08/04/2011
Review by David Anthony
In one of the earliest and most memorable lines in the film Magic Tripnewly restored and edited by Alex Gibney and Allison Elwood, a narrator slyly asks the question “When did the sixties begin?“ It has by now become axiomatic and thus only slightly an exaggeration to reply in this connection that if you do recall them, you probably weren’t really there. But we can also ask where.
Magic Trip suggests that the answer to this query lies somewhere around 1963 and with writer Ken Kesey, who had by age 49 made himself quite a reputation from two best selling novels, One Flew Over The Cuckoos’ Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. At once dazzled and enervated by his fame, he set out with a group of unconventional friends who came to be known as Merry Pranksters to undertake a road trip in a once yellow bus he and his cohorts repainted and christened “Further.” The excursion became an odyssey in the tradition of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley and a precursor to the quintessential sixties road film, Easy Rider.
Key to the bus trip was that it was to be filmed. To that end the pranksters bought cameras and stock, and created a soundtrack on a Wollensak tape recorder. The problem was that no one made the time to try to sync sound and image so the work lay around for decades waiting for someone to revive the effort and give the film at least some semblance of order so that it might then be rendered viewable. In this sense this tale is very much about film.
The result, Magic Trip, mixes the voices of the prankster protagonists with much of the footage that until now had been largely legendary. The product is a striking visual document capturing a pivotal time in North American and global history, the loss of innocence precipitating the creation of a counter culture in which drugs, the sexual revolution and radical anti-establishment politics coexisted in a myriad of weird ways that still largely defy description.
Full disclosure: Kesey was an Oregonian, and for four years so was I. A musician friend played with the pranksters in the eighties, and while I never met Kesey, I could have, and although a generation younger, the trippy adventures unfolding in those heady days still remain so resonant that Kesey’s magic bus saga held interest.
On one hand Magic Trip could not be more illustrative of the social forces that bred rebellion among artists, bohemians and, by extension, a younger generation whose consciousness was shaped by the civil rights movement, bold new trends in popular music and society, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War, each later becoming reference points for what constituted the sixties, locally and globally.
On the other hand, the film also reveals how ordinary the pranksters were in the way they had been raised until one or another political, cultural or social detour arose in their lives, launching them into uncharted territory. Kesey himself proved a case in point. In his own estimation he was rather typical, involved in collegiate athletics as a wrestler and football player, an accomplished U of O student who then found himself propelled into a brave new world by the LSD experiments at Stanford.
Influenced by Kerouac, his prowess as an author and success as a personality brought him into contact with his heroes, including Allen Ginsberg, and soon helped create something of a cult around himself, especially as his friendship with the members of the Grateful Dead blossomed into an artistic oasis for each of them. Magic Trip meticulously brings all of these factors into focus.
Like the strange trip itself, the film rambles and contains random bits which portray the altered states of various real life characters in the piece, a critical mass of whom were renamed for the qualities by which they became known. Simultaneously, Magic Trip illustrates how sixties experimentation catalyzed multiple movements forcing the US and a wider world toward volcanic social changes. Vividly referencing acid tests and magic mushrooms the pranksters alchemically seek to transform seers into believers, providing that they are ready to take the ride in 1964 America.
Despite excesses ranging from the libertine and licentious to the blatantly bizarre, Kesey somehow sustained a marriage with his junior high school sweetheart that withstood innumerable affairs. Magic bus passengers became intimately entangled with partners other than those to whom they were legally or emotionally bound, causing friction among former friends. Then there were no vocabulary for their acts.
Magic Trip uses this road story to recreate the context of the space and time within which a sixties counterculture could emerge. The loss of innocence was both literal and figurative, dramatized when the lily white bus travelers elect to take a dip at a beach they subsequently come to recognize as for black bathers only, naively blundering into what could have been an incident. Yet the discovery came without words from any of the clearly shocked sable swimmers. What might have happened if the shoe were on the other foot? Quite a contrast to death defying Freedom Riders.
It helps to be enamored of Kerouac and Kesey, beguiled by Ginsberg and tolerant of some daring social experiments of the post-Eisenhower decade. But even if one does not share the desire of rebellious students of the beat generation nonetheless no more fully in sync with its tenets than with those of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and struggling to find their way in a wacky world they could yet barely comprehend, Magic Trip is an unsettling visit to that curious instant. Leaving the merry prankster Magic Bus it can be hard to look at magic, buses or trips in quite the same way again.
For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony