Psych-Out: The Haight-Ashbury Exploitation Trip

There is a category of exploitation film whose value has nothing to do with its intentions. American International Pictures made Psych-Out in 1968 to sell tickets to teenagers curious about hippies, and to do that it sent Richard Rush, a cinematographer called László Kovács, and a cast including Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Dean Stockwell into Haight-Ashbury while Haight-Ashbury was still happening. The film they came back with is a rickety melodrama wrapped around some of the only usable footage anybody shot of that neighbourhood at its peak, and fifty-odd years on the wrapper matters a great deal less than the contents.

Susan Strasberg plays Jenny Davis, a deaf teenage runaway who arrives in San Francisco looking for her missing brother. She falls in with a band and its guitarist, Stoney (Nicholson, in a ponytail that is doing a lot of work), and the search takes her through the scene — the crash pads, the free clinics, the gallery openings, the ballrooms, the dealers — toward a brother who has come apart somewhere in it. Dean Stockwell is Dave, the scene’s resident sceptic. Dern is the brother. Adam Roarke and Max Julian fill out the band.

Kovács, and the reason to watch

László Kovács is the reason this film is not disposable, and the case is easy to make from the first ten minutes.

Kovács shoots the Haight in real light, on real streets, with real people who are not extras walking through the frame. He works handheld, close, at eye level, and he lets the exposure do whatever the actual conditions demand — blown windows, black interiors, faces going in and out of legibility as the camera moves. The result reads as reportage that a story has been dropped into. Nobody was shooting American subcultures that way in 1968 at a studio’s expense, and the footage is now a primary document; you can watch people who had no idea a film was being made simply existing in a place that would be a museum exhibit within eighteen months.

Kovács and Rush had done this before, on Hells Angels on Wheels the previous year, also with Nicholson, and the partnership is the interesting thread. Kovács went on to shoot Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon — a decade of the New Hollywood look — and the technique that defined it was developed on AIP money in pictures like this one. The Corman-adjacent apprenticeship has always been discussed in terms of directors. It produced cinematographers too, and the visual grammar of the American seventies was substantially worked out on exploitation schedules.

Rush is the other graduate. He would direct Freebie and the Bean and then The Stunt Man in 1980, get an Academy Award nomination for it, and spend the rest of his career as one of the great might-have-beens. His formal ambition is already visible here in the trip sequences, which he stages with a restlessness the material does not require.

The real ancestor

The film is filed under the psychedelic cycle alongside The Trip, and the shelf is fair enough. Its actual skeleton comes from somewhere else entirely, and once you see it the film improves considerably.

Psych-Out is a detective story. An outsider arrives in a closed subculture she does not understand, looking for a missing person. She acquires a local guide who knows the terrain and has his own compromised motives. She works through a chain of informants, each further into the underworld than the last, each giving up a fragment. The trail leads through the milieu’s respectable end toward its rotten centre, and the person she finds is unrecognisable. That is The Big Sleep. That is every private-eye picture ever written, and the Haight is functioning here exactly as noir’s Los Angeles functions — a demimonde with its own rules, its own language, and an interpreter required.

Jenny’s deafness is the tell. It is a noir device, and a good one: a protagonist who cannot hear the city she is investigating, who must read faces and rooms, who is permanently one sense short in a place that communicates through music. The film uses it inconsistently and it is still the best idea in the script. The detective who cannot listen is a premise a better film would have built everything on.

Once the noir skeleton is visible, the film’s odd priorities make sense. The scene is the case. The band is the informant network. Dern’s Seeker is the body at the end of the trail. AIP thought it was buying a hippie picture and paid for a missing-person procedural with a light show attached.

What the music is doing

The soundtrack is a genuine artefact. The Strawberry Alarm Clock appear and perform; The Seeds contribute. This is the sound of the moment recorded at the moment, by bands who were charting that year, and the film treats the performances with a straightness that is more useful now than any dramatisation would have been.

