Altered States (1980)

William Hurt: Eddie Jessup

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Quotes 

• Eddie Jessup : Emily's quite content to go on with this life. She insists she's in love with me - whatever that is. What she means is she prefers the senseless pain we inflict on each other to the pain we would otherwise inflict on ourselves. But I'm not afraid of that solitary pain. In fact, if I don't strip myself of all this clatter and clutter and ridiculous ritual, I shall go out of my fucking mind. Does that answer your question, Arthur?

  Arthur Rosenberg : What question was that?

  Eddie Jessup : You asked me why I was getting divorced.

  Arthur Rosenberg : Oh, listen, it's your life. I'm sorry I even asked.

• Eddie Jessup : What dignifies the Yogic practices is that the belief system itself is not truly religious. There is no Buddhist God per se. It is the Self, the individual Mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth.

  Emily Jessup : What the hell is not religious about that? You've simply replaced God with the Original Self.

  Eddie Jessup : Yes, but we've localized it. Now I know where the Self is. It's in our own minds. It's a form of human energy. Our atoms are six billion years old. We've got six billion years of memory in our minds.

• Eddie Jessup : You saved me. You redeemed me from the pit. I was in it, Emily. I was *in* that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real. I don't want to frighten you, Emily, but what I'm trying to tell you is that moment of terror is a real and living horror, living and growing within me now, and the only thing that keeps it from devouring me is you.

  Emily Jessup : Why don't you just come back to us?

  Eddie Jessup : It's too late. I don't think I can get it out of me anymore. I can't live with it. The pain is too great.

• [Last line] 

  Eddie Jessup : I love you, Emily.

• Eddie Jessup : Memory is energy! It doesn't disappear - it's still in there. There's a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousnesses. There has to be; and I'm telling you it's in the goddamned limbic system.

  Mason Parrish : You're a wacko!

  Eddie Jessup : What's whacko about it, Mason? I'm a man in search of his true self. How archetypically American can you get? Everybody's looking for their true selves. 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.

  Mason Parrish : You're a wacko.

  Eddie Jessup : Well, l think that that true self, that original self, that first self, is a real, mensurate, quantifiable thing, tangible and incarnate, and I'm going to find the fucker.

• Eddie Jessup : I can't live with it Emily, the pain is unbearable.

  Emily Jessup : We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems...

• Mason Parrish : I want someone to look at those X-Rays who can read them.

  Eddie Jessup : I'd rather not have everyone in the Brigham in on this. It's bad enough we've got this nosy x-ray technician.

  Mason Parrish : Are you all right?

  Eddie Jessup : I'm fine, Mason. I tried to indicate this was just a transient thing.

  Mason Parrish : Transient ischemic attack, that's what it was.

  [Addressing Arthur] 

  Mason Parrish : He's got his voice back.

  Eddie Jessup : It wasn't an ischemic attack! It wasn't a seizure. You saw the x-rays, Mason. There was clearly something anterior to the larynx that looked like a laryngeal sac. That's strictly simian! I obviously regressed! To some quasi-simian creature.

  Mason Parrish : I'm gonna show these to someone who can read them right, 'cause you're reading them wrong, that's all there is to it. Because no one is gonna tell me you de-differentiated your goddamn genetic structure for four goddamn hours and then reconstituted! I'm a professor of endocrinology at the Harvard Medical School. I'm an attending physician at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital! I'm a contributing editor to the American Journal of Endocrinology and a I am a fellow and vice-president of the Eastern Association of Endocrinologists and president of the Journal Club! And I'm not going to listen to any more of your cabalistic, quantum, friggin', dumb, limbo mumbo jumbo! I'm gonna show these to a radiologist!

• Eddie Jessup : Anthropology seems to attract good-looking women.

• Eddie Jessup : [Discussing his father's death, and its impact on his thinking]  I haven't told anyone this in ten years. I'm telling you now because I think you have a right to know what kind of a nut you might be getting mixed up with here.

