Mandy: Bad Trip

Memory is a funny thing - we tend to remember the gist of things, the way they felt, rather than how they actually happened. We get details wrong, but we get them wrong in ways consistent with the overall feeling of the experience. We’re better at remembering the emotional truth of an experience than its literal truth.

This occurred to me while I was watching Mandy, because the whole film feels like the emotional truth, rather than literal truth, of a specific time and place, of a specific zeitgeist. It evokes a specific aesthetic and set of cultural references while at the same time turning them all up to the point of expressionism.

Red is a lumberjack, and he and his girlfriend Mandy live in a cozy cabin by a lake at the foot of the Shadow Mountains. He chops down trees, she runs the cash register at a small gas station, and in the evenings she draws or reads, they watch television together, talk about their dreams. Theirs is a life of quiet contentment under an impossibly starry sky.

That is, until the day that Mandy crosses paths with Jeremiah Sand, aspiring musician and leader of a small cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Something about Mandy captivates him, calls to him.

He must have her, and Jeremiah Sand is used to getting the things he decides he needs.

 It’s a story as old as time. You’ve got a quiet, hardworking man, the woman he loves, a kidnapping, and that quiet hardworking man set off on a rampage of revenge in the name of the woman he loves. It’s right there in the title: Mandy. This is a film that works in the way it presents discrete images and vignettes that communicate a feeling, moreso than in telling a story. It does have a story, albeit not an especially complicated one, but what makes this film compelling is how richly and vividly the story is put up on the screen, and how far it pushes its imagery. It’s shot with a vivid, gorgeous palette that takes elements of drug/psychedelia, cult, and biker exploitation films and turns them up and up until they achieve hallucinatory majesty, punctuated by intertitles that first tell us the setting (the Shadow Mountains, in 1983, in a flowery period-appropriate script), then the antagonists (the Children of the New Dawn, set in a typeface reserved for Satanic-panic witchcraft stories), and finally, over an hour in, Red’s mission (Mandy, described with the thorny symmetry of a metal band’s logo). How it’s written matters as much as what it says.

Likewise, how it looks tells us how the characters feel. The beginning - our introduction to Red and Mandy and their idyllic existence - has a strong emphasis on the cosmic, lots of color washes and open, brightly starry skies, and as the film goes on, these open vistas are replaced by the chromatic aberration and apocalyptic visions of hallucinogens, then a descent into darkness and firelight and grime, and then back to vivid color again as Red completes his journey through hell, itself chronicled by animated nightmare sequences that resemble nothing more than the cover of one of Mandy’s pulp fantasy novels, or a heavy metal album cover. Mandy’s kidnapping is set in total darkness, punctuated only by flashes of blue electricity, action captured in fragments like a very slow strobe, and even relatively innocuous scenes of everyday life are shot through with period-appropriate film grain and colors, the warm browns and mustard yellows of the 1970s and early 1980s. Still, you’d never mistake it for a period film because everything’s so heightened, all of the cultural allusions so caricatured, that it becomes something else entirely.

The acting contributes to the overall expressionism as well. The characters don’t really have inner lives and largely speak in banalities, but it works, because they’re essentially emotional colors alongside the literal colors of the film. Red speaks mostly in monotone or in pained, guttural screams of rage and grief, and Jeremiah Sand is quietly melodramatic until the second he doesn’t get his way, the facade revealing ugly, angry cracks. A conversation between Red and the Chemist, a purveyor of powerful drugs, seems to consist of Red broadcasting his thoughts telepathically, and throughout, Mandy feels remote, unknowable, unattainable, as if she’s a ghost, as if she’s already receding in Red’s memory no matter how hard he tries to hold onto her. The soundtrack does its own share of the heavy lifting to convey what words do not, shifting from gentle ambience to ominous, pulsing synthesizers and tectonic swells of distorted guitar as Red journeys further into darkness.

It isn’t perfectly executed, however. Most notably, it flags a little at the beginning of the third act. While it’s still beautifully shot and lit, the action, when Red finally arrives at a confrontation, is not paced well. There is a fight against a demonic biker gang that should feel climactic given their monstrous introduction but doesn’t, instead ending as it’s just starting to develop a head of steam, and Red’s revenge against the cultists - something we’d expect to be lingered over - is dispatched summarily. What the first two-thirds of film leads up to is over in a matter of minutes, the end result being oddly anticlimactic. The filmmaker’s lack of facility with action is, however, made up for by a final encounter with Jeremiah that works beautifully, an apocalyptic showdown in the pulsing red light of his church. The end result is a film you feel, rather than one you think about, a simultaneous love letter to and tone poem for an age and aesthetic long passed, and perhaps only dreamed about. But what a dream it is.

IMDB entry
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