Revisionary metaphysics in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980): on the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the ontological subversiveness of psychedelic sequences in Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). Exposing the viewer to a mode of experiencing the world that radically deviates from his/her standard mode of experiencing, these sequences call into question the foundations of the viewer’s ‘folk ontology’. Distinguishing between two levels of subversion, the article’s first section explores the notion of an experiential field that is the outcome of a subject-object interaction, opposing the common-sense view that the perceiver is separate from the perceived. Building on but also deviating from this reading, the second section introduces a second and more radical level of subversion. Specifically, the article suggests that the psychedelic sequences expose the viewer to a ‘subject-less’ experience not anchored in any perceiving entity. By maximizing the incomprehensibility coefficient in both the characters and the interpreting viewer, this second level of subversion exposes us to our folk ontological fallacies more directly than the first level does. In this way, Altered States potentially facilitates a process of revisionary metaphysics in the viewer.