In MANDY, Nicolas Cage proves his levels of fearless crazy have no bottom (or top), and Canada's Panos Cosmatos proves his debut film BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW was no psychedelically-distilled Ativan one-off, like his next film would be a saga of a family coping with senility or something. Instead, he brings in the big guns: Nic Cage. The result is like pouring Godzilla's piss onto the blazing oil fire-for both Cage and Cosmotos have proven in their separate films that high art and foam-mouthed insanity needn't be exclusive. MANDY is the door-kicking explosion of cool we need right now. With its slowed-down sound, psychedelic movement trails, pineal-buzzing drones, rock and roll violence, and fantasy paperback chapter intertitles, MANDY pulses with a mix of what a lot of us would describe as heaven (a warm, mellow super-cool chick, lovely house deep in the old growth woods with a still small lake out back, cool lighting and music and art everywhere). And Hell as his ultimate destination. As Red, a woodsman (aka lumberjack, for the chainsaw hath replaced yonder axe), Cage starts out soft and intimate, deeply attuned to his lady faire and full of gentle weird jokes but over the course of the film he descends/ascends to the Cage we know and love. With his gut out, his butt lit, his eyes covered with shades instead of goggles when he uses his garage forge to hammer out a massive weird gleaming sword, guzzling his shower vodka in his underwear and pouring it over his open wounds, howling in a way that's totally new even for him, and like nothing cinema has ever heard the like of. It's not nasal and hysterical but deep, tragic and genuinely scary. He rides a demonic ATV through the wild north woods in the dead of night; he fights chainsaw duels; he burns churches. He does every drug in sight. Crushing skulls, losing his shit over a demon ripping his favorite shirt, saying wild shit like "a psychotic drowns where a mystic swims" (a Joseph Campbell quote) and telling super-cool Bill Duke he needs his crossbow back because he's hunting "Jesus freaks" (spoilers why). To paraphrase Mrs. Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby, he's too... tremendous!
And so is the Mandy. It's saturated with a pleasing palette of deep reds and blacks, and propelled by Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, a bed of murky drones and synths both thumberling and quiscubescent (two words I just invented). King Crimson's "Starless and Bible Black" slithering like syrupy warm serpents down the river lane of the opening credits. Jóhannsson's score isn't quite as instantly riveting and tripped out as Sinoa Caves' for Rainbow, it's more varied, moving from romantic minor key Eno-ish dalliances to thunder god forge burbling, eerie droning. But when old Nic preps for war, joint or cigarette in mouth, goggles on, gut out, in flow pulse-quickening synth cycles that sound like an old flying saucer getting kick-started deep in the woods with no ears to hear it. We finally learn what that quiscubescent sound freels lorick! (New words for new sensations).
The plot finds us in--as the first chapter title explains 'the Shadow Mountains - 1983 A.D. That AD is a key right there, for this is a story that could be told in the wild west of 1883 or some Middle Ages Belgian schwarzwald (where it was films), aside from its one Piscean foot being in the world of Mandy's current fantasy novel, and her interest in the planet Jupiter. The Shadow Mountains are the kind of place so deep dwell only truckers, loggers, drug manufacturers, and the assorted good and evil forces and businesses they engender. It's a kind of old growth paradise, shot through with hazy lavender and pink sunlight streams which bathe the life and pad of Red and his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) in haunting lights. Every frame of their existence is rooted but floating in the absolving caress of timeless space. Happy as could be, they live as any of us would at the time--if we could--with great sound editing capturing their intimate whispers as they natter on about Galactus, Erik Estrada, Jupiter, birds... With her glasses and crow's feet proudly un-Botoxed, her Bette Davis x Peter Lorre eyes staring right into him across the water (they live "out on Crystal Lake") or their backyard campfire, distant howls or human moans too abstract to investigate, Jóhannsson droning over them all Vangelis Blade Runner "Love Theme"-ish dreamy, it's a new kind of paradise, all the sweeter because we can feel the glimmer of the nightmare nipping at their toes. We're deep in it with them, with Nic, staring at Mandy through the flames at the laid-back cool old lady of his come-true dreams.
