Health Trends + Hallucinations
"Who gets the mushroom first?"
Mushrooms are having a moment. They’re in our zombies and in our smoothies. (I should admit that, while skeptical of the health benefits, I genuinely enjoy a smoothie that tastes like dirt.) The fictional Blue Angel mushroom featured in the animated series Common Side Effects does it all. Not only does it cure disease and bring you back from the dead, it gives you quite the trip along the way.
Image credit: www.sling.com and Adult Swim
Created for Adult Swim by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, Common Side Effects is a lot of things: a cosmic Big Pharma conspiracy comedy thriller. It’s also about a lot of things: mainstream healthcare’s relationship (in the USA) with the ever-mainstreaming ‘alternative’ wellness industry, how Americans across classes (mal)adapt to the pressures of contemporary society, how our connections to other people influence our decisions to help or hurt them. But first and foremost, it’s about a mushroom.
High school lab partners Frances Applewhite and Marshall Cuso reunite at a pharmaceutical conference as adults. When Frances tells Marshall about her mother’s dementia, Marshall divulges a secret: he’s found a mushroom with the potential to heal the world. To prove the mushroom’s effectiveness, Marshall grabs a pigeon off the ground, snaps its neck, and brings it back to life. Marshall wants to find a way to grow it and give it to everyone for free. But Frances needs to pay her mother’s medical bills. She decides to figure out how to bring the mushroom to her boss, Rick, at Reutical Pharmaceuticals, to negotiate for a promotion. As Frances and Marshall try to grow the mushroom, they become targets for DEA investigators-slash-best buds Copano and Harrington, as well as mercenaries hired on behalf of wealthy Reutical boardmember Jonas the Wolf. Spoilers ahead.
The investigators are usually a step behind Frances and Marshall, which keeps the mystery focused on the mushroom: can it really heal people? What are the side effects? Are the hallucinations... real?
Image credit (and interview with show creators) www.awn.com and Adult Swim
At first, the similarities in people’s visions could be chalked up to stylistic choice, except that everyone sees these same gray babies and multicolored shape confetti. For the most part, the audience is figuring out what’s going on with all that alongside Marshall, who first ate the mushroom in order to survive an otherwise-fatal plane crash. Eventually he starts warning people that their mind is going to go to “a place” and refers to that place as “The Portal”. (I anticipate that the distinction between portals and destinations will come up in season two.) But I think there’s a few ways to interpret these visions, starting from the first episode, when you witness the pigeon’s trip back to life.
Cosmic mysteries are, for the most part, tied to the subjective experiences of the characters. For written works, I think that most of what makes a cosmic mystery is a certain kind of speculative interiority. For visual works, I tend to focus on the central character’s curiosity about the nature of the world around them. Many of the characters in Common Side Effects experience a Blue Angel trip at some point. As a storytelling tool, drug trips are cousins to dreams. When they’re used to further the plot, they both convey extremely specific information that can’t really get to the characters any other way. When it’s a dream, you know that the dream is only being viewed by the character dreaming it. Same for drug-induced hallucinations. Two people see the same thing, that proves something objectively unnatural is going on. I want to make the case that trips show up more often in comedic mysteries due to the legacy of stoner comedies, but that might just be because of the punchy sequences in this latest season of the howdunnit series Poker Face.
What are the creators trying to say when they show the audience a dead pigeon’s hallucinations right at the beginning of the show? Common Side Effects plays with the audience’s expectations of subjectivity from the start, so that, no matter what we think about what should be done with the mushroom, we suspect there’s more to it, which means the cure doesn’t come without some very unique side effects.
These hallucinations stick with people long after they’ve eaten the mushroom, and in some cases seem to be the way that the mushroom communicates with, connects, and even controls people. But the mushroom gives people vision in a nonliteral sense, too. Most characters who know about the mushroom can’t help but imagine the future it’ll bring about, and these imagined futures tell us who these characters are.
Marshall sees the potential for a world without insurance companies, where people aren’t “kept sick because they’re poor.” Frances doesn’t have a vision, because the show is about Frances finding her way among all these conflicting visions to eventually support Marshall’s. Marshall seems to be the only one who consistently cares about people. He also cares about the transition into the world he imagines. “Who gets the mushroom first?” he asks. This question invokes the covid vaccine rollout and its various successes and failures around the world. In contrast, Jonas the Wolf has a vision that serves as an exaggerated reminder of the way an advancement in health technology got snowballed into the political destabilization of the United States.
McGuffins don’t need to be cosmic to make characters imagine the future, and thus, show us who they are. But when a story introduces something that doesn’t exist in the real world, it makes the audience go through that same thought process of discovery, contemplation, and conclusion for the first time in the context of this story, which might not happen with a mundane item.
Frances’ boss, Rick, is all over the place. At first, the mushroom just makes him think “infinite revenue.” In one of my favorite scenes in the series, Rick hypes up the mushroom to scary wealthy Reutical boardmember Jonas. “We could cure everyone!” When Jonas warns Rick that everyone in the healthcare industry, including him, would be out of a job, Rick exclaims something like, “Maybe we should be!”
Jonas immediately crushes Rick back into compliance by describing a dystopian, cartel-controlled hellscape where everyone just kills each other all the time over the smallest conflict because they know they can probably be brought back to life. Soon after, Rick’s saying that everyone will access the drug the ‘right’ way through insurance, comparing the American healthcare system to “nature.”
Marshall is caring but cautious, Frances is undecided and impulsive, and Rick is incoherent. But to me, it doesn’t so much matter if Jonas actually thinks the mushroom will bring about this particular future—it’s more important that this is a story he uses to scare Rick away from a vision of the world without Jonas at the top of it.
But just in case this is how Jonas sees the mushroom’s future, I was glad that, when Jonas is suddenly diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decides to seek out the mushroom. If he takes a dose, then maybe the trip will prove to him that the mushroom’s too weird for such a banally apocalyptic future to arise. When Jonas finds a stash of the mushrooms, he gorges on as many as he can—way over the dose Marshall’s been handing out. Instead of having a nice, weird, illuminating trip to The Portal, something… different happens to Jonas.
Jonas’ body collapses on itself and regurgitates a mutant, infantile humanoid on the floor with, importantly, nobody to observe this but the gray babies in the hall. They don’t exactly rush to welcome it as one of their own. In the final episode, Jonas is seen as he was before, but comatose—unlike the others the mushroom has healed so far. This mystery brings us back to the question of what’s really going on with the subjectivity of the visions. All throughout the series, we see how various characters seem to be drawn together by their mushroom visions, culminating in a scene where Marshall physically touches Frances in a different location and leaves her a visual image, thereby communicating with her.
We don’t see much of Jonas’ trip. But all throughout the show, characters have been talking about how important it is that the mushroom grows in the right soil, the right substrate. What about the people who consume it?
What kind of world would the mushroom create, if people could be healed, and better understand others? What kind of world would the mushroom create if a few greedy people took up all the doses? As with most cosmic mysteries, Common Side Effects uses the impossible to present questions that easily translate to the real world—even if the answers can’t be found just by eating a mushroom.
NEXT MONTH
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Next month I’ll be packing up the Cosmic Mystery Club and moving it to a new platform. Still haven’t made the final decision on where I’m going, but expect the same everything, it just might look slightly different. There will still be a newsletter next month: Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s 2017 film The Endless, a cosmic mystery that two brothers stumble into when they visit the cult they once escaped from. See you then.