Altered States

In 1967 New York City, psycho physiologist Edward 'Eddie' Jessup (William Hurt) spends time floating in an isolation tank, researching sensory deprivation. He hallucinates religious allegories and cries while re-experiencing his father's painful death. His friend Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban), a pharmacologist, record his EEG tracings. Jessup admits he doesn't know what he's searching for. At a party, Jessup meets Emily (Blair Brown) a doctoral candidate in physical anthropology. After they make passionate love, he reveals that has a child he believed in God and had visions... until his father died and the visions stopped. Emily realizes that he is someone willing to sell his soul for Truth. She tries to convince him that "life doesn't have truths. And that for Jessup's fanatical search for 'Truth' all he has done is replace God with the Original Self. Both Jessup and Emily get teaching positions at Harvard University. Emily suggests that they get married. He agrees, although he cannot reciprocate her great love for him. In a jump forward to 1974, Arthur and is wife Sylvia (Dori Brenner) move to Boston. They learn that Eddie and Emily Jessup, whom have two daughters, are separating. Jessup has no time for a family and sentimental feelings when he must find his Original Self. Emily travels to Nairobi, Kenya to study baboons. Jessup goes to South American to participate in a mushroom ceremony held by a backward tribe of Maya descendants. All who partake are supposed to have a common experience. When Jessup drinks the ceremonial liquid, he hallucinates he is propelled into a crack into Nothing, from which, the Mayan chief explains, comes one's unborn soul. After returning to Boston, Jessup resumes isolation tank experimentation while Arthur and his friend Mason Parris (Charles Haid) record his words. He injects himself with the mushroom solution and has amazing hallucination and blackouts while in the tank. At one point, he tells his assistants that he has become an ape man and is killing a sheep. He emerges from the tank with blood on his mouth; X-rays reveal that his skull has temporarily take on the shape of a gorilla skull. At night, Jessup briefly experiments genetic changes, and hair grows on his body. Emily returns to Boston from her trip to Kenya in which she is still in love with Jessup and worried that he is cracking up. He goes to the tank along and emerges as an ape man. He brutally beats a guard before escaping to the zoo. There, he kills and eats a sheep. Jessup is discovered by the police... in his human form. Jessup insists that he go back into the tank with Emily, Arthur and Mason present to witness the realty that he can really turn into an ape man. There is an explosion that knocks out Arthur and Mason. A whirlpool vortex forms in the lab and Jessup, in en embryonic state, is sucked toward the moment of creation. Emily pull him out. Jessup tells Emily he know that what all that is important is human life, not terrible moment of creation. Only her love is keeping him from being pulled back to that time. Suddenly, he changes into his embryonic form. Emily tells him to fight it if he loves her. They touch and she becomes an energy form. Jesusp slams his arm into the wall over and over. Suddenly, human again, he hugs Emily, who also reverts to her human form.