The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. Imagine your mind is a big old Victorian house. Most of us never even go upstairs! We just live in the front foyer, maybe we sleep in the living room. The basement is locked, the attic and bedrooms boarded up. We don't even like to admit they're there as it reminds us we never really moved in all the way. Then LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doorways, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. The rest of the house isn't dirty and dusty and empty - it's teeming with everything we ever felt was missing from our lives: art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come down, we at least know they're there. Dogmatic shrinks might tell us it's all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. I frankly think you're all hallucinating! Sort of how Bush ran his presidency!
THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as foyer types, and then got the tour halfway through the movie. It's got the look and feel of an after-school special, but runs a deeper game: Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives sis her first trip and her parents later find Maxie's blown her mind out in a closet, and the whole flock rushes to counseling and to talk to the neighbors, who are mixed up with Masons in a loose ring of adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.
WHAT IT GETS WRONG: PEOPLE NEXT DOOR kind of beats the dead horse a bit with the Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and sleep around vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland. The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last (Similar to Michael Douglas at his daughter's NA meeting at the end of TRAFFIC: "We're here to listen").
In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, and it's more than either, probably cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment.
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