I’ve never been a drug person, sad to say. Even living in Key West, one of the marijuana capitals of the United States, I’m not entirely sure where I’d find a connection to buy some pot. At parties, I’m always the one who politely declines to partake whenever a joint gets passed around.
It’s not that I’m a prig or a prude—it’s just that on the rare occasions when I’ve indulged in even a mild drug like pot, my reaction was violent enough to make me swear off the stuff altogether. The night after smoking my first joints, I lay in bed and literally cried myself to sleep—sobbing at the top of my lungs, in great, unstoppable, gut-wracking wails loud enough to wake up everyone on my floor. I stayed away from pot until years later, when a neighbour invited me over for dinner and handed me a pot brownie. Half an hour later, I was feeling light-headed; 15 minutes after that I was nauseous, and 15 minutes after that, I was back in my apartment, vomiting my guts out.
I can only imagine what LSD would do to me, and I’m not anxious to find out. But I’ve always had a fondness for the LSD movies of the late ’60s—and I’ve always been particularly charmed by the surprisingly positive way the drug was portrayed onscreen. Even a Squaresville picture like the bizarre Jackie Gleason/Carol Channing vehicle Skidoo (which I wrote about in this column a few weeks ago) portrays acid trips as a healthy experience—at worst, you might indulge in some silly but essentially harmless behaviour, and at best, you’ll come out the other end of the rabbit hole with your mind opened, all your hang-ups straightened out and your sex life radically recharged.
The best LSD movie I’ve ever seen is 1967’s The Trip, which I finally caught up with last week. When it came out on DVD not long ago, the people who reviewed the disc tended to dismiss the film (or at least condescend to it) as an amusingly dated period curiosity, snickering as they pointed out the low-tech “psychedelic” lighting effects that director Roger Corman used, with varying levels of success, to simulate the effects of LSD, and the way Dennis Hopper manages to shoehorn the word “man” at least twice into every line of dialogue. At best, it was described as a dry run for the team that would regroup a couple of years later on Easy Rider and change American movies forever: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, who wrote the script for The Trip but doesn’t appear onscreen.
I’ll admit, I started out watching The Trip more for its potential camp value than anything else, but I ended up being unexpectedly moved by it. Believe it or not, underneath all of The Trip’s far-out-man trappings, lies one of the best American movies ever made about male friendship.
Fonda plays Paul, a guy who’s decided to take LSD for the very first time. He directs TV commercials for a living, which makes him a bit of an establishment figure, but he has enough of a foot in the artistic world to have a few hip friends willing to aid him in his quest. Chief among them is John, played by Bruce Dern in a performance so warm and gentle and just plain likable that it’s difficult to understand how Dern got typecast as a high-strung psycho so soon after this picture came out.
Nicholson never explains exactly what John does for a living or how he and Paul met, but Dern is so attentive and nurturing as he explains the basics of what’s going to happen to him, what changes his mind is going to undergo, and how he’s going to be watching out for him the whole time that you never doubt that these two guys are dear friends. I love the fond smile, for instance, that dawns on Dern’s face as he watches Fonda experience the first effects of the drug—picking up an orange and feeling as if he’s holding the sun, or being suddenly overwhelmed by the cosmic implications of the phrase “living room.” Later on, when Paul’s trip gets scary, John holds him in his arms and calmly talks him down.
I wish I had a friend like John. Or Bruce Dern maybe. Someone who wouldn’t want me to be complacent, and who could conduct me safely into a new thing. My mind could definitely use some expanding, plus I’m already named Paul. But I don’t currently have anyone I can trust to stand by and feed me some Thorazine the moment I feel my face starting to melt. (November 9, 2006)
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