The recent career-overview documentary The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin is a decent enough introduction to the sci-fi author’s big-picture concepts & beliefs.  The posthumous doc unfortunately highlights Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a source of inspiration for Harry Potter, of all indignities, but it’s a faux pas I’m willing to forgive since it also indulges in some transcendent Loving Vincent-style animation that illustrates her ideas beautifully.  I’m also willing to forgive it because there is so little visual, extratextual material to pull from when marrying images to Le Guin’s words.  Goro Miyazaki’s condensed anime adaptation of the Earthsea series also felt like a lazy cash-in on the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s, mixed with generic Games of Thrones-style fantasy tropes.  Tales from Earthsea certainly didn’t engage with the meaning behind the story of its source text in any authentic or substantial way, so it makes sense that The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin would have to re-illustrate its central concepts instead of licensing Miyazaki’s imagery from Studio Ghibli.  There wasn’t much else to pull from beyond the Goro Miyazaki movie either – a noticeable void of extratextual illustration that becomes exponentially unignorable the further the documentary digs into Le Guin’s legacy. 

It’s outright absurd that there are only four direct film adaptations of Le Guin’s work listed on her official website.  Half adapt stories from Earthsea – including the Ghibli movie and a Syfy Channel miniseries.  The other half are TV movie adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven – one for public access and one for A&E.  That’s a shockingly thin catalog for an incalculably influential author with dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories to her name.  Luckily, there’s at least one great work lurking among these meager titles, one that eases the bitterly bland aftertaste of the middling Earthsea anime.  The very first film adaptation of Le Guin’s writing was also credited as the first made-for-Public-Access-TV movie ever.  The 1980 Lathe of Heaven is something of a cult curio for New Yorkers who happened to catch it on WNET Channel 13 in its original broadcast, and its scarcity on home video has only intensified its status as a niche object of sci-fi nerd affection in the decades since.  Made by experimental video art weirdos from the NYC area (David Loxton & Fred Barzyk), the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven is much more stylish than the A&E version from the 2000s.  Le Guin also had so much direct involvement in the production that she earned an official “creative consultant” credit, which is something you won’t find in the other adaptations of her work. 

The Lathe of Heaven stars Bruce “Willard” Davison as a troubled citizen of near-future Portland (Le Guin’s home city), a suicide attempt survivor who’s assigned to a “voluntary therapy clinic” to assess the mysterious sleep disorder that’s tanking his mental health.  He’s isolated by his suffering, since he is being plagued by phenomenon he describes as “effective dreams”: dreams that alter the fabric of reality in waking life, unbeknownst to everyone but him.  Against all odds, the patient convinces his new sleep therapist that the “effective dream” phenomenon is real in just a few sessions, but instead of working towards a cure, the doctor immediately exploits his fantastical power.  Using suggestive hypnosis, the therapist influences the content of his patient’s dreams, attempting to improve society and the planet through the unwieldy power.  After a couple minor successes transforming the famously rainy city of Portland into “The Sunshine City” and dreaming his way into a bigger office, the therapist quickly starts dreaming bigger – to the entire world’s peril.  His patient effectively has a cursed Monkey’s Paw for a brain, leading to a series of Twilight Zone style ironies in dreams fulfilled.  Dreaming the planet’s relief from over-population leads to genocide.  Dreaming for world peace leads to global suffering under alien invaders.  Dreaming the end of racism leads to oppressive cultural homogenization; etc.

There’s an overt philosophical conundrum at the heart of Le Guin’s story, stemming specifically from her interest in Taoism.  Although the therapist is relatively well-intentioned in his efforts to improve the world by exploiting his patient’s effective dreams, he’s constantly violating the natural flow of life & the universe, suffering grand-scale consequences for the transgression.  The dreamer, by contrast, is much better suited to a proper Taoist lifestyle, gradually accepting that there is no grand purpose or meaning to Life, explaining to his doctor, “It just is.”  The philosophical clash between those opposing forces would only be enough material to cover an hour-long block of Outer Limits, though, so it’s for the best that Loxton & Barzyk bring some much-needed visual flair to the dream sequences & sleep study experiments to translate Le Guin’s written ideas into cinema.  The directors’ video art psychedelia shines through on the display screens of the retro-futurist lab equipment and in the film-negative illustrations of invading UFOs.  It’s an effect that’s only been amplified by the film’s degenerated imagery.  Since its original production materials were lost, its most current DVD prints were remastered from time-damaged video elements – leaving it with a “ghosting” effect that smears all rapid movement onscreen in a transparent trail.  That would be a frustrating limitation in most archival contexts, but it’s appropriate to the film’s deliberately dreamlike visual style in this particular instance.

Truth be told, The Lathe of Heaven is more “great for a TV movie” than it is great for a movie-movie.  There are a few flashes of brilliance in its planetarium laser shows, its stage-bound visualization of a global plague, its Ed Woodian stock footage of jellyfish & space rockets, and its stunning montage of Portland landscapes warped by their reflection in skyscraper windowpanes.  Otherwise, the production is glaringly limited by its Public Access TV production budget, and so it’s most commendable for the imaginative & philosophical strengths of Le Guin’s writing.  The most you could say of the 1980 Lathe of Heaven as an art object is that it lands as a more level-headed, made-for-TV version of Ken Russell’s much wilder Altered States, which happened to be released the same year.  Otherwise, it’s a scrappy, serviceable illustration of its much more substantial source text.  That service just can’t be overvalued in this case, since the text’s author is so greatly talented and so strangely underadapted, with only a few relatively puny competitors, all devoid of any discernible visual style.

-Brandon Ledet