Her mind alive to the infinite, taking weird Antichrist-style sojurns into the chthonic woods both real and figurative, reading a novel about serpents eyes and red skies, working on fantastic drawings, Mandy is perhaps open enough to the oceanic currents that her curious stare into the window of a passing van gets ensnared in the neural network of Manson/ Papa Jupiter (!)-ish cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) who takes it as divine right that he should have her as part of his 'flock' (They are called, as we find out in a chapter title, 'the Children of the New Dawn'). Soon he shall use the long the horn of Abraxas to summon a gang of evil demon bikers (somewhere between the Cenobites and the radio active ash-blackened New Mexican derelicts in the new Twin Peaks: The Return). And well, that's when it gets really interesting, because one thinks they have this movie all figured out as some variation on any of Nic's angry cult-busting, child or bride-rescuing/avenging adrenalin junkets, like Drive Angry--but the left turns start coming, we veer into the realm of deep dark Nordic and samurai myth. Red walks 'the demon path' like Lone Wolf, sans Baby Cart, the spirit of pure violence of some viking berserker possessing him like it did Dustin Hoffman in the last chunk of Straw Dogs, Shauna Macdonald in the last chunk of The Descent as well as, of course Max von Sydow in the last chunk of Virgin Spring. The side that didn't want war always takes the first hit--they never even see it coming, but the sting of the slap wakes their fury, and nothing's scarier than a civilized human who suddenly has nothing left to lose. That can be cliche or it can be the mythic frame solid enough to support even the most far-out of fictions. In short, Mandy is far out.
Cosmatos' fantastic feature debut, 2010's Beyond the Black Rainbow, built its trippy towers on the foundations of classic Canadian sci-fi horror films like Scanners, The Brood, and Blue Sunshine, here the influences seem to Valhalla Rising, The Virgin Spring, and the Canadian animated film Heavy Metal, but the style and mood harkens back to Rainbow alone. It's now the Cosmatos style: a slow druggy deep woodsiness where people seem to swim through the LSD atmosphere. And the Cosmatos theme: that the difference between unbearable prolonged pain and euphoric timeless peace is largely a matter of dosage. No matter how happy and secure you feel, the gates of archaic demonic madness can open at the drop of a hat, or on the tongue or in the eye. And for Mandy we get a new Cosmatos concept: that fictions are always a reflection of your life in the moment:. Elements right out of Mandy's novel: the Loc-nar-evoking "Serpent's Eye jewel"; the 'Horn of Abraxas" that summons "the Black Skulls," the "tainted blade of the pale night, straight from the abyssal lair," monstrous demons slavering while they talk in rumbly inhuman voices, their ATVs roaring like otherworldly hellhounds, their LEDs beaming like the eyes of dragons, manifesting in the woods like Mandy is the gatekeeper of reality, the dream of the dreamer turned nightmare. Starlings smashed in sacks or set ablaze, all horrors doubling back along the Moebius ouroboros. Immersion in a druggy slow motion bizarro world, awash in deep ASMR whispery intimacy, creates space for both the stars, the page, and the woods to merge into one.
Such reality bending and warping match the perceptions of the totally tripped out, take it from me. I was there. For every peak, a valley... and some of the valleys are so dark it takes getting even darker to find the light again.
Saturated in dark red and blacks, with all sorts of deep dish manipulations of light and sound, Cosmatos creates a magical zone where idealism has crashed into the trees and Canadian and US indie horror and sci-fi films from the 70s all find their sequel, a zero sum flashpoint. Just as Tarantino turns to the Shaw Brothers, New World's 70s-era drive-in Pictures, and 60s Italian westerns for his pastiche palette, Cosmatos turns to the wilds of Canada and NYC: Cronenberg, Lieberman, Barker, De Palma, Bakshi, Cohen; he also turns to Frazetta and prog rock album covers and to what Terence McKenna would call the 'heroic measure' of psychedelics for his inspiration. The wild fumes of 20x salvia divinorum and the LSD - ecstasy - amphetamine concoctions of trans-dimensional Berkeley chemists. The sort of stuff where you take it on Friday and by the following Wednesday your wife's wild mystical artwork is still moving on the paper, the wild willowing branches of the endless tree that becomes tentacles and tendrils reaching for the inner light. You wish you could sleep but the trails makes that impossible. In the meanwhile you make Gandalf seem like Gob Bluth. It might take a month to totally fade... but by then you've taken other things, kept the ball rolling...
