“We’re all try­ing to ful­fill our­selves, under­stand our­selves, get in touch with our­selves, face the real­ity of our­selves, explore our­selves, expand our­selves. Ever since we dis­pensed with God we’ve got noth­ing but our­selves to explain this mean­ing­less hor­ror of life.”
–Eddie Jessup

It’s a tes­ta­ment to the sheer will­ful­ness of John Corigliano’s chal­leng­ing score that dur­ing a view­ing of Altered States (1980) the sound­track mirac­u­lously holds its own against Ken Rus­sell’s visual orgies of Para­janov­ian icono­graphic tableaux, each esca­lat­ing in insan­ity as we delve head-long (and nightmare-deep) into a highly sub­jec­tive hero’s jour­ney from hope­less­ness towards redemption.

Though Paddy Chayef­sky’s script cov­ers sev­eral years in the courtship, mar­riage, and sep­a­ra­tion of two dri­ven Ivy league aca­d­e­mic pro­fes­sion­als, pro­tag­o­nist Jes­sup (William Hurt) painfully and glar­ingly can not bring him­self to say “I love you” to his part­ner until the last line of the movie. If the L-word’s con­spic­u­ous absence hangs over the resul­tant daz­zlingly brazen hal­lu­ci­na­tory pro­ceed­ings, Jes­sup is haunted in his state of arrested devel­op­ment by another word that fills the wounded neg­a­tive space left in a soul lack­ing love: “ter­ri­ble,” both a defin­ing word and world­view that Jes­sup declares at the film’s out­set of hav­ing con­tracted dur­ing his father’s drawn out death of cancer.

“One day I thought I heard him say some­thing. I got up and leaned over him, my ear an inch away from his lips. ‘Did you say some­thing, Pop?’ Then I heard the word he was des­per­ately try­ing to say, a soft hiss of a word. He was say­ing… ‘terrible.’…Terrible. So the end was ter­ri­ble, even for the good peo­ple like my father, so the pur­pose of all our suf­fer­ing was just more suffering.”

Lis­ten­ing to Corigliano’s tracks on their own, divorced from Russell’s ver­tig­i­nous com­pli­men­tary imagery, it is easy to imag­ine that you are lost within a con­found­ing, con­fus­ing, cold, and harsh uni­verse that may never truly make sense.