Forced Hollywood Ending?
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Stefkin — 21 years ago(June 27, 2004 06:55 AM)
Note the words Eddie utters before he goes into the deformative state at the end. He says that he has experienced the great emptiness and terror of coming into existence, and that it is not that state, but the living reality that holds the truth. The other states eventually are nothing, literally.
It is also this understanding that makes him express his love for his wife. He was always to preoccupied with finding truth and understanding in the universe to give himself to love, but now that he knows that truth and understanding in fact only lead to the emptiness he experienced, he can finally just feel, just be part of the moment and give into it.
When he experiences the sort of "fallback" of becoming shapeless again, and even affecting his wife by transponding energy into her, it is his new realisation that helps him return to the reality he wishes to be a part of.
He does not transcend because there is nothing to transcend to. All is emptiness. Very buddhist and one of the reasons I loved this unexpected ending. -
chasehamrick — 19 years ago(June 29, 2006 08:52 AM)
Yes the ending is great because that really sounds like something you would learn in an altered state like that. If you were hallucinating and doing that crazy metaphysical beep i think you would realize the truth is you don't really want to exist in the nothingness, before the universe was created thats not what were meant for, you would want to exist with people and feel love.
not sure if i actually believe in trips causing thing to happen physically like in the movie but i could really see figuring something out like that during a trip -
briansouter — 15 years ago(May 16, 2010 06:56 AM)
a bit late to respond now,but theres no buddhist 'emptiness' in this filmSunyata is not some sort of nothingness.
Sunyata is a Mahayana development of 'Dependent Origination'that is no thing exists independently'Phenomena are śnya or unreal because no phenomenon when taken by itself is thinkable: they are all interdependent and have no separate existence of their own.'
This talk of 'energy' is also misleadingThats a western mechanistic interpretation.
'He who takes things out of the Earth invites disaster'..Hopi saying -
gsygsy — 13 years ago(July 28, 2012 09:02 AM)
Just seen the movie and thought the ending was inevitable - didn't seem tacked on at all. As Stefkin says in his comment, 'He (Eddie) does not transcend because there is nothing to transcend to'. There is no external meaning, no meaning out there for us to find. We choose meaning, or we choose death. It's anti-mystical, anti-religious. Existentialism rather than Buddhism. The last line seems to me to be what the whole film (and I suppose the source novel too) was working towards.
Pretty good, really. Much better than I was expecting. -
gnolti — 19 years ago(August 05, 2006 04:59 AM)
Nobody can top Crealist's summary, but I'd add one point: The story is a satisfying fulfillment of the philosophy (or thesis, or credo, or what have you) that Chayefsky put forward in Network (1976), which is that the individual in modern society is too self-absorbed and self-interested to be capable of love. (In Network he pitted William Holden against Faye Dunaway and the way corporate media made a mockery of human experience. Holden lost.) I don't know how Chayefsky's original novel of Altered States ended, but it makes sense that he would try to show that humans are still capable of reaching out to each other from within the womb/tomb of the self.
"Follow those who seek the truth. Beware of those who find it." -
Patrick-27 — 19 years ago(August 08, 2006 11:33 AM)
Actually, the novel (which I just finished reading for the 2nd time
since I first read it in 1986) ended the same way as the movie, except that
they didn't disappear and re-appear as they did in the movie.
The novel of course was also PACKED with theoretical speculations of
what was happening to Jessup. I found it both fascinating and hard
to understand.
In that last scene where Jessup is explaining to Emily what happened, he
tells her that at one point all of his matter was returning to pure engergy,
pure nothingness. And it doesn't stop there. It never stops. From nothingness,
it goes on to something more horrible! Whatever that means. That has had me
stumped ever since I first read the book, but it sounds alot like Emily did
more that just save Jessup's life, or save him from spending the rest of
it looking like an extra from 1,000,000 B.C.. She did nothing less than
save him from what might be called Hell. And she did so at the risk of
joining him there. I just wish that I could more clearly understand the
exact nature of what she saved him from. Basically, the book seemed more
like a metaphore for human kind's search for the meaning of life than it
did a science fiction.
I was not overly impressed with the DVD. It did have a number of trailers,
and scene access. It also had a page about the scientific theory that went
into the movie. When I first saw that page, my eyes bugged out because I
didn't look very carefully and I thought that each sentence was a link to
a different documentary about the science of altered states, but instead,
the text simply posed the question of wheter or not it was possible to
retrieve such ancient memories? Some scientists think that the answer
might lie it the unexplored two thirds of the human brain. That's the
best of it that I can remember.
Now, if you want to rent a movie with a fascinating "Science Of" documentary,
check out the DVD for "Suspect Zero" and see what it has to say about remote
viewing.
In any case, I really did like altered states (which I saw in the theatre)or I
wouldn't have rented the DVD, or book from the library. But what I wouldn't
give to talk to the late Paddy Chayefsky, or some of the scientists that
he spoke to, whose names are mentioned in the acknowledgements
By the way Gnolti, I noticed that quote at the end of your post.
"Follow those who seek the truth. Beware of those who find it."
When I first heard it, I heard it phrased as "May god deliver us
to those who seek the truth, and deliver us from those who've found
it". I've been looking for the author of that quote for years. Do you
know who it is?
-Patrick- -
gnolti — 19 years ago(August 09, 2006 04:22 AM)
Ironic you should notice, Patrick, since I only just changed my tag yesterday, as I do periodically. But I got the quote from Truffaut's Le Peau Douce, where it was attributed to Andre Gide.
