July 3: Doors of perception, doors that do not close
On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris at age 27. Tonight's film: Altered States (1980).
The Doors did not name themselves after a door. They named themselves after a book about opening one. In 1954 the English writer Aldous Huxley took mescaline for the first time and wrote down what happened, in a short book he called “The Doors of Perception.” The title came from the poet William Blake, who had written that “if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” Two young musicians in Los Angeles read Huxley, borrowed the phrase, and called their band The Doors. One of them, Jim Morrison, then spent the next six years acting out the promise of that name on stage.
Morrison was not a scientist. He was a drunk, a showman, a reader, and a romantic, in roughly that order. He had studied film at UCLA, and he carried a poet’s appetite for apocalypse into every performance, reading William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche as seriously as other rock singers read the charts. But he shared with a certain kind of researcher the same restless idea: that ordinary waking consciousness is a small room, and that there are doors out of it, and that they can be opened with chemicals. He pursued that idea with whiskey and psychedelics until it killed him. He had moved to Paris only that March, to write poetry and to be quiet for a while. On the morning of July 3, 1971, his partner Pamela Courson found him dead in the bathtub of their apartment. He was twenty-seven. French law did not require an autopsy, so none was performed, and the official cause was listed as heart failure. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery, a few Metro stops east, in a grave that has been a shrine ever since.
That same restless idea is the whole engine of Altered States (1980). Ken Russell’s film follows Eddie Jessup, a research scientist played by William Hurt in his first screen role, who is convinced that other states of consciousness are not illusions but real places a person can travel to. His tools are the isolation tank and a hallucinogenic mushroom he brings back from a trip to Mexico. The further he goes, the more his body changes to match what his mind is doing, until the film itself is no longer sure whether he is regressing into his ancestors or becoming something that has not existed before.
The cast deserves a word. William Hurt, in his debut, gives the role a sweaty, single-minded seriousness that holds the film together when Ken Russell’s direction starts pushing toward the operatic. The screenplay was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own 1978 novel, and the production was torn apart by creative disputes between Chayefsky and Russell, who wanted the film louder and stranger than the writer did. Both men, in their different ways, were chasing the same thing Morrison was. A door, pushed open as far as it would go.
Where Altered States turns from tribute into warning is in what it costs. Jessup does not come back from his experiments improved. He comes back frightened, and physically altered, and less and less sure which version of himself is the original. The film’s argument, in the end, is the opposite of the counterculture’s. The doors of perception can be opened. But some of them, once opened, do not close.
So tonight, put on Altered States. Watch a man climb into a tank and try to walk back through evolution. And remember that on this date in 1971 a far more famous man, who had spent his life trying to do roughly the same thing with no tank and no supervision, was found dead in a bathtub in Paris.
What else happened on July 3
Two other July 3 events could just as easily have been tonight’s pick:
1886, Karl Benz drives the first automobile in public. On July 3, 1886, he took his Patent-Motorwagen out on the Ringstrasse in Mannheim and showed it to the town. About twenty-five were built and sold over the following years. If this were tonight’s topic, the film would be Death Race 2000 (1975): the first practical car launched an era of personal motorized transport, and the film pushes that era to its violent extreme, turning the automobile into an instrument of state-sanctioned killing.
1988, the USS Vincennes shoots down Iran Air Flight 655. A US Navy cruiser, equipped with the automated Aegis combat system and nicknamed “RoboCruiser” by other ships, mistook a climbing civilian Airbus for an attacking F-14 and fired two missiles at it over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. If tonight turned on machines that make lethal decisions faster than humans can correct them, the film would be Stealth (2005): a military targeting system’s catastrophic error that killed 290 civilians foreshadows a film about an AI-piloted warplane that starts making its own lethal decisions.
Sources
The main event: Jim Morrison, July 3, 1971
Wikipedia, “Jim Morrison” (found dead in the bathtub on the morning of July 3, 1971, age 27, heart failure, no autopsy under French law): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morrison
Britannica, “Jim Morrison” (moved to Paris in 1971 to write poetry, died at 27, buried at Père-Lachaise): https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jim-Morrison
The band name and the literary line behind it
Wikipedia, “The Doors of Perception” (Aldous Huxley’s 1954 essay on his mescaline experience, the source of the band’s name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception
William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), the original “doors of perception” line quoted above
Tonight’s film: Altered States (1980)
Wikipedia, “Altered States” (directed by Ken Russell, William Hurt’s film debut, adapted from Paddy Chayefsky’s novel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_States
The alternative events
Karl Benz’s first public drive (1886), Wikipedia, “Carl Benz” (the Patent-Motorwagen, the July 3, 1886 drive in Mannheim): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
Death Race 2000 (1975), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Race_2000
USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655 (1988), Wikipedia, “Iran Air Flight 655” (the Aegis system, the “RoboCruiser” nickname, the July 3, 1988 downing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Stealth (2005), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_(film)