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DIRECTED BY: Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens
FEATURING: Voice of Chloë Sevigny
PLOT: A biography of pioneering cetologist and “psychonaut” Dr. John C. Lilly.
COMMENTS: John Lilly may best be known to readers of this site as the inspiration behind the canonically weird Altered States. The real Lilly seems to have lived a life that actually was “stranger than fiction.” A neurophysiologist by training, Lilly began his research career during the height of Cold War paranoia. The term “brainwashing” was first coined in the 1950s, when Lilly’s initial studies of mammal brains were designed to achieve “push-button control of animals and people.” In the 1960s he embraced the use of psychedelic drugs, leaving behind military research in favor of the counterculture. He described his moment of enlightenment as a “very bizarre and weird feeling.”
Almereyda and Stephens’ documentary traces the gamut of Lilly’s life-long research interests, from his early days hooking monkey brains up to cathode ray TVs to a daily self-experimentation regimen involving hourly doses of ketamine. What comes across is a portrait in contrasts. Though he came to see himself as living outside the bounds of mainstream “consensus reality,” American culture readily absorbed Lilly’s ideas.
Lilly is responsible for our belief that dolphins are intelligent creatures, and inspired the Greenpeace effort to “Save the Whales,” igniting an interest in environmentalism. He popularized the analogy likening the human mind to a “biocomputer”; he believed that only through the perception of other realities can we break free from our “programming.”
Lilly’s “feeling of weirdness” resulted from the realization that the animals he had been researching were not just test subjects but thinking, feeling creatures, whose intelligence and sense of consciousness could equal that of humans and, in some cases, even exceed us. After studying the brains of cats, monkeys, and dolphins, he decided to focus on dolphins, convinced they would have some ancient wisdom to impart to human beings.
The film’s makers present all facets of Lilly’s research and impart his intense curiosity regarding the mind and how it works. His evolution from straight-laced government scientist to drugged-out psychonaut proceeds without judgment. In the beginning, Lilly comes across as eccentric even when appearing on ’60s talk shows, likening inter-species communication to an alien encounter. In one episode the host is quick to point out that Lilly is a real doctor and not “some nut!”
The narration touches on important ethical issues regarding animal research, but never delves too deeply. Lilly’s personal fortune gets a
mention, since it allowed him to self-fund his own research once government grants dried up. This was obviously a mixed blessing; it allowed him the freedom to explore his own ideas, but he gradually abandoned proper scientific protocols. Many dolphins died in the course of his experiments, and Lilly had no qualms about dosing them with LSD.
A fascinating thread that winds its way through this biography is Lilly’s connections with Hollywood. His dolphin research began at Marine Studios, the marine park and underwater filming location where Creature from the Black Lagoon was made. He would begin using LSD under the influence of Constance Dowling Tors, wife of Ivan Tors, the producer and owner of a zoo that supplied animals for film productions.
Altered States wasn’t the only movie inspired by Lilly’s life and work. Though Lilly endorsed Altered States, and even used its publicity campaign to publicize his own lectures, he thought very little of the George C. Scott vehicle Day of the Dolphin, an espionage thriller produced by Joseph Levine. Lilly planned to sue Levine, but when the two men actually met, they hit it off, and Levine agreed to help fund Lilly’s research.
During the 1970s, Lilly took a break from dolphin research to focus on his isolation tank studies (apparently, he started to think dolphins were psychically controlling his mind). It was during this period that Alejandro Jodorowsky visited him for a tank session. Jodorowsky’s interview here only lasts about five minutes, but fans will undoubtedly find it fascinating.
Because Lilly passed away in 2001, he’s represented through documentary footage of his many television appearances, from interviews to lectures, and even a commercial for one of his research institutes. To illustrate the decades through which Lilly lived, his more outré ideas, and his lasting influence on pop culture, the directors heavily utilize feature film clips and footage from the Sega video game directly inspired by Lilly’s dolphin research. Isolated scenes from, among others, Blood of a Poet, Night of the Living Dead, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary’s Baby, 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Flipper,” Johnny Mnemonic, and the finale of Altered States, paired with a soundtrack of whale and dolphin songs, imbue the documentary with an almost otherworldly vibe.
Ultimately, this biography presents the conflicting accomplishments of a man whose influence on today’s society can’t be denied—yet, Lilly’s actual contributions to science remain obscure. His great discovery from using psychedelic drugs is something he called “ECCO,” the Earth Coincidence Control Office, some sort of extraterrestrial command station that, he thought, interfered with human minds. This wasn’t an entirely negative influence, however. John Lilly believed the only negative force in the universe is “solid-state intelligence,” a super computer he witnessed in a vision, which, he believed, will bring about the apocalypse.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Documentaries are always a challenge for weird movies: they are rarely weird themselves, but occasionally address subjects so bizarre they deserve coverage here. This one fits into that category. Lilly frequently uses the words “weird” and “weirdness” to describe his own experiences. He’s a character with strange obsessions and an inconclusive legacy: he did produce some real science, but drifted into pseudoscience and made a lot of ethically questionable decisions (his dolphins didn’t always appreciate the experiments he performed on them). The (brief) presence of Jodorwsky does not hurt anything. The documentary is nonjudgemental, but you’re not likely to come away with the sense that Lilly was an underappreciated genius who was really onto something. Worth seeing.