mikegerber.com

This Friday’s documentary, originally aired by the BBC in the late 90s (?), tells the strange, dramatic, and ultimately quite sad story of acid guru Timothy Leary. The question with Leary—and perhaps with all such larger-than-life characters—is this: what was behind the surface we all saw? What was inside him? What made him different from the rest of us (if indeed he was different), and what do his successes and failures have to teach us? At the end of the film, a commenter says that Leary “lived the Great American Novel about the Sixties that never got written.” Would that it had been a book instead, because for all of Leary’s high-profile psycho-cyber trailblazing, there seems to have been an equal amount of everyday emotional destruction. By the film’s end I have to say, I felt glad not to have been born Timothy Leary.