  Emily Jessup : Arthur was right. You are a fascinating bastard.

  [kisses him] 

• Eddie Jessup : The noise is stupefying. The sun became black... as sackcloth. The full moon became like blood. Then the great mountain, burning with fire... was thrown into the sea. And the BEAST ascends from the bottomless pit. The angel of the bottomless pit. His name is Abaddon.

  Eddie Jessup : [pauses]  Abaddon.

• Mason Parrish : He is off the wall.

  Arthur Rosenberg : [holds the microphone]  Are you okay?

  Eddie Jessup : Get this stuff. It's new. It's deafening. The noise is deafening.

  Eddie Jessup : [shivering with strut]  Can you hear me above this noise? Oh, my God. The most unbelievable thing I've seen. I'm watching the birth agony of a mountain.

  Mason Parrish : Oh, my God.

  Arthur Rosenberg : Are you okay?

  Eddie Jessup : [still holding the microphone]  I'm fine. Really, I'm fine.

  Arthur Rosenberg : Do you want me to bring you down now?

  Mason Parrish : What happens now?

  Arthur Rosenberg : He's blacked-out. His blackouts can get pretty freaky. Sometimes they last as long as four hours. When he comes out, he's chipper as a bird but doesn't remember a thing.

  Mason Parrish : Just how dangerous is this stuff he brought back from Mexico?

  Arthur Rosenberg : I didn't say dangerous, l said it was weird. Hangs around too long. And what's really screwy is it heads straight for the brain.

  Mason Parrish : Well, l don't believe this. You guys are shooting up an untested drug that stacks up in the brain, works in the nucleus of the cell, and don't call that dangerous?

  Arthur Rosenberg : For the record, we don't actually shoot up.

  Mason Parrish : Heh, heh, heh.

  Arthur Rosenberg : Eddie drinks a 10...

  Mason Parrish : Well, It's gonna stop right now. You guys are supposed to be scientists, not two kids in the dorm, freaking out on Mexican mushrooms.

  Arthur Rosenberg : Well, why do you think I called you for? Let's see you stop him.

• Eddie Jessup : It's just possible I'm not mad, you know! I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me, to accept one deviant concept. That our other states of consciousness are as *real* as our waking state. And that reality can be externalized.

• Eddie Jessup : So the end was terrible, even for the good people like my father. So the purpose of all our suffering was just more suffering.

• Eddie Jessup : For God's sake, Arthur, is that how you imagine me? A respected and admired figure? A devoted father? A loving husband? Well, I've also published nearly two papers a year for the last seven years and not a fundamental piece of work in the lot. I sit around the living rooms of other young married faculty members talking infantile masturbation: "Who's sucking up to the head of the department?" "Whose tenure is hanging by a thread?"

• Eddie Jessup : Am l really that weird in bed?

  Emily : Sometimes.

  Eddie Jessup : Shall l try to change?

  Emily : No, I kind of like it.

• Emily : Well, you can't get any tidier than that, can you? We're gonna be together in Boston and l think we should get married.

  Eddie Jessup : You know, of course, I'm supposed to be at least a little bit nuts.

  Emily : A little bit? You're an unmitigated madman! You don't have to tell me how weird you are. I know how weird you are. I'm the girl in your bed the past two months.

• Eddie Jessup : That doesn't sound like Arthur.

  Emily : Well, what he actually said was you were a high-handed, arrogant prick. A little nuts, but brilliant, and that if l ever got you talking, I would find you fascinating.

  Eddie Jessup : That sounds more like Arthur.

• Eddie Jessup : This is an all-bets-are-off sort of thing. We may be opening a black box that may scrap our whole picture of space-time. We might even have a link to another universe.

• Eddie Jessup : I have been probed, scoped, and palpated. Mason's had a mirror down my throat or up my ass every half hour for the last three months.