The Baffler Presents: Mind Game

The DEA's Drug Fact Sheet warns that ketamine can take you to "K-Land," producing a "mellow & colorful" out-of-body experience. There's no ketamine in Masaaki Yuasa’s 2004 animated film, Mind Game, and it's never mellow, but something in Yuasa's animation epitomizes K-Land, with its shifting, palsied perspectives, explosive colors, and drifting camera—its hero even floats out of his body at one point. The film’s giddy, grotesque kaleidoscope is as close as you'll come to Ketamine: The Motion Picture.

The screening features a live introduction by writer Dan Piepenbring, who examines both the current ketamine vogue and the 19th-century fascination with nitrous and ether in his article “K-Pop,” his contribution to The Baffler’s latest issue, “Altered States.”