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                     Mandy - A Gnostic Allegory and The Most Metal Movie Ever Made

When I die
Bury me deep
Lay two speakers at my feet
Wrap some headphones
Around my head
And rock and roll me
When I'm dead


     Panos Cosmatos’ new film Mandy opens in black, giving way to the deep verdant hues of the primordial forest. A synth spins in resonance and the first strains of Starless by King Crimson wafts in on waves of Mellotron and Fripper-tronic Guitar Fuzz as emerald and amber light filters thru the branches. Red fells trees and goes about his logging work with an easy grace.

Sundown dazzling day 
Gold through my eyes 
But my eyes turned within
Only see Starless and bible black 

     All seems bucolic but yeah, those lyrics tell me this is probably not going to end well. In English class they called that “foreshadowing”.

     Mandy is a film which can be viewed on multiple levels, I am going to unpack at least two, as a Mythological Gnostic Allegory and as the cannabis and fantasy-novel fueled daydream of the titular Mandy. I have specific details from the film I am going to throw out to prove this second thesis but will drop them in the second half of the article with a nice “there be spoilers ahead” warning for those of you who are not familiar.

     For the first half hour or so we are treated to some of the most beautiful images I have seen on film, a 1983 Pacific Northwest paradise called the Shadow Mountains, near a Crystal Lake. (Oh, shit! more foreshadowing, that was the name of the lake in Friday the 13th!!!) Here is where I feel Johann Johannson’s soundtrack really shines as Panos plays with dancing and strobing light effects toshow us the heavenly Pleroma these lovers have made for themselves, a veritable eye in the storm as Reagan’s Satanic Panic rages around them. They share, they allow each other space, they are tender with each other. (Just as Jeremiah asks Mandy later in the film; “be kind, like me.”)

     Through this idyll we see Red start to get little glimpses though that all is not well in the garden, there may be a serpent or two approaching, a rough beast may be slouching their way. When he looks in his rear view mirror on the drive home from his logging job the trees seem to be towering hooded malevolent figures in hot pursuit. When he sees the fantasy paintings Mandy has created he is taken aback, perhaps worrying an artist of this caliber is not made for this world and won’t be around long. Red, after waking from