Mind Stuff - 16 May 2007 exLJ

I watched Altered States last night and after that I watched Being John Malkovich. Altered States was very different from what I remembered. Being John Malkovich was a kinda weird, not quite black comedy, maybe grey comedy. The funny thing was that they were both about mind stuff.

In Altered States Dr Jessup was proving that the state of the mind changes the state of the body. By sensory deprivation and magic mushrooms his body would transform into homo erectus. When he did he wasn't in control of his behaviour anymore. He nearly lost it a few times but in the end his love for his wife saves them both from a fate worse than death, as the cliche goes.

One of the funny things about Altered States and my mind was that in the beginning he was just describing in words the scenes he was seeing while in the sensory deprivation tank. These descriptions I had turned into images in my mind and remembered the imagined scenes as part of the movie. I was a bit disappointed that the scenes weren't in the movie at all, just a description of them.

In Being John Malkovich a puppetteer discovers a portal into John Malkovich's mind, and then learns to control him and eventually take him over. After many twists and turns they all live happily ever after, except the puppeteer, of course. Thinking about it, maybe it really is a black comedy.