Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics (2020)
dir. Donick Cary
Rated: TV-MA
image: ©2020 Netflix
There’s a section of the new(ish, I’ll get to that soon) Netflix documentary, Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, that discusses the all-important set and setting concept. It has to do with the state of mind a person is in before they embark on an experience with hallucinogenic drugs. Focusing on a positive mindset (set) and putting oneself in a comfortable setting with people one trusts makes it much more likely that one will have a good experience on the drug. The same basic idea is true of watching the documentary, too. To use the parlance of someone you might score psychedelic mushrooms from at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert: Don’t let any negative vibes near your aura while you watch it, man, or you’ll, like, be in for a real bad time.
Have a Good Trip is the brainchild of TV comedy writer Donick Cary, and is a collaboration with Ben Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films. Cary has numerous writing credits to his name, including The Late Show with David Letterman, The Simpsons, New Girl and Parks and Recreation. He created the short-lived satire Lil’ Bush, which envisioned Dubya and his cabal as elementary school kids.
Cary’s documentary is a light-hearted affair. It’s a perfect distraction for a Friday night when you’re stuck at home because there’s a worldwide pandemic going on outside, and checking the headlines on The Intercept one more time might send you into total despair.
Trip is essentially a series of interviews with dozens of celebrities talking about their experiences with psychedelics. Cary enhances their tales with animated sequences, and he mixes in a few other features to fill out his picture. The longest, and silliest, of these is the cheesy ‘80s-style LSD Afterschool Special, hosted by Adam Scott and broken up into several chunks throughout the film.
Despite all these bells and whistles, the movie starts to wear out its welcome despite its svelte 85-minute runtime. I genuinely enjoyed hearing the likes of Sting, Sarah Silverman, Rosie Perez, and Paul Scheer describe their experiences on LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, or some other hallucinogenic. It turns out, though, that someone telling you about their drug trip is analogous to someone describing a dream they had. It can be mildly interesting, but something is definitely lost in the translation. You have to rely on your own experiences with mind-altering drugs, or be willing to imagine such a state if you’ve never been in one yourself, to really enjoy the tale.
It’s also clear that it took Cary a long time to put this thing together. It’s quite jarring to see Anthony Bourdain (who died in 2018) and Carrie Fisher (who died at the tail end of 2016) pop up with no warning to walk us through their own psychedelic trips. They are, however, both enjoyable segments – Fisher’s tale of watching an acorn “misbehave” in front of her while she was tripping in the middle of Central Park is particularly funny, especially because Cary casts actor Brett Gelman as the offending acorn.
There are several missed opportunities within Have a Good Trip. Nick Offerman is completely wasted as a professorial type who introduces us to several concepts of psychedelics. He’s on screen for a total of maybe five minutes. The science behind mind-altering drugs is also left mostly unexplored in the film. Cary merely introduces tantalizing topics like why a person might stare at their own hand for an hour while high, but never explores any deeper.
The movie also turns to a few dubious authorities to make the (again, largely unexplored) argument that psychedelic drugs can serve as therapeutic help for people with mental disorders. I believe in the potential of such research, although, because of the American government’s misguided and idiotic “war on drugs,” the science in this area is still in its infancy. But, one should never, as Cary does here in an archival clip, turn to the quack and general buffoon Dr. Oz to bolster one’s case for anything.
The other “scientific expert” that Have a Good Trip leans on is new-age woo purveyor Deepak Chopra. His meaningless word-salad mindfulness expressions have become so ubiquitous that someone created a Deepak Chopra Quote Generator, which produces gobbledygook that’s virtually indistinguishable from the guru’s actual quotes.
I will admit, though, one Chopra interview segment melted my brain a little bit. Chopra talks about how the “reality” that each human being experiences isn’t real, because that reality is made up of our five senses sending chemical reactions to our brain in order to interpret the outside world. So, every person’s “reality” is different, and doesn’t actually exist outside of their own brain. If I had been high while I heard that, I might not be typing these words right now; I’d still be somewhere in the fifth dimension, communicating with the aliens.
Have a Good Trip’s biggest revelation for me, someone who has never had a psychedelic experience, comes early in the film, in one of Sting’s interview segments. The singer talks about how taking hallucinogenic drugs made him feel as though he was a part of the world, instead of being separate from it. “When you see the world as an object, you treat it badly,” he says, and his experiences with psychedelics helped him reject that harmful way of thinking. It nurtured in him a desire for empathy and love, something I want for myself.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get tickets to a Grateful Dead tribute show, so I can score some magic mushrooms and have my own Sting-like revelations.
Why it got 3 stars:
As one of my college professors wrote in a comment on a paper I handed in many years ago: “Well, this is pretty slight.” (harsh, but valid, although, I was going through my first bad breakup, so back off, prof!) There’s just not much there, there with Have a Good Trip. There’s a “guess you had to be there” vibe running through most of the descriptions of the psychedelic trips. It is a fairly fun (and funny) time, though.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I love the liberal use of old footage from ‘40s and ‘50s drug scare “educational” films.
- The most entertaining tale of the whole doc is Lewis Black’s story about forgetting his own name. He refused to check his driver’s license, because he was scared his wallet would only be filled with Monopoly cards.
- I’ve been culturally aware of the band Yo La Tengo for a while now, but hearing their music in the movie makes me want to actually check out their stuff.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
Week twelve. Not much to add, so I’ll ask you for feedback. How are you coping with no access to movie theaters?