An unorthodox documentary profile of an unorthodox scientific polymath, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office has been one of the more enjoyably left-field world premieres at Rotterdam film festival this week.
An American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, author and self-described psychonaut, Lilly earned both fame and infamy for numerous ambitious projects spanning from the 1950s to the 1990s. He died in 2001, leaving behind a huge body of work, a highly contested legacy, and a stranger-than-fiction life story. This fascinating film is rich in wild episodes and WTF twists, even if its deadpan surface tone sometimes undersells the alluringly strange depths beneath. The working title for this project, after all, was Weirdness.
Co-directors Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens both have eclectic track records that include experimental documentaries, sci-fi thrillers and modern-day Shakespeare adaptions. Interweaving archive footage, a handful of recent interviews plus acres of previously unseen home movie material gleaned from Lilly’s son, here they create something closer to an audio-visual poem than a straight bio-doc, with Chloë Sevigny’s woozy audio narration and a soundtrack of gently burbling electronic music boosting the deliberately trippy effect. The duo cite French New Wave icon Chris Marker’s free-ranging essay-films as stylistic inspiration. The work of cult British director Adam Curtis, who creates grand conspiratorial docu-thrillers from densely layered collages of BBC library footage, feels like another obvious parallel.
Born to a wealthy Minnesota banking family in 1915, Lilly was probably best known for his long-running attempts to communicate with dolphins and whales, often making exaggerated claims of inter-species contact. But he also created some landmark inventions, notably the isolation tank, and explored the outer limits of consciousness by using his own brain as a laboratory for psychoactive drugs. In later life, Lilly tarnished his track record as a reputable scientist to become a kind of guru figure to the emerging hippie underground, embracing the wilder fringes of New Age pseudo-science, commune-style living and druggy self-discovery.
Lilly’s obsessive quest to find a shared language with cetaceans throws up some pretty bizarre subplots, from the female researcher who became sexually involved with a dolphin to Lilly injecting dolphins with LSD as part of a NASA-funded Cold War research program. This led to Lilly himself becoming a prolific LSD user, enduring scary bad trips in which he regressed millions of years, meeting his “hairy anthropoid” ancestors. One unusually heavy dose ended with him recovering in hospital, temporarily blind and comatose. Undeterred, he later embraced ketamine with similar eagerness, entering trance-like states which he claimed opened up a link to his extra-terrestrial “true self”.
An early member of the team that launched the S.E.T.I. project (search for extra terrestrial intelligence), Lilly was interested in outer space as much as inner space. In 1974, he claimed a shadowy cosmic entity, which he dubbed the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.), was secretly directing the seemingly random connections of human existence. Long before The Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999), he warned that a sentient AI supercomputer, which he called Solid State Intelligence, might ultimately turn hostile to humankind, with most citizens already trapped inside a “consensus simulation.”
In their weaker moments, Almereyda and Stephens sometimes flatten the cinematic power of Lilly’s audacious ideas and high-risk antics into a cerebral lecture-type format, thin on either scientific context or dramatic depth. Which is odd, because Lilly’s larger-than-life story is ripe for the big screen treatment – indeed, fictionalised versions of his various projects already inspired two feature films, the Mike Nichols-directed The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Ken Russell’s mind-bending sci-fi thriller Altered States (1980). His legacy has also found its way into novels, pop songs, TV shows and computer games.
A born showman and prolific author as well as a scientist, Lilly’s enduring fame is at least partly grounded in his flair for self-promotion and his connections to feted counterculture figures like surrealist film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. Still a twinkly old shaman at the grand old age of 95, Jodorowsky shares a few first-hand memories in this film, one of a handful of Lilly’s surviving contemporaries squeezed between vintage footage. Major credit is also due to archive producer Hannah Shepard for corralling such a sprawl of diverse material into a coherent whole.
Directors, screenwriters: Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens
Cast: Chloë Sevigny, Gigi Coyle, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hella McVay, Scott McVay, Diana Reiss
Editing: Courtney Stephens, Iva Radivojevi?, Max Bowens
Music: Brian McOmber
Producers: Taylor Hess, Jesse Miller, Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens
Production company, world sales: Subtle Body Films (US)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English
89 minutes
