Altered States · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man floats in a steel tank of black water, sealed from light and sound, and goes looking for the bottom of his own mind. He believes there's a floor down there — an original self, the first thing that was ever conscious, the irreducible ground of being. Ken Russell's Altered States takes that belief literally, and the literalness is the whole event. Dr. Eddie Jessup doesn't theorize regression; he regresses. First in vision, then in flesh, then in matter itself. Watch the film once and you remember the freakouts. Watch it twice and you notice it is built as a slope, and that nobody on it can stop walking down.

Deleuze has a precise name for a cinema organized around that pull: the impulse-image. It lives in a degenerate zone between pure feeling and purposeful action — a predatory register where people are driven not by goals they choose but by an appetite that chooses them. Jessup is its perfect specimen. The dossier puts it exactly: he is a man who "treats his own annihilation as a research problem." That isn't ambition. It's compulsion wearing a lab coat, and William Hurt plays the monomania straight so we feel the drive underneath the vocabulary. Each tank session takes him deeper; each is harder to come back from. Deleuze would call that escalation the line of slope — the irreversible downward gradient toward exhaustion and death that every impulse-image eventually obeys. The film ends, fittingly, with the implosion of matter. The slope had no floor.

What the drive digs toward is what Deleuze calls the originary world. The naturalist filmmaker takes an ordinary setting — Deleuze's "derived milieu," here the lab, the lecture hall, the Cambridge apartment, the marriage — and reveals beneath its social surface a savage primal realm of pure drive. Russell's gift, the dossier says, is that he "detonates the ordinary from within." The proto-human loose in an urban night, the desert, the blood sacrifice, the crucifixion iconography: that is the originary world erupting up through the derived one. This is naturalism in Deleuze's strict sense, and it has a clear ancestor — Forbidden Planet's "monsters from the id," a scientist's expanded mind externalizing the unconscious as a lethal force. Russell just makes it bodily.

The trips themselves work by a different logic, and it's worth naming. They don't advance the plot; they figure. Religious images, ritual sacrifice, desert forms, primordial shapes collide in fast association while the marriage and the career proceed in conventional coverage. Deleuze, borrowing Eisenstein's "montage of attractions," would call these passages attraction-images — staging that presents an idea as spectacle rather than acting it out. The descent from 2001's Star Gate is direct: Kubrick had already proven you could render expanded consciousness as immersive abstract light-and-form instead of dialogue, and Russell carries that template into Jessup's regressions, fused with the crucifixion-and-ecstasy grammar he'd forged in The Devils. Jordan Cronenweth's photography — pools of light against engulfing black, just before he shot Blade Runner — draws the hard line: clinical naturalism for the waking world, saturated delirium for the descent, so the trips read as a rupture in style, not only in story.

Underneath the spectacle the film genuinely wants to think, and that's where Deleuze's late vocabulary earns its place. Chayefsky's architecture — sustained argument about God, the self, regression, the same obsessions he circled in Network — makes this a noosign, an image that tries to use the screen as a brain. But thinking the ground of being means thinking what comes before thought, and Deleuze, following Artaud, says the deepest power of cinema is to confront us with our own powerlessness to think it. He calls that figure the spiritual-automaton, and its discovery is the unthought, the encounter with an outside the mind cannot close around. Jessup's terror, when it arrives, is not a monster. It's that the bottom he was sure existed is nothing at all. The origin doesn't ground him; it dissolves him.

And here the rationalist screenplay reverses itself in a way pure reason can't supply. What pulls Eddie back from the void is not an argument. It is Emily refusing to let him go — love as the one force that answers the outside. Deleuze's logic holds even against Chayefsky's surface: you don't think the unthinkable, you are pulled back from it by another body.

That reversal is the film's quiet significance. It took the metaphysical SF of the post-2001 strain and ran it through the practical-transformation horror of its exact moment — Dick Smith's prosthetic lineage from The Exorcist, the first-person metamorphosis POV reaching back to the 1931 Jekyll — and made consciousness itself a body-horror subject. The mind goes too far and the flesh pays. That fusion seeded the consciousness-horror that followed. Watch it again and ask the question the film can't answer and knows it: if you reached the very bottom of yourself, would you find the first thing that was ever you, or would you find that there was never a floor — only the people on the surface holding the rope?