Timothy Leary's Last Trip

Timothy Leary's Last Trip

For over 30 years, former Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary preached the redemptive possibilities of LSD, constantly expressing the view that it has the power to save the human race. This amateurish documentary, which recaps his life and follows Leary and friends during his last days, does little to back him up. In fact, it works unintentionally as a refutation of Leary's views: Based on the evidence found in this fawningly uncritical film, the most visible result of the LSD "revolution" is its revolutionaries' embarrassingly visible regression into infantilism. Part of Timothy Leary's Last Trip takes place at the annual "Pig-Nic" at Wavy Gravy's hog farm, where Leary presides over the proceedings like a king. Had Leary possessed any self-respect, he would have known better: The young attendees seem to have only a hazy sense of who Leary is, one going so far as to say he never reads any books, only High Times magazine. That's the fruit of the revolution? Presumably this is pretty far from the consciousness-expansion Leary originally had in mind; if not, looking at what happened to Wavy Gravy ought to scare people away from drugs more effectively than any public-service announcement. What is meant to be a tribute instead makes its subject seem naive at best, and willfully ignorant at worst. The presence of sometimes-great novelist/acid casualty Ken Kesey—who is occasionally and inexplicably represented by a talking skull—doesn't help. There's something truly sad about such witticisms as, "The '60s aren't over until the fat lady gets high" coming from the man responsible for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It makes it easy to appreciate that the '60s, or at least the notion that self-indulgence could somehow be equated with a revolutionary act, ended a long, long time ago.

 
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