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| Nic, powering up for battle (i.e. guzzling bathroom vodka and screaming). |
These aren't your average hackwork stepped-on ecstasy capsules or weak-ass doses. These are special variants (like DOM, Roybal, and Ethyl) super-charged by Berkley chemistry majors going down a way more psychedelic rabbit hole than your profit-hungry meth cookers. Of course, many of use who went down that rabbit hole wound up lost in the woods, spinning like Susan Strasberg suddenly able to hear again at the end of Psych-Out--- 'til the right cult found them (Manson on the dark end, the Rainbow Family on the other). When I was doing DOM in the mid-90s, even Burning Man was still just an insular Wickery cult rather than today's midlife crisis tourist spot. The few who rode the snake all the way and--resisting the temptation to stay egoless in the ecstasy of blind guru-worship, joining the flower people, or 'the Children of the New Dawn' and following a failed acid folkie into oblivion-- climbed out of even the ego trip of egolessness and became themselves again, only shinier -- the gunk of the moment's residue cleared away by the acid bath. In Rainbow, Cosmatos shows the previous decade's deep dish mid-60s LSD experiencers--seeking to use consciousness to make inroads into western medicine--had by the early 80s lapsed into babbling junkies. In Mandy, we see how mystics and seers with their joyous followers in the 70s devolved into delusional cult members, too passive and fucked-up to question the ease with which some pitch-shifted LSD-spiked light show won their soul over to a charismatic psychopath. That was what acid users often weren't prepared for--the suggestibility that made them easy marks. There was a reason the CIA used it in mind control experiments. It left an unsuspecting person's hard drive decrypted and wide open for hacking. If drugs didn't open their mind enough to see that it was their own mind opening, on its own, it was too easy to let a scammer take credit. I saw them all the time at Dead Shows in the 80s... only there in a more benevolent, large-scale way. The music dissipated the Satanic darkness the music engendered. It wasn't hard to see the power that band had, the way so many people were willing to be subsumed in the larger ego --a nice way to live if you're able to surrender fully, until you're exploited, which, how can you not be? Be it groupies letting themselves by horribly abused by Led Zeppelin up in the Edgewater, misled German boys charging into Belarus all amped up on Pervatin, or Manson's women singing at their own trial--total belief in false gods provides the ultimate in permissive highs, obliterating all traces of empathy, self-regard, and sanity in a giddy headlong rush.
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| No, my children, it's not Richard Lynch |
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| 99% of all great horror/genre films remember people watch TV, and they keep their sets on all the time. |
Grief and suffering heat a man to a cherry red blade ready for an oil quench and a sharpness test. As on TV's Forged in Fire, it's not what the blade does to this railroad spike, it's what this railroad spike does to this blade. But forged in the anguish of murderous Jesus freaks, that spike is going down.
Though filmed in the wilds of Belgium, presumably the black forest region where Hansel and Gretl were chased by Suspiria witches, it's clear this is a film with the wild depths of the Canadian provinces in its heart - dark forest lands that maps can't do justice to, as if our entire USA is engulfed in old growth and chilly salmon-stoked streams, wilderness where meth and LSD labs and wild ATV-riding nightmares run amok. We forget how vast empty country is, our minds pull towns closer together like a wormhole. But if you've ever driven across country, in the North, Highway 80 or 90, you've seen it - the vastness, the emptiness, like it's a whole separate dimension. That vastness coupled to the deep old growth forest vibe is what makes dark Nordic folktales spring to life when enough residents are high as hell or have done enough astral voyaging in their lives that they can shrug off massive doses of the 'good stuff' and laugh mercilessly at the penis of their insane captor. And yet they are no different than people you probably know, that cool couple (4) who exist casually in that gulf between blue collar outdoors jobs and white collar education, the couple who love all the things they do and are humble and just out for the same things the rest of us are. The self-imposed dream exile of the Jesus freaks and Black Skulls, these makers of dark myth, are the real losers. Doomed and misled by baser impulses, peer pressure, and cheap meth.
