Psychedelia, Sex, and the American Moral Conscience

The emergence of the hippie counterculture movement in the late 60s and early 70s created an open wound in the American moral consciousness. Sexuality, previously confined to the strictly monogamous and heteronormative terms of Protestant America, became one of many battle grounds of contested authority. The emergence of the “sexually liberated” hippies promoting “free love” created the conservative, reactionary sense that “individual desire, expressed in sexuality and selfishness had eclipsed familial and social responsibility” (Sconce 241). In the midst of these cultural tensions between sexual experimentation and moral debasement, a set of popular exploitation films bent on representing fringe sexuality emerged. However, as Jeffrey Sconce contends, these films dealt with a fundamental question: “How could a desire to see sexual experimentalism be acknowledged—maybe even celebrated in a certain pluralistic spirit—without wholly dissolving the moral agency, social legitimacy, and personal responsibility of the spectator?” (Sconce 347). Though they arrive at divergent conclusions, the films The Trip (1967) and I Drink Your Blood (1970) grapple with these questions of moral responsibility and alternative experimentation.

The Trip teases out these cultural tensions around sexuality and experimentation throughout its entire runtime. The film follows the unassuming TV advertisements director Paul, played by Peter Fonda, who decides to embark on an LSD “trip” in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. As Paul goes through the phases of his LSD high, his hallucinations reveal a paranoid subconscious amalgamating sexual titillation and kaleidoscopic colors with regret and fear towards moral authority. The film concludes at the end of Paul’s trip with a climactic sex scene between him and a nameless blonde, who asks him, “did you find what you were looking for?” Paul responds, “Yeah, I think I… like I love you, and everybody else…,” ultimately reaffirming the countercultural ethos of free love and sexual liberation.

However, prior to arriving to its conclusive moments, the film spares its protagonist no anguish in questioning his moral legitimacy. In one of the film’s oddest moments, Paul sits in a mind-reading chair on a whimsical carousel across from Max, played by Dennis Hopper. Max, who speaks with a God-like aura of authority, forces Paul to interrogate himself and his actions. Max starts his interrogation with a montage of cultural allusions to money, Christianity, love, Buddhism, the American flag, and Richard Nixon, all symbols that invoke no response from Paul. Then, Max questions Paul’s career as a TV advertisements director who peddles “lies,” upon which Paul declares himself as “not guilty.” Finally, Max broaches the question of Paul’s failed marriage, bringing Paul to plead guilty. Max ultimately belongs to the counterculture, concluding his line of questioning with “I wish there was some hip way of telling you this, baby, but you’re one with and part of an ever-expanding, loving, joyful, glorious and harmonious universe.” Yet, by forcing Paul to reckon with his marriage, Max brings the “moral agency, social legitimacy, and personal responsibility of the spectator” to the forefront of the film, forcing audiences to think of these questions of “free love” and “responsibility” along with Paul.

In contrast with The Trip, I Drink Your Blood portrays its hippies as symptomatic of a depraved social order, and as such the film aligns itself more closely with conservative sensibilities towards sexual experimentation. The film follows a cult of satanic hippies perpetually high on LSD who rape a young girl and take her small town by storm. A naive young boy infects them with rabies as punishment, which in turn only increases their militancy as a threat to the established social order. The film concludes with police killing all the rabid, high cult members, liquidating the metastasizing counterculture tumor and thus restoring the social order of “peace and harmony.” 

The opening scene of I Drink Your Blood puts the film’s negative perception of the counterculture in its most explicit terms: what Sconce refers to as “absolute subjugation.” The film opens with the cult leader, Horace Bones, introducing himself as “born into Hell… the firstborn son of Satan.” Bones is surrounded by the other members of the cult, all America’s “others” of diverse ethnic backgrounds, who declare their allegiance to him. Meanwhile, a girl quietly spies on the cult as they perform a sacrifice to Satan. Bones notices her presence, and orders his henchmen to “stop here,” upon which they chase her and rape her. Not only do they obey his every order, but one of them even complicitly accepts a slap in the face from Bones as punishment for bringing the girl. This scene seems to almost echo Sconce’s argument verbatim: “Satanic sex thus offers the promise of absolute liberation in return for absolute subjugation,  ripping up an internalized social and moral contract and replacing it with one signed in blood, ultimately reaffirming the Law of man, God, and the unconscious” (Sconce 258). By presenting the counterculture as a cult of doomed subjugation, I Drink Your Blood openly reaffirms and validates the moral authority of the dominant social order.

The Trip and I Drink Your Blood ultimately diverge on where they stand in regards to the debate between counterculture free love and monogamous heteronormativity. However, neither film invalidates the corpus of America’s moral consciousness -- either directly or indirectly, these films speak to the cultural tensions of a morally conflicted America. Both films showcase alternative lifestyles and deviance, again, “without wholly dissolving the moral agency, social legitimacy, and personal responsibility of the spectator.”