Psychedelic plants have grown on and been used by people on nearly every continent since the beginning of humanity; LSD or lysergic acid diethylamide was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938. Naturally, psychedelic use by humans has a place in visual culture and therefore cinema. “Avant-garde filmmakers were, as early as the mid-1950s, among the first artists to explore the nexus between drug use and cinematic spectatorship … Kenneth Anger’s kaleidoscopic Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954/1966) is arguably the first film to implicitly depict a psychedelic trip” (Church, 2018).
Psychedelics have always been known as a way that humans connect with the earth. This is very evident in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) in which a group of college students travel to a Midsommar festival in Europe and become involved in the community's trippy, strange, and often gory traditions. In the film, every character takes many trips, firstly on psilocybin mushrooms and then multiple more times on what is assumed to be psilocybin tea. This plant-based tripping relates to the themes of nature throughout the film, and every time they trip they are in nature. The film shows the characters being very close to nature while tripping, which is an accurate depiction of the ways in which many cultures actually take psychedelics. Psychedelics also connect users with other people. This connection ranges from platonic to sexual and is depicted in both Midsommar and Satyricon (1969).
In Satyricon, the characters of a strange, almost science fiction ancient Rome (who are not overtly tripping, but rather are shown through a psychedelic lens) are often shown in groups in places such as bathhouses or town squares, both platonically and sexually. This sense of community is evident in MIdsommar as well, and also includes a great deal of sex. The characters in these two films also share the trait that they do not have control over what they are doing, but rather acting without logical thinking. Where they differ is why they are that way; the characters of Midsommar took drugs intentionally in order to open themselves up to the world and lose their ego in order to face the fear and pain of death. The characters in Satyricon, however, shown through the psychedelic lens as acting only on pleasure, only partying and enjoying themselves. “In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film, it was always with a patina of dirtbag mummery: naked broads in body paint frugging through a kaleidoscope via a hyperactive zoom lens” (Kuersten, 2019). This change may be attributed to the re-emergence of research and the use of psychedelics in therapy in the last decade.
As psychedelics are largely visual drugs, it is obvious that psychedelic films would be made visually “trippy”. How the trip is depicted visually changes from film to film. Early psychedelic films were very colorful, overwhelming, whimsical, and “hallucinogenic”, often showing characters with strange attributes or adornments. In both Midsommar and Satyricon, many people wear flower headbands. In George Dunning’s 1968 animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, the entirety of the film is very colorful like a psychedelic trip in which colors and lights are brighter than usual. It also shows many patterns, which relates to the patterns or visuals that are seen during trips. These colors and patterns are also seen in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, as well as a layering of shots which relates to the way in which people become overwhelmed with the many things happening at once during a trip. Satyricon is known to have been intentional in its casting of trippy looking people, Felinni himself spoke of finding his actors “None of them are professional actors… I opened a little office in Rome and asked funny-looking people to come in” (Ebert, 2001). These films feel as if they attempt to replicate psychedelic trips, to make the viewer/user feel as if they are tripping, but in a much more aggressive way than films today.
In Midsommar, Aster takes a different approach, one that film critic Kuersten Erich on their page “Acidemic” has dubbed ‘’ ‘hallucinaturalism’ — i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as a blacklight lava lamp excuse for gaudy excess but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body” (Kuersten, 2019). This more natural and less in-your-face approach to visual depiction of a psychedelic trip allows the film to show the ways in which the trip is affecting the characters without being ridiculous and causing the viewers to lose the emotional intention of the trip.
Because of the ways in which cinema reacts with culture, this new way of depicting trips as how they actually are takes us away from the days of flashing, kaleidoscopic, trippy films and to a place where psychedelics are taken seriously as a medicine rather than just a crazy drug experience. Other forms of media are documenting the resurgence of psychedelic medicine, such as Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a documentary tv program made by VICE, so why shouldn’t the film industry also help to increase the use of psychedelics by mindfully using them as a tool both for making films as well as a part of their films. What artist wouldn’t be better off from a bit of natural drug therapy, or simply a silly trip.
Church, David. “The Doors of Reception: Notes Toward a Psychedelic Film Investigation.” Senses of Cinema (blog), June 27, 2018. http://sensesofcinema.com/2018/feature-articles/the-doors-of-reception-notes-t oward-a-psychedelic-film-investigation/.
“Fellini Satyricon Movie Review (1970) | Roger Ebert.” Accessed March 4, 2020. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fellini-satyricon-2001.
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Kuersten, Erich. “Acidemic — Film: Hallucinatural: MIDSOMMAR.” Acidemic — Film(blog), July 11, 2019.
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25YL. “Psychedelic Healing in Midsommar | 25YL | A24 Films,” December 2, 2019.https://25yearslatersite.com/2019/12/02/psychedelic-healing-in-midsommar/. Tupper, Kenneth W., Evan Wood, Richard Yensen, and Matthew W. Johnson.
“Psychedelic Medicine: A Re-Emerging Therapeutic Paradigm.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 187, no. 14 (October 6, 2015): 1054–59. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.141124.