That may be the highest auric ray inherent in the glow of Mandy, the idea that if the average dude with his 9-5 outdoor job, who just likes kicking back with his old lady on weekends, not starting any trouble, might feel outgunned, out-"lived," by all the wild and polyamorous maniacs out there, maybe it's really the reverse. The 9-5 job-working couples eating dinner in front of the TV are more mythically dense, loom larger on the horizon of glory, than all the murderous acid-addled hippie freaks out there, combined. If we 'normals' can slow our roll down, bring our Iron John larger-than-lifeness to even the smallest detail in our daily life (instead of letting it just evaporate in a boozy haze), if we can live so minutely that just taking out the trash can reverberate with druggy slow-tempo grinding, the analog synth score in our headphones filling each woodland shadow with dragonly menace, then maybe the glowing green gem we somehow lost during the 90s via Bjork, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Moby and Massive A.- all that spinal fluid-draining MDMA heartbreak (3) will turn up at last. Maybe the warm amniotic fuzzy completion that lies even beyond duality and total union with the OMmmm was just waiting out in the backyard for us to finish dinner, so we can race back outside and resume the game before it gets too dark to see the ball.
Maybe, deep inside some shrieking hippie's gut pocket, that ball is still waiting --back there in 1983 AD--back when we were still reading paperbacks and watching arial TV, still rocking to guitar solos on warm analog LPs and eight tracks, still smoking brown, seedy weed, and riding through deep forest canopy full of insect life; still made art on paper and canvas. Cut open that hippie dragon and pull that gem out, Nic Cage!
He has.
Always kind of half-assed around the edges, and hammy, as if he was fumbling around on a car radio dial of insanity looking for his 'One True Signal' - something deeper and wilder than anyone had ever tuned to before--never picking a station 'til he found it--he could drive the backseat passengers crazy. Well, here he found it- here he's busted through all that white noise at last. This is no longer a manic Crispin Glover kind of crazy or a method-worked crazy, but a crazy from the masculine diaphragm, laughing and hollering and roaring in the face of dragons like Blue Babe and Bunyan. From steel first softened via the Iron John nascent Men's Movement of the late 80s, hammered in the Forged in Fire of the anvil-ringing now, the Iron John wildman archetype Nic now embodies passes every strength and sharpness test, slicing through carcasses of false prophets and rows of gossipy phantasm apples. It's not what the man will do the world, it's what the world will do to the man. And Nic's edge isn't even dulled after a brutal leg chain chop. He will cut. He will kill. The serpent's eye is lifted from the abyssal lair in the belly of the beast. Strange and eternal, Mandy of Jupiter ascends.
Dad, if only I ever got to see you working.
NOTES:
1. See SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (10/11/11)
2. The Cheddar Goblin commercial is very gross (he vomits mac and cheese on lucky kids' heads, but makes a great counterpoint to Red's horrible loss, and is made by the genius behind the beloved Too Many Cooks.
3. It took me ten years of mourning to accept that warm 'first night' rush would never come back. Craig got it all down so beautifully I cry to this
4. See also: The Devil's Candy (2015)
FURTHER:
The Acidemic Nic Cage Reader (Knowing, Kick-Ass, Drive Angry, Bad Lieutenant, Vampire's Kiss)
Tales from the Benway Pharmacy (Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Machine)
Manson Poppins: The Deathmaster
Though filmed in the wilds of Belgium, presumably the black forest region where Hansel and Gretl were chased by Suspiria witches, it's clear this is a film with the wild depths of the Canadian provinces in its heart - dark forest lands that maps can't do justice to, as if our entire USA is engulfed in old growth and chilly salmon-stoked streams, wilderness where meth and LSD labs and wild ATV-riding nightmares run amok. We forget how vast empty country is, our minds pull towns closer together like a wormhole. But if you've ever driven across country, in the North, Highway 80 or 90, you've seen it - the vastness, the emptiness, like it's a whole separate dimension. That vastness coupled to the deep old growth forest vibe is what makes dark Nordic folktales spring to life when enough residents are high as hell or have done enough astral voyaging in their lives that they can shrug off massive doses of the 'good stuff' and laugh mercilessly at the penis of their insane captor. And yet they are no different than people you probably know, that cool couple (4) who exist casually in that gulf between blue collar outdoors jobs and white collar education, the couple who love all the things they do and are humble and just out for the same things the rest of us are. The self-imposed dream exile of the Jesus freaks and Black Skulls, these makers of dark myth, are the real losers. Doomed and misled by baser impulses, peer pressure, and cheap meth.
