Trippin’ at the Movies

These are my favorite trippy flicks.  Either because they are about altered states of consciousness, or because I enjoyed them while tripping, or both.  For me an LSD or shroom session usually lasts 8-12 hours between ingestion and returning to ‘normal’ baseline.  After about 6 or 7 hours I get to a point where even though I’m mentally tired, there is no chance of going to sleep.  This comedown time is also when I tend to start churning through uncomfortable psychic stuff and it helps to have a distraction.  A nice way to get through this transition is to watch a movie.  For the most part these should be colorful, upbeat and not too deep. Animation, documentaries and SciFi/fantasy are usually my favorite.  In my heightened emotional state I get lost in the story and have an abundance of empathy for the characters so anything too weird or heavy can be a bummer.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
It was December 31, 2000.  We stayed home that New Year’s Eve and celebrated with some L.  The local Public TV station was showing Kubrick’s 2001.  I don’t even know how many times I’ve seen this movie, but it was completely new and different in my altered state.  The special effects were amazing given that it was released in 1968.  I imagined that Kubrick made this movie with tripping people in mind.  The final scene, where the guy ages and dies blew me away.  I started having my own ‘god realizations’ at that point and felt like I was dying too.  It was very intense but I wasn’t scared at all. That was probably one of my top experiences ever and for my husband also.  It wasn’t just the movie that triggered it.  It took about three or four months to come down – that was my Kundalini phase. 

Altered States (Ken Russell)
This is an obvious pick. It came out when I was in high school and I think I saw it before I ever tried LSD myself.  William Hurt stars as a research scientist conducting experiments with hallucinogens in an isolation tank.  This was loosely based on John Lilly’s research.  A couple of the scenes are kind of religious fire and brimstone stuff.  I think this may have affected my own trips many years after because a few times when my own trips have gone to hell, I’ve had similar visions – devilish goat heads, human holocausts, firepits, etc.    It’s possible that these are also just common myths and themes pulled from our collective unconscious (a la Joseph Campbell). 

Honorable mention:
Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull)
Natalie Wood’s last film.  She died before it was complete.  It’s not really psychedelic but it is SciFi about neuroscience.  Christopher Walken stars as a scientist who has invented ways of recording peoples thoughts. His co-researcher (Louise Fletcher) alone in the lab at night has a heart attack and when she realizes she’s dying manages to put the device on her head and record that journey.  They find her dead in the lab the next day – the tape is completely filled.  The question then becomes, what happens if someone views the tape?  What will they see?
Here’s the scene…

Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg)
This film was originally a Kubrick project.  After he died Spielberg took it on.  This is a SciFi movie about a robotic boy who is programmed  so that his prime directive is to get his mother’s love.  Like Pinocchio, he wants to be a real boy – he thinks that will make his mother love him.  His ‘parents’ have a real son who is comatose with some incurable disease.  So they bring home David as their substitute child.  When their real son is miraculously cured there are some conflicts between the boys, and the robot boy gets discarded like yesterday’s trash.  This movie also got a little too intense for me.  I empathize way too much with the character.  I liked the cinematography though. Parts of it had a Blade Runner feel.

City of Lost Children (Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
This is one of my husband’s favorite movies.  We were shrooming for this one.  It’s very surreal, dark humor and a little scary. A mad scientist-type is kidnapping young children and stealing their dreams.  A little girl and a giant man go on a rescue mission after the giant’s little brother is taken by the Cyclops gang. 

Spirited Away (directed by Hayao Miyazaki)
This is a Japanese anime film. It won the 2003 Oscar for ‘Best Animated Feature’. A little girl and her family get lost on the way to their new house in the suburbs and her parents are turned into pigs.  She works at a strange bath house while she tries to figure out how to return her parents to normal and get back to the real world.  There is a scene where a spirit being, vile and covered in filth, comes to get clean.  The little heroine bathes the creature who no one else was willing to touch.  With her kindness and care, the filth and horrors are washed away and a lovely dragon-spirit appears.  That was breathtaking.  Dragons have always been a symbol I identify with. 
This clip isn’t the original music but I like this song. 

More animation:
Waking Life (Richard Linklater)
Coolest animation.  And some great philosophical conversations about the nature of reality and consciousness. 

Honorable mention to Linklater’s more recent offering:
A Scanner Darkly  (Richard Linklater)
It has the same trippy animation, and is definitely about drugs and society but I didn’t like it as much.

American Movie (Chris Smith)
This is a documentary about two loser-ish guys making a low-budget horror movie in Milwaukee, WI.  The main character, Mark Borchardt, is wonderfully earnest about making this movie and acheiving his dream even though his life and family are somewhat dysfunctional.  His odd family and friends all participate in making the movie. They are such great characters you can not believe it is real life.  I never laughed so hard.  “Funniest movie ever!” is one of the comments I saw on YouTube.
This clip starts with a description of one of the main character’s acid trip gone bad. 

Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance (Godfrey Reggio)
This is the first movie I tripped to in college. It’s about Man and the Environment. Great time-lapse and slow-motion photography.  It made me love and appreciate our planet, with some despair thrown in for how man is detstroying the natural beauty and raping it’s resources.  I still haven’t seen the sequels:  Powaqatsi or Naqoyqatsi.  They are probably worth checking out.

A similar type of Enviro-movie
Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou)
This is a documentary about insects and other life in the micro-level. It is incredible photography, also using time-lapse or slow motion to show the beauty of the little creatures we barely take notice of in ordinary life.