"I never had a latency period." -
tbyrd8 — 19 years ago(August 24, 2006 04:13 PM)
I never could figure out why Chayevsky disowned the film. Not only was the ending virtually the same, huge chunks of dialogue came straight from the book to the screen, though often with the characters (very naturally, in my opinion) saying their lines at the same time, interrupting each other. I liked this movie from the first viewing in the theater, and along the way got a VHS and now a DVD of it. But then I like almost all of "crazy" Ken Russell's films.
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Nick_Jones — 17 years ago(December 14, 2008 09:57 PM)
Chayevsky disowned the film (sight unseen, according to the Trivia section), and substituted the name "Sidney Aaron" for the screenplay credit, because he didn't like Ken Russell's direction and tried to undermine what he was doing. When Russell caught Chayevsky telling the actors they "shouldn't act so drunk" in the restaurant scene, Russell had him thrown off the set. In other words, Chayevsky (well-known for his overblown ego) was being a d*ck, got caught, and acted like a spiteful little child.
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rainbird131162 — 18 years ago(November 18, 2007 07:36 AM)
It just doesn't look like it was intended to end that way.
Yes it does & it's the perfect ending. The whole dynamic of Jessup & Emily's relationship is that she loves him & would do anything, whereas he just cares about his work. She proves how she feels by saving his life in the tankroom, plunging into that cosmic whirlpool and bringing him back from the void. When Jessup tells her that his experience has made him realise how empty the universe is and how important Emily's love for him is, it's the first sign that his priorities have changed. In the final scene he overcomes the transformation to save her life, proving by his actions that he loves her. It's a fine ending and makes perfect sense given the themes the movie examines.
It looks like the ending should have been more like Jessup and possibly his wife disintegrating into that great vortex of a higher (lower) level of being.
Since the whole experiment was about regression why on earth would they sudddenly be turned into a
higher
level of being (besides, didn't we see that trotted out in
Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture
)? And what would be the point of showing them disintegrating into a lower level of being other than to provide a pointlessly downer ending? Moreover how would such an ending square with the earlier scene of Emily being able to save Jessup from the whirlpool?
I sensed that Chayefsky was pressured by Hollywood sensibilities of the time to concoct a happy ending perpetuating the old "love conquers all" axiom and that's why the end of the movie seems so abrupt.
'Hollywood sensibilities of the time'? What, in 1980?
. 'Love conquers all' may be an old axiom but that doesn't make it any the less true. The great thing about the film is that it finds a fresh way to deliver this message.
Whether this was due to unfavorable audience repsonses in pre-screenings or pressure from the cinematic illuminati, it just looks a bit contrite at the end when compared to the deliberate pacing of the rest of the movie.
Well I didn't find the movie 'deliberately paced' (by which I take it you mean slow). In fact I was surprised just how quickly it seemed to zip along. At a tight 99 mins I thought
Altered States
was a rather good example of a movie that knew what it wanted to say and got the hell out once it had said it. -
LeonardPine — 18 years ago(March 03, 2008 11:39 AM)
It was always meant to end like it does, but they had a lot of problems of how to film it. The prosthetic suits looked to 'rubbery' so it was decided to put visual effects over the top of the shots. Very complicated way back then.
I like the ending, and thats the ending that was always intended.
"I felt my pecker flutter once, like a pigeon havin' a heart attack" -
mojojobob — 18 years ago(March 04, 2008 04:30 PM)
I agree with most of the assumptions made in this thread pertaining to way the film ends, thematically it makes sense. The pacing that is implemented in the way the story is told and filmed is not on the other hand. The previous three scenes are a long build ups to the truth in Eddie's experiments, and it is tackled that he finds this ultimate truth to existence. The scene of his backlash upon knowing this great nothingness and the paralleled physical regression are both extremely brief, not fully fleshing out such an important epiphany. The film shows Eddie running around in this ape-man state for over ten minutes, which was relatively unimportant when compared with what happens at the very end. Thats why it seems tacked on, its too abrupt given its context to the rest of the picture.
http://whatsnewinspace.blogspot.com -
c0y0te — 18 years ago(March 08, 2008 09:21 AM)
I don't remember wich one it is, but there is an episode of South Park (yeah) where Cartman do the ''Jessup wall thumping thingie'' while changing colors! I thought it was pretty hilarious and weird at the same time I mean, who watches South Park and know about Altered States?!? Just me, maybe
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agentalbert — 9 years ago(July 05, 2016 01:01 AM)
I agree with most of the assumptions made in this thread pertaining to way the film ends, thematically it makes sense. The pacing that is implemented in the way the story is told and filmed is not on the other hand. The previous three scenes are a long build ups to the truth in Eddie's experiments, and it is tackled that he finds this ultimate truth to existence.
The scene of his backlash upon knowing this great nothingness and the paralleled physical regression are both extremely brief, not fully fleshing out such an important epiphany.
The film shows Eddie running around in this ape-man state for over ten minutes, which was relatively unimportant when compared with what happens at the very end. Thats why it seems tacked on, its too abrupt given its context to the rest of the picture.
I think you've nailed it here. The ending seems so abrupt and rushed and I don't think the importance of Jessup's epiphany comes across well. Too little time spent there, and too much on him attacking security guards and visiting the zoo.