GEOFF Bell's review of Ken Russell's Altered States and Michael Cimino's Heavan's Gate is very amusing. But what he says about the Russell film totally misses the point.
Geoff interprets it as a fable about Russell's work, and how he now realises that it has been empty and meaningless. Pure speculation. The story was written as a novel by Paddy Chayevsky, not by Ken Russell.
The self-experimenting scientist in the film doesn't just discover that his hallucinatory experiments are 'a load of pseudo-intellectual crap' as Geoff says, but he discovers that his whole project — 'to find the real, inner self and the meaning of life' — is ridiculous because 'there is no final truth, there is no meaning to life'.
Indeed, he goes further, and argues that the only meaning to life are the purposes and intentions which human beings give to it. Absolutely correct, and very Marxist.
This rejection of the pursuit of absolute truth (which he correctly recognises is essentially a religious notion) is overlaid with an adoption of the power of love as an essential facet of human intentions and purposes, but there's nothing wrong with that is there? In fact it brought tears to my eyes.
Incidentally, I think SC should keep up the film reviews: I very much missed the Under Review page over the past few weeks. Congratulations again on SC's very high quality.
Paul Lawson, West London