God-Fuck

Altered States is an pretty great early 80s science fiction movie about a scientist experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs in order to induce a religious experience.

The scientist tells his colleagues and the grants administrators that he is researching Schizophrenia, but he’s not. He doesn’t even think Schizophrenia is a disease.

He gives LSD and Ketamine to schizophrenics and when they come down they say things like ‘I feel like my heart has been touched by Christ’ and the scientist just feels jealous.

The scientist, played by William Hurt, is obsessed with religious experience to the point were he likes to talk about Christ when he’s fucking his hot wife even though he claims to have ‘stopped believing long ago. ‘

His hot wife doesn’t mind too much if he talks about Christ in bed even though she would just like a nice hard, uncomplicated fuck. She’s an anthropologist and also Blaire Brown so she is open to all kinds of people and playing all kinds of roles.

When she gets sick of talking about Christ during sex she goes to Africa but can’t shake the scientist because he’s like a virus. A real God fuck.

The scientist is a drag to live with. He fathers two children with Blaire Brown and one of them is Drew Barrymore but he still thinks families are oppressive and that Blaire’s love is just her preference for ‘the pain we inflict on each other rather than the pain we would inflict on ourselves if we were alone.’

He says he’s not scared to be alone but that’s mostly cause he prefers taking hallucinogenic drugs to anything else and the drugs give him the illusion of supreme aloneness even though his buddy is monitoring him closely and ready to bring him out of it with a downer if his trip gets too bad.

When scientists party it’s called science.

The scientist goes to Mexico and behaves like a racist baby with the Mayans even though they let him join in on their ritual and give him loads of peyote soup. If Castaneda had behaved like that someone would have decked him and his spirit coyote would have scuttled off through the tumble weed.

Like in Akira, in Altered States the scientist believes that the entire history of evolution is encoded in our genetic structure. That’s how come sometimes when he’s tripping hard he grows fur and regresses to primal man. Then he gets the munchies and has to kill a goat.

When he comes down he wants his wife to cuddle him, which is understandable but a real drag for her because he’s ugly and mean when he’s a monkey and ugly and needy when he’s coming down and his skin’s all bubbly and he never ever offers to split his trip with her.

When he’s coming down he says that he loves her and that she is the only thing that stops him from remaining primal-man forever because only love can go head to head with science. And love is stronger than evolution. And love is the perfect drug. And the lover is a more potent symbol than Christ, stands in for the image of Christ and is the only true God-fuck.

I don’t know what Blaire Butler thinks about this but I think it’s pretty weak and annoying especially after such a promising build up and all the amazing drug sequences.

I suspect that after the credits the scientist is going to drop some more Peyote and break into the zoo again.

If I were Blaire Butler, I wouldn’t put up with this. I’d go back to Africa or accept tenure at Cambridge or sign Drew Barrymore up with a child actor’s agent or insist that the scientist share his stash because this relationship, like this movie, is totally unsustainable and can only come to a pretty pathetic conclusion.