into this plane thanks to your expanded ability to see them, like strangers across the room who take your noticing them as an invitation to manifest further, like the strange  guy in the corner who you made the mistake of making eye contact with and now he stalks you all through the party, working up the nerve to come say hi, his shyness slowly creeping you the fuck out. Can anyone else at the party even see him?

These thoughts can be horrifying to the shroomer. The stoner, on the other hand, can't hold onto them long enough.

The film SHROOMS crashes and rises from the moldy Irish mud and shows how some days the psilocybe spirits are less kind than in others. And heavy Catholic guilt makes murder of 'sluts' an easy sacrificial treat on some elder god level. But this film isn't satisfied with just squirming down that dark poison trail, there has to be big twists which SPOILER ALERT.... ah, you guessed it already.

Top: Shrooms / Bottom: Cabin in the Woods

The best of these stoner horrors addressed in this post is obviously CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012), a pothead Truman Show, with a Lovecraftian chaser, but instead of comedy it's only a terrifying farce, featuring a WAXWORKS edge-of-sanity assortment of Escher-esque monsters and the feeling of constantly being watched (and waxed) by unseen cameras, which is what paranoia on pot is all about--both fun and unnerving, colorful and creepy...relaxing and nerve-wracking... and, uh... colorful? Did I say that one? Yo, did I mention it cures cancer? I shall now gargle whiskey while my little friend sings "Swanee River," I thank you.

It was in the summer of 1997, when I was still drinking, and so very social, and constantly amidst a sexy posse and one particularly colorful LSD trip in Sheep's Meadow (Central Park, NYC) back when you could still smoke outdoors and enterprising homeless guys regularly patrolled between the blankets selling waters ($1) and cold Heinekens bottles ($2) from rolling coolers. As we consumed the Heinekens and the acid made the trees glow like a beautiful Shakespearean jigsaw classical painting I'd dimly remembered seeing at the Met, which was right behind us... Because this was Central Park, where everyone from George Washington to Treat Williams in HAIR had hung out, getting toasted. Then, in a flash the thing came to me: Every homeless guy selling beer looked like Harry Belafonte. Within minutes I could see the way these were clones using Sheep's meadow as a testing ground, selling Heinekens laced with chemicals and monitoring the results with secret cameras placed on the heads of dragonflies, and the Meadow itself, with its glowing blue and green Kentucky grass, was an experimental grid, the blazing reflection of the grass blades in the sun hiding the cracks of the secret trap doors where the Belafontes, as we called them, retreated when their coolers were empty. They went down long stairs to get more beer, and check in with their overlords, and monitor us and our reactions.

How else did they get the beer so cold and sell it so cheap, and why else would they all look so Belafonte-ish if they weren't ghostly clones of Belafonte who probably has some great beer-broker DNA? See? You can't answer.

Just as in SHROOMS, the world kicks in around you when your senses are enhanced. The landscape seems designed to heighten whatever your brain tells your eyes and ears to see. And the bastards down there finally decided to make it plain to the rest of the world, via the film THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. This film is my proof about the Belafonte system.

End of meaningless anecdote.

"Belafonte!"

In THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, there's a found diary written by a tragic one-armed mutant hillbilly cannibal girl, who at the time of writing had been watching her family slowly disappear into the dad's HOSTEL-like 'black room' and it's this grisly idea that provides the film's only real unpleasantness. In my metatexutal undercurrent journal I marked this family down as relatives of the crazy Lola from LOVED ONES and the unstable murderer in SHROOMs, but the torturer in LOVED takes the cake and her victim could surely use some pot. Hell, even I was deeply nauseous after watching it, and while the tropes of male-on-female psycho torture porn cinema are so grisly and unpleasant my feminist liberal arts programing won't allow me to even read the synopses, I generally love crazy SPIDER BABY / AUDITION type girls torturing guys- as nature intended. But giving victims lobotomies via drilling a hole through the third eye and then pouring in boiling water, that's horrible to imagine, horrible to think anyone could even think like that, anyone presumably sane and just writing a screenplay. Then again, my childhood friend Alan used to think like that. Yeesh, I forgot about that.

Killing is one thing, but burning away a human's pineal gland, their third eye? Who could be so cruel? Who could deny a person the ability to dream and see the world beyond 3-D space? I mean, aside from our own government and its absurd anti-drug hysteria, of course, for their fear of anything consciousness-raising is the great tragedy of our modern age. Lumping psychedelics in with neighborhood scourges like heroin and crack? Dumb, man. Because we take those drugs and KNOW they're scuzzy - but a scumbag gives us LSD and our minds expand, we follow them into the meat-grinder, not your dumb naysaying church, because if you're that wrong about one drug, maybe you're wrong about crack, too. This is what Graham Hancock calls The War on Consciousness, a war so insidious he was scheduled to speak about it at TEDtalks, but they waffled and pulled him last minute (1). This shit's real. Science is scared of its own shadow. This is your brain on drugs, smelling hmmmm-mmm good in their frying pan home. This is your brain slowly dying in jail for trying to save your grandmother's life by spiking her brownies. Better she be vomiting a slow agonizing post-chemo death than getting the munchies and spending too much time on the couch, right, "America"?

Final Score:
SHROOMS - **
THE LOVED ONES - ***
CABIN IN THE WOODS - ***1/2

PS -11/13 The marijuana laws are slowly being reformed! Was it this blog post that brought people around?  (no). 
NOTES:
(1) this happened after the original date of this post, but I'm doing some rewrites as is my wont here in 4/13)

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