That may be the highest auric ray inherent in the glow of Mandy, the idea that if the average dude with his 9-5 outdoor job, who just likes kicking back with his old lady on weekends, not starting any trouble, might feel outgunned, out-"lived," by all the wild and polyamorous maniacs out there, maybe it's really the reverse. The 9-5 job-working couples eating dinner in front of the TV are more mythically dense, loom larger on the horizon of glory, than all the murderous acid-addled hippie freaks out there, combined. If we 'normals' can slow our roll down, bring our Iron John larger-than-lifeness to even the smallest detail in our daily life (instead of letting it just evaporate in a boozy haze), if we can live so minutely that just taking out the trash can reverberate with druggy slow-tempo grinding, the analog synth score in our headphones filling each woodland shadow with dragonly menace, then maybe the glowing green gem we somehow lost during the 90s via Bjork, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Moby and Massive A.- all that spinal fluid-draining MDMA heartbreak (3) will turn up at last. Maybe the warm amniotic fuzzy completion that lies even beyond duality and total union with the OMmmm was just waiting out in the backyard for us to finish dinner, so we can race back outside and resume the game before it gets too dark to see the ball.
Maybe, deep inside some shrieking hippie's gut pocket, that ball is still waiting --back there in 1983 AD--back when we were still reading paperbacks and watching arial TV, still rocking to guitar solos on warm analog LPs and eight tracks, still smoking brown, seedy weed, and riding through deep forest canopy full of insect life; still made art on paper and canvas. Cut open that hippie dragon and pull that gem out, Nic Cage!
He has.
Always kind of half-assed around the edges, and hammy, as if he was fumbling around on a car radio dial of insanity looking for his 'One True Signal' - something deeper and wilder than anyone had ever tuned to before--never picking a station 'til he found it--he could drive the backseat passengers crazy. Well, here he found it- here he's busted through all that white noise at last. This is no longer a manic Crispin Glover kind of crazy or a method-worked crazy, but a crazy from the masculine diaphragm, laughing and hollering and roaring in the face of dragons like Blue Babe and Bunyan. From steel first softened via the Iron John nascent Men's Movement of the late 80s, hammered in the Forged in Fire of the anvil-ringing now, the Iron John wildman archetype Nic now embodies passes every strength and sharpness test, slicing through carcasses of false prophets and rows of gossipy phantasm apples. It's not what the man will do the world, it's what the world will do to the man. And Nic's edge isn't even dulled after a brutal leg chain chop. He will cut. He will kill. The serpent's eye is lifted from the abyssal lair in the belly of the beast. Strange and eternal, Mandy of Jupiter ascends.
Dad, if only I ever got to see you working.
NOTES:
1. See SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (10/11/11)
2. The Cheddar Goblin commercial is very gross (he vomits mac and cheese on lucky kids' heads, but makes a great counterpoint to Red's horrible loss, and is made by the genius behind the beloved Too Many Cooks.
3. It took me ten years of mourning to accept that warm 'first night' rush would never come back. Craig got it all down so beautifully I cry to this
4. See also: The Devil's Candy (2015)
FURTHER:
Tales from the Benway Pharmacy (Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Machine)
Manson Poppins: The Deathmaster
Saw this yesterday after reading this.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a big fan of ultraviolence, even cartoonish violence, but I did love the space the film pushed me into, sort of that von Trier/Winding Refn space where anything could happen and we're detached from our usual filters and morality.
The visuals were so fantastic- the tracers on Mandy's face in the red/blue tripping scene were wonderful. And scenes like "You ripped my shirt!" and, well, lighting the cigarette off the burning head made me laugh.
It's one of those films I can't believe got made and thanks for giving me the push through your great writing to see it.
Thanks Harry, glad to have "helped'
DeleteI do not get it. A straight line (the plot) with lots of colors and some cartoons is still just a boring old straight line. So, I'm going to watch it again.
ReplyDeleteHahah - yeah it's a familiar tale, but consider it in line with Mandy's fantasy novel she's reading, and the parallels between that and Nordic myth and the dawn of Christianity when it was still a blood cult running amok in the East
DeleteSorry for the belated comment, but just a quick note to say thanks so much for this post Erich - absolutely fantastic writing.
ReplyDeleteThis film is so densely packed with unfathomable cultural/mythic resonance, it's great to have someone of your particular talents on hand to crack it open like a coconut.
Personally, I couldn't help but start to see it as some kind of psychedelic '..Alfredo Garcia' in the days after viewing, but there's enough hidden in there for probably every single viewer to pull out their own favourite threads and connections and start waving them around... which is nice. Can't wait to watch it again.