Grimsley brought over another Hippie Movie tonight, "Psych-Out" (1968), starring Jack Nicholson and Susan Strasberg, who was also in last week's "The Trip" (which Nicholson wrote). Once again, LSD is involved, as you might've guessed by the title, and in both movies the use of the drug is at first promoted by the protagonists in each film, but then is experienced as a nightmare by the young people who take it. Peter Fonda has a horrible trip in "The Trip", and Susan Strasberg will have one that nearly ends in her death in "Psych-Out". Neither film, then, is pro-acid, just in case you were wondering.
But we are getting a little ahead of ourselves
Strasberg stars as a young runaway who is newly arrived in the Haight/Ashbury district in San Francisco, which was ground zero for Hippies during the height of Flower Power mania. As is now well known, the CIA introduced the drug LSD into American cultural circles in the late 1950s to early 1960s, starting with the intellectual crowd, and movie stars. Then they had a brainstorm idea in the mid-60s, when well-organized student groups were agitating for an end to the Vietnam War, to which the young men were being manditorily drafted into. As a way to get the youth to stop protesting, the CIA spread LSD around the Hippie scene in San Francisco, as well as in other metropolitan centers where the youth culture was prominent. The whole drug scene of the 1960s was a CIA creation, this is verified fact if you care to read the books and do the research, and as further proof, the Agency did a repeat performance with the introduction of crack cocaine into the inner cities of Black America in the 1980s, which took down not only the beautiful and creative musical achievements of the black community to that point, and replaced them with rap - which has never gone away since - but it also destroyed the voice of the black intellectual movement that existed in the 1960s and early 70s and has since been replaced by "bling bling" n-word culture, which the black youth have been trained to call themselves, something the more enlightened African American folks from the 60s never did.
I was there as a kid in the 60s, so I know.
And I tell you all of this just to provide a background on how LSD came to be used by the Hippies of the late 1960s, and came to be thought of as a wonder drug by many. For others, like Syd Barrett, the founder of Pink Floyd, it was a nightmare that ruined his life and sent him spiraling down into schizophrenia.
This is what the CIA knew from their research into the drug, that it had a very strong effect on the mind and the sensory organs and could push the young people far away from their present political concerns. They knew it would make the kids lackadaisical and "out of it", and that's exactly what happened. Kind of like what the legalization of ultra-potent marajuana is doing now, making Stoners out of everyone, which again is not good. I know about that, too, and am beyond grateful that I stopped smoking pot 22 years ago.
So that's the end of my tangential tirade (sorry) and now back to the movie.
Susan Strasberg has arrived in The Haight looking for her older brother. The two siblings are survivors of a horrific childhood, the brother (Bruce Dern) has dropped out of society and become a Jesus freak in San Francisco. He is clearly schizophrenic. Susan has her own disability; she is deaf.
Just off the bus from the Midwest, she enters a psychedelic cafe and runs into Jack Nicholson and his bandmates. Jack is a long haired lead guitarist for a band that is trying to make it big in the SF music scene. He is wary of acid but his bandmates all take it. Everybody talks in Hippie lingo. Jack looks too clean cut for his role (this is before he became a raging alcoholic and coke fiend), and so does his friend Dean Stockwell, playing a bandana wearing Counterculture philosopher who pontificates on the nature of reality and the "game playing middle class".
Man, I couldn't have hung with a guy like this even if I had been old enough to be a Hippie. He is beyond pretentious, and Jack thinks so too. He spends most of the movie trying to get laid and get his band a coveted gig at "The Ballroom".
Now, there are a bunch of Rednecks - big, macho men - who hang out at the local junkyard. They hate Hippies and in particular Bruce Dern the Jesus Figure. He preaches in Golden Gate Park, and these guys hate it - "all that talk about peace and love", they say. They can't stand him and are gonna clobber him one way or another, even though the band members kick the rednecks' butts in a classic Hippie Punchout that had me laughing out loud unintentionally.
To bring things to a head, the Dean Stockwell character, who is supposed to be above such pursuits, covets Susan Strasberg, who is nominally Jack's girl but he is after other women anyway. Stockwell knows this, and so he plies poor Susan - who is deaf - with phoney attention and caring, and then he drugs her with an even worse hallucinogen.....STP.
STP was notorious as an extreme psychedelic, deadly in some cases.
After Strasberg ingests the STP, she goes on an even worse trip than Peter Fonda had in "The Trip".
The movie turns into a horror film at that point, and I will let you see it for yourself to examine the wreckage.
Whereas "The Trip" was a rather arty examination of LSD culture, thoughtfully made, and even if cheesy it had a good script, "Psych-Out" on the other hand was more of a conventional Hollywood picture - "B" Grade - that was produced to capitalise on the Hippie scene.
It feels less focused as a story. In the last 15 minutes though, it becomes a horror movie, complete with fire effects ala "Carrie", then it ends with a scene on the Golden Gate Bridge that will surely steer you away from ever using STP, if you ever had an inclination to do so (and if they still even make it).
As I said to Grimsley when the movie was over : "That was some seriously weird stuff".
I'll give "Psych-Out" Two Regular Thumbs Up just for curiosity value, for you to see how strange things got in 1968. Though I must say that, as a kid, I didn't see any Hippies this weird).
If you watch it, watch it with an ex-Hippie if you know one, or someone who was "almost a Hippie" like Grim. He was only 15 in 1968, not quite old enough to be a Hippie. I was only 8 and didn't know Grim then, but anyway, try to get in the spirit of the times if and when you watch "Psych-Out".
It will help you enjoy it more.
See you in the freakin' morning! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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