1985.
A-Ha invites the world to hear synth songs composed of elements medieval, picaresque and fantastic. The songs constitute their 1985 album, Hunting High and Low. One song in particular is constructed in a melodramatic register but also serves up popular appeal, and it is titled "I Dream Myself Alive.""I Dream Myself Alive.
You can't deny.
There's something dark against the light.
All I can say,
It doesn't have to be this way."
The song is immersive, conducting a specific world, as the band does cohesively throughout the album. Beyond being music, playing it evokes a subjectivity; an enclosure; a world of feeling.
As does Panos Cosmatos' Mandy.
1983.
MANDY. Panos Cosmatos, 2018.The synth sounds (composed by Johann Johannsson) haunt and bounce; reverberating the space they live in, like glass. Sometimes notes collect en masse, droning; suggesting inevitability.
Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) dreams himself into an unreal reality. He inhabits a holy space of his own creation. He works in the earth and the earth returns his effort and gives shelter. Love is a private inner world he and his lover Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) sustain by maintaining its borders. She illustrates; figurally and scenically aligned with the fantastical imagery of the Metal bands she sports on her shirts. Their story is romantic yet conscious about its interiority; hiding inside, being separated from some greater world. The elements coloring the story are oversaturated primaries, deep space in forestry environs, mythologic marital love, and the fantastic.
Early scenes: Red cuts trees for work. The trees his chainsaw cleaves in two prefigure the cleaving of oneness into twoness that occurs in dramatic graphic imagery as the movie gets in motion.
When Red returns home to Mandy at the end of his work day, their domestic sphere evokes a modern treehouse, with visible lumber and the sense of being a safe space within a natural organism.
"Handke wrote, 'The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself.' That was beautiful, ...Handke did not lie...I was lying. Why? When I looked at a tree, I saw that it was blind and arbitrary, an entity that had come into being and would die, and which in the meantime was growing."
-- p 177 My Struggle, Book 6 -Karl Ove Knausgaard.
TITLE CARD: Shadow Mountains 1983 A.D.
Images track the Sacred as well as the Profane. The couple's womblike home counters the vastness of the wooded spaces as well as the heterogenous intentions outside of their own.
Mandy is the main character through which we experience a sense of anxiety of outside threats. The look in her eyes as she works in the shop, her awareness of another's gaze upon her; both a male in a car and another female, in person. Women are not holy to Mandy, and her modernness is sensed in her own agency by working for herself and knowing enough to be as untrusting of a woman than she may be a man.
Murmured in the background is an Unseen Voice of the Televisual: The voice of President Ronald Reagan, announcing, triumphantly, the spiritual awakening of America.
ENTER: THE BOGEYMEN.
Distinctions are as blurry as the image of Mandy's face when it falls under the subjective, longing gaze of "Psycho Jesus Freak" Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache.)
Vision counters sound. The sound is rhetorical, and vision slowly states that what we know is moving into past tense. The definition of Mandy vs the definition of the evil sister is blurred because our view; our perspective is blurred. We watch Mandy walk home and we breathe in a dreamlike sense of her: romantic and elemental in the forest. The form of her silhouette is liquefied as she and the forest bleed into each other. Is this a fairytale princess; the viewfinder owned by adoring husband Red? Or is this the view of Mandy from the car window of murderous deviant Jeremiah Sand?
THE TREE OF LIFE VS THE BOGEYMAN.
PERCEPTION IS FLUID.
Good vs. Evil, or loss of individuation.
Silhouettes have boundaries. Their outline is what differentiates (for the watcher) the distinction between where the human ends and where the forest they are walking in begins. Boundaries (like these) bleed in Mandy. Key here is the distended timeline and sequence of Mandy's capture. But is this point of rupture (and major tonal pivot point in the film) or a nod to the creative process? The doors of perception allow one to enter a possible crisis: permanent loss of self. They also offer privileged rarity: pure experience outside of the self. To bend the mind and amuse at the loss.
Later on, in Knausgaard's book, he struggles with the process (WHY and HOW) of creating art.
A sense of boundary -less ness or selflessness is drawn:
"What does it mean to write? First of all it is to lose oneself, or one's self. In that it resembles reading, but ...the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow...no foreground or background, no top or bottom."
p. 240
TOPICAL BOGEYMEN:
(in 1983)
Under the gothic pop terrain is a deeper reckoning: reaction to the radical political change of the late 1960s -70s and the freewheeling sexual mores. The political and cultural reactionaries came back to battle it all with BOGEYMEN. Feminism was born and then widely rebuked in 1983; a recall based on the horror of women who do not subordinate to men.
When Mandy is taken by the man who can't escape her gaze; he is the bogeyman not unlike how traditional women saw people like Mandy at that time. It was dawn in America, and women were pressed to maintain the traditional role. In the sequence depicting her kidnapped encounter, there is a shared recognition between Mandy and Sand; each horrified of the other, faces acidicly dripping into one another.
GODLESS SOVIETS. (Perestroika, doomed attempts to alter a governmental economy. Encroaching RED scare echoed in MANDY's apocalyptic reds)
Fear of sexual deviation and the loss of the couple: recent psychic symptoms from 1970s spate of MANSON TYPE CULT LEADERS.
INDEPENDENT WOMEN -- WILL FORSAKE MEN. Because ERA almost passed..until in 1982 it failed to be ratified by the a few of the total needed number of states. Anxieties of the job market are exulted by working men facing the end of economic harmony as well as the end of heterosexual dependency.
Writing on the economic crisis of 2008-09, David Leonhardt reminds us of 1982 as he writes (NYT, Jan 20, 2009): "Is the economy only a little worse than it was in the last couple recessions, as some have said, and still a long way from the dark days of 1982?"
 |
| she exerts agency |
 |
| Trapped in his Gaze |
 |
| Are they so different? |
 |
| enjoyment, but solitary |
 |
| Desperate to reassert his own agency |
