The first time I came across the name John C. Lilly I was––rather fittingly, for reasons that will become clearer in a minute––not exactly sober. Late in the night or early in the morning, back from a housewarming party, my YouTube algorithm fed me a video concerned with an American scientist who’d spent his career trying to communicate with dolphins, a lifelong obsession that saw him, among several unbelievable feats, flood his beachside mansion into a pool, elect a few cetaceans as roommates, and watch as one of them became sexually fixated on his research partner. I suppose there must be other portraits of the man circulating in some dark corners of the web, but what sets apart Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office is that the professor isn’t the documentary’s only focus. Lilly’s experiments on interspecies communication are secondary to the discourses they were embedded in, which is to say Earth Coincidence isn’t a biopic so much as a study of a few tumultuous decades in US history, and how ideas––even and especially the most absurd––can seep into culture.
Written by Almereyda and Stephens, with voiceover from Chloë Sevigny, Earth Coincidence paints Lilly as a 20th-century polymath, a one-of-a-kind maverick hellbent on “getting his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.” Yet a hagiography this is not. Fascinated as it may be with its subject––a man bestowed with a “panoramic thinking” that led him to operate at the interstice between science and sci-fi––Earth Coincidence is as keen to praise Lilly for his contributions to things like the Save the Whales movement as it is to expose some of his most barbaric theories, not least that a steady diet of LSD would prove as eye-opening to his aquatic tenants as it did to him. (Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, though it’s safe to say the acid injections Lilly routinely administered to his dolphins didn’t make their captivity any smoother.) Where others might have played the most salacious aspects of Lilly’s saga and astonishing drug intake for shock value, Almereyda and Stephens are after something different––namely, the processes through which ideas can be absorbed into the mainstream and meaningfully shape it.
This contamination serves as the film’s through line; if Earth Coincidence has a protagonist, it isn’t Lilly but the bigger forces that negotiated his assimilation into the public sphere. Tellingly, Almereyda and Stephens situate his first experiments within the backdrop of the Cold War: as Lilly was fantasizing of a “Brain TV” that would allow us to crack the mystery of non-human language, the word brainwashing was just becoming popular, and the military-industrial complex soon latched onto the professor’s theories hoping to recruit dolphins as weapons against the Soviets. Communicating with cetaceans might help us figure out how to talk to extraterrestrial creatures––or so thought NASA, which also began funneling money into Lilly’s growingly intrepid crusade.
But if the Navy and Space Administration’s enthusiasm eventually wore out, Lilly’s theories did not; dovetailing with the New Age movement, they began to crop up in different media. Stitched together from all kinds of archival footage, Earth Coincidence doubles as a work of cultural archaeology. TV interviews, lab photographs, and Lilly’s own recordings of his experiments sit in-between excerpts of films that sponged the conspiratorial mood of the Cold War era, some of which were directly influenced by the man’s bizarre work (e.g. Ken Russell’s Altered States). If Lilly’s contributions to science remain disputed, his cultural legacy does not, and the genealogy Earth Coincidence offers is the film’s most illuminating aspect.
Is it any wonder that Almereyda and Stephens would be drawn to such a figure? Stephens’s last solo feature, Invention, spoke to her ongoing fascination with the way ideas can intersect and evolve under capitalism, while in Tesla, Almereyda trained his camera on another visionary outcast. Beyond thematic interests, the two filmmakers share a similar proclivity for the weird, a word that Earth Coincidence traces back to its Old English root: fate. Whether or not Lilly knew that bit of etymology, his most eccentric hypothesis, the Earth Coincidence Control Office, was itself tied to destiny. Conjured after years spent regularly shooting up LSD and ketamine, the ECCO was, in Lilly’s eyes, an omnipotent computer that allegedly dictates nearly all our moves and will eventually obliterate biological life altogether. All-powerful tech, alien civilizations, inter-dimensional dolphins, brain TVs––Earth Coincidence teems with all manner of deranged ideas. But how do you make the weird cinematic?
Even at its most lysergic, Almereyda and Stephens’s footage is never as trippy as the stuff Lilly imagined or got up to. That’s admittedly a very high bar to reach, but the asymmetry between the things we hear and the images they’re matched to––audiovisual relics from the era, yes, but also present-day, talking head-style interviews with former collaborators––is nonetheless palpable, and it makes the documentary an oddly lopsided experience. Earth Coincidence is fueled more by the power of its ideas than its images, or a disquieting, sax-heavy score by Brian McOmber. And though Almereyda and Stephens are careful never to let the proceedings slip into one big lecture, there are times when their film feels more informative than revelatory.
For a story that touches on something called the isolation tank––capsules in which users are deprived of all external stimuli, and the birthplace of many an acid-induced new theory by the professor––Earth Coincidence is crammed with so much information and so many detours it seems designed to leave your mind agog. A film ostensibly tethered to a man of science(fiction) swells into a far larger foray into the history of ideas and who gets to write it. Lilly may not even come across as the documentary’s most thought-provoking aspect, and if he remains largely shrouded in mysteries, perhaps that’s only fitting. In the words of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who met Lilly while touring the U.S. with The Holy Mountain and was immediately invited to slip into one of the isolation tanks: “It’s very difficult to be a human being. Very, very difficult.” Try pinpointing one such as John C. Lilly.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam and screens today, February 25, at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight 2025.