As loglines go, a Chloë Sevigny-narrated, archive-heavy documentary about an infamous, largely discredited dolphin scientist has a kind of whimsical ring to it. And indeed, in Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda’s new film, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, there is a sense of play to be found between Sevigny’s cool, assured narration and the filmmakers’ deft weaving of largely as-yet-unseen archival footage. However, the seemingly light touch behind this unconventional profile of John Lilly, simultaneously a mainstream pioneer in dolphin communication research and an elusive cult figure, belies serious inquiry into the unknowables we face every day.
Stephens and Almereyda might not seem the most obvious pairing. The former’s films are derived from the archive and often experimental in nature, or at least interested in muddying our understanding of the divide between fiction and nonfiction; the latter’s have, in recent years, dressed a fascination with experimentation, speculation, and singular male figures in the garb of conventional narrative filmmaking. The two’s convergence on John Lilly is a happy one, resulting in a documentary that, without demolishing the conventions of nonfiction storytelling, injects much-needed life into public figure profiling.
By chronicling Lilly’s achievements and failures in equal measure, John Lilly is less concerned with discrediting the man than it is in elucidating the nature of his speculative imagination — his capacity for envisioning consciousness outside of his own — which belies a deep insecurity over a rapidly changing world and a desire to tamp down and rationalize those changes. As we watch footage of Lilly’s early experiments on dolphin speech, whatever minute variations in tone and “pronunciation” a viewer’s untrained ear might comprehend feel like the product of a hopeful mind rather than of any measurable reality. But the point is to raise awareness of the gaps between understanding and speculation, between assurance and disbelief. In many ways, Lilly’s life’s work, including his forays into hallucinogenic drugs to reach altered states of consciousness and find answers to the unknowns of our universe, is found in these gaps.
Stephens and Almereyda’s examination sometimes feels overextended. In taking a chronological approach, they appear eager, and rightfully so, to place John Lilly’s life into the broader context of a rapidly changing mid-century America. Though these efforts, like Lilly’s wandering quest for higher truths, can take interesting, if unilluminating, detours, such as when we follow the attempts to relocate the last dolphins under Lilly’s care off the coast of Georgia, the filmmakers are driven by a deeper question, one that partly explains the nature of their and Lilly’s scattered trajectories: in what directions can our quest to understand the seemingly unknowable lead us?
It’s hard to deny the satisfaction, even comfort, derived from finding the historical source for our contemporary conditions, the moment that explains everything that has happened since. This conspiratorial framework of thinking has positive and negative applications, all of which Stephens and Almereyda are keenly aware. In John Lilly’s case, the application is paranoid, as shown in his increasingly improbable explanations for life’s mysteries. Minor experiments with LSD in the early 1960s, seen as practical enhancements to his existing dolphin work and new forays into isolation and sensory deprivation, led him to name the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO), an extraterrestrial network of biological agents engineering coincidences in the universe and controlling all biological life on our planet. In a way, the film conducts its own speculation, crediting, for example, Lilly’s early experiments on dolphins as part of the reason our culture at large attributes to them such high levels of consciousness. Never ones to rest on an absolute, however, Stephens and Almereyda point out the paradoxical nature of widespread awareness of cetacean activism alongside their continued slaughter.
While John Lilly acknowledges critiques of the man’s experiments on dolphins as quasi-scientific and cherry-picked in nature, its own outlook isn’t entirely critical. Stephens and Almereyda maintain a delicate balance between critique, sympathy, and praise, generally without explicitly verbalizing any one of them. There is the freedom in their assessment for Lilly to be a philosopher, a pioneering scientist backed by an equally ambitious mid-century American government engaging in its own global power struggles; and an insecure quack, prone to flights of fancy, self-mythologization, cruelty, and unchecked paranoia. But their gentle approach to John Lilly’s life feels somehow necessary, because the answers they seek are just about as unknowable as the ones Lilly himself sought. At the risk of being overly permissive, it’s hard to fault a film for grappling with a man who was never satisfied with the day’s answers for life’s mysteries, and failing to find answers of its own.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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