The mechanical point worth making is how Rush cuts the music sequences. He treats the band scenes as documentary — long takes, the camera in the crowd, the performance allowed to run — and then cuts the drug sequences as pure montage, fast, layered, disjunctive. The two grammars alternate, and the effect is that the ballroom feels real and the trips feel like an argument about the ballroom. Rush is inconsistent about a lot of things in this film. That alternation is disciplined and it carries most of the picture’s atmosphere.

The trip sequences, technically

Rush’s hallucination footage is the film’s most-copied element and it repays a close look, because his method differs from Corman’s in a way that tells you about both men.

Corman kept the room. His acid sequences in The Trip always return to the sofa, the guide, the domestic anchor, because he had done the research and knew the anchor persists. Rush abolishes the room. His trips are total — the environment is replaced wholesale by superimposition, by coloured gel thrown across the lens, by his signature effect of a rack focus so extreme the image dissolves into shape and colour. Rush was fond of the long lens and the distorted foreground, and he uses both here to make ordinary San Francisco geometry read as threat.

The honest verdict is that Corman’s version is truer and Rush’s is more cinematic. Rush is describing a nightmare with the tools of a horror film; Corman is describing an experience with the tools of a documentary. Both approaches propagated. Everything American cinema has since shot to represent a bad trip descends from one of these two 1967-68 AIP pictures, and the horror-movie version won, which is why the movies have been lying about it ever since.

The case against

The script is poor. Its idea of what people in the Haight said to one another is a collection of magazine phrases, and Stockwell in particular is handed a philosophy to recite rather than a character to play; he does what he can, which is more than the lines deserve. Strasberg’s deafness is written as a plot switch to be flipped when the story needs jeopardy, which wastes the one genuinely inspired thing in the screenplay. The moralising arrives on the AIP schedule — the scene is dangerous, the drugs will hurt you, the runaway should go home — and it sits at odds with a film that plainly finds the Haight more interesting than the suburbs it came from.

Nicholson is fascinating here and not yet good. He is two years from Easy Rider and three from Five Easy Pieces, and what you can see is a man with immense presence trying to work out what to do with it. The ponytail is a costume he is acting against rather than in. That said, there are two or three moments — a look, a pause, a piece of amused calculation — where the actor who would run the next decade is briefly visible, and they are worth the wait.

The deepest objection is the one that hangs over the whole cycle. This is a film made by an industry that regarded its subjects as a market, shot in a neighbourhood it was helping to publicise into destruction. The Haight of Psych-Out had months left; the summer that made it famous had already brought in more visitors than it could hold, and the scene the film treats as an ongoing world was already a going concern in the process of being sold. AIP’s cameras were part of that. The picture is a document of a place and an instrument of the tourism that finished it, and both things are on screen at once.

Watch it for Kovács. Watch it for the streets. Watch it as the strange middle child between The Trip, which understood the chemistry and had no plot, and Gas-s-s-s, which understood the joke and had no discipline. Psych-Out has a plot, borrowed from Chandler, and a documentary hiding inside it. It circulates in decent transfers now, and the Haight footage in particular has never looked better.

Spoilers below

The search resolves into the film’s one genuinely disturbing passage. Jenny’s brother Steve — the Seeker — is found, and Dern plays him as a man who has been dismantled: a casualty rather than a mystic, living in a condition the scene around him has agreed to interpret as enlightenment. The film’s most acid observation is that the community has a vocabulary for what has happened to him, and the vocabulary is what prevents anyone from helping.

The climax puts Jenny herself under, dosed without her knowledge, and Rush stages the resulting sequence as the film’s formal peak — the montage grammar he has been alternating all picture finally overwhelming the documentary one, the Haight dissolving into pure hostile abstraction. She ends up on a freeway, deaf, hallucinating, unable to hear the traffic, and the noir premise finally does the work the script had been withholding from it. The detective’s missing sense becomes the mechanism of the crisis.

Stockwell’s Dave gets the ending, and it is the picture’s only honest sacrifice — the sceptic who has spent the film refusing to commit to anything paying for the commitment when it arrives. What AIP wanted was a warning. What Rush delivered is closer to grief: a scene that has built a philosophy sophisticated enough to explain away its own casualties, filmed in the last months it was still standing.