the trip (d. roger corman, w. jack nicholson)

The Trip is both a cultural emblem and a work of art. As a cultural emblem, it’s astonishing. Perhaps the high water mark of a liberated, prelapsarian LA, before Manson, before Altamont, before the dream died. Because the film, for all its druggy flightiness, is anchored in a Southern California actuality. The clubs and the streets, as well as the modernist mansions and the beaches. This is a world where drug taking is not so much transgressive as integrated into the development of the soul, the world of psychic experimentation, á la Aldous Huxley. Drug-taking isn’t hedonistic, it verges on a shamanic, religious experience. This appears to be what Corman is seeking to capture, and whilst it is easy to ridicule this intent, there is perhaps something remarkable about it, a road which LA and the rest of the world turned off of, fearful of the dark edges and the anarchy. (How curious that at the end of the Pennbaker Dylan doc, he is referred to, disrespectfully, as “an anarchist”.)

Form and content overlap, the medium is the message. In order to convey his protagonist’s journey, Corman has to employ visual effects which, in a technological medium, are bound to date. The film feels like a half-way house between Cocteau and Gaspar Noe. The capturing of dream, or nightmare, has always been one of the most elusive quests of art. The Trip includes visual motifs which are dreamlike, something that maps onto a LSD trip. Whilst at times it seems to drift, when the film builds towards the more nightmarish nighttime sequence in the bars and streets of downtown LA, it gathers pace and narrative tension. That it holds together at all is minor miracle, and credit to the screenwriter, none other than then unknown actor, Jack Nicholson. It makes one wonder what kind of material he might have continued to produce as screenwriter and/or director. Much of his rare talent is distilled in the acting roles he would take on over then course of the following fifteen years. But in another, less evidently commercial context, he might have had even more to offer.