'Magic Trip' takes psychedelic ride with Pranksters
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11252/1173212-120.stm
Movie review
Friday, September 09, 2011
By Barry Paris
John F. Kennedy and Ken Kesey were both looking forward to the 1964 World's
Fair in New York. Everybody in America was. World's fairs mattered in those
days, and New York hadn't hosted one since 1939. A charming clip in the
documentary at hand shows JFK gingerly pressing the squares on a new-fangled
push-button telephone as he says, "By dialing 1-9-6-4" -- not touching -- "I
launch the final phase of this great effort."
He wouldn't live to see the fair or the year. His death was the death of
American innocence, from which, half a century later, we still haven't fully
recovered. But one disillusioned bunch of West Coast young people decided to go
to the fair anyway.
They would soon be illusioned.
At 29, Ken Kesey, "one of America's greatest writers," led a scruffy band on "a
bus trip across America that changed everything," declares narrator Stanley
Tucci. Their search for themselves and America was largely conducted on LSD.
Directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood can be forgiven some hyperbole in what
is basically a terrific doc. Mr. Kesey (1935-2001) was the author of two highly
influential books, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great
Notion." Whether he was one of our "greatest" writers and whether his
cross-country odyssey "changed everything" can be debated.
But there's no question that the Magic Trip became a major countercultural
milestone. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" and John Steinbeck's
"Travels With Charley," Mr. Kesey set out from California with Beat Generation
bad boy Neal Cassady (aka "Sir Speed Limit") at the wheel of an ancient yellow
school bus, repainted psychedelically for the occasion.
It wasn't so much a bus as a philosophical concept, Mr. Kesey says. Its
passengers were pleasure-seekers of a generation-on-the-cusp: "We weren't old
enough to be beatniks, and we were a little too old to be hippies." But he had
one clear purpose: to make a spontaneous road movie (gas = 28 cents a gallon)
with a 16mm camera and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Unseen until now, it's a
reality show ahead of its time.
Mr. Cassady was not just ahead but the head of his time -- a pre-Hunter
Thompson Dr. Gonzo and real-life model for Mr. Kerouac's Dean Moriarty in "On
the Road." Other zany, amazingly good-natured and confrontation-free "Merry
Pranksters" on the trip included Mr. Kesey's wife, Faye, son Zane, and people
with names like Gretchen Fetchen, Stark Naked, Mal Function and Generally
Famished (Jane Burton).
In one riveting segment, Mr. Kesey reveals his first LSD experience in a
hospital where experiments were conducted by the CIA, which thought the drug
had possibilities for interrogational use. Human guinea pigs were paid $25 a
day, and the taxpayers got their money's worth with Mr. Kesey's articulate
descriptions of "concentric math patterns, hexagons, discordant colors" --
beautiful one minute, terrifying the next.
Nobody knew what dosage of LSD cocktails they were taking, on or off the bus.
Marvelous footage shows gorgeous Stark Naked's joy and terror during a dip in a
pond, where she feels "the algae welcoming me into its existence!'"
Stark never quite recovered, we are told: "All her molecules never came back
together."
Mr. Gibney is the Oscar-winning director of "Taxi to the Dark Side" (2007), an
expose of American torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of the superb "Enron:
The Smartest Guys in the Room" (2006). He and Ms. Ellwood have digitally
improved and adroitly edited the "Magic Trip" material, painstakingly
synchronizing sound to images. (They had to hire a lip reader to help determine
what words people were speaking in what shots.) The result is a pristine time
capsule of 1964 America in full color (most footage of that era being black and
white). It makes you want to re-read Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test"
and re-listen to the Grateful Dead, the Pranksters' unofficial back-up band,
whose "Truckin' " became their great anthem.
Cameos by Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary frame the big generational question:
"Can you pass the acid test?" Most people's LSD revelations are, in fact, more
loopy or tiresome than profound -- and the freak-outs aren't pretty. True
confession here: My own first psychedelic experience as a strait-laced
19-year-old was quite involuntary, when a "friend" dropped a tab of acid into
the Pepsi I was drinking without telling me.
Not all such pranksters were nice. "No matter how hard I try, I will eventually
lie to you," was one of their mottos, and they tended to abandon anyone like
Stark who couldn't keep it together. But Mr. Kesey himself is genuinely
lovable, gently guiding his chaotic Lewis & Clark expedition. His subsequent
repudiation of LSD was inevitable (like most people's).
"We went wild for a while," he says, "because we were caged up for 50,000
years, but now it's getting away from us ... time to stop."
At the time, though, there was a certain internal logic to the drug-drenched
self-indulgence, and seeds of the embryonic feminist and civil-rights
movements. ("God, there's a lotta colored people here!" one of the Pranksters
says, as they integrate a segregated beach in New Orleans without knowing it.)
Mind-and-reality-altering was the whole point. 'Twas ever thus, down through
the history of all substance use and abuse, from ancient Greek bacchanalias to
Joe's Bar (all 43 of them) on East Carson Street.
How appropriate at the end of the trail, finally reaching the New York World's
Fair, to find its definitive DuPont exhibit: "Better Living Through Chemistry."
--
Opens today at Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room in North Oakland.
PG film critic emeritus Barry Paris: [email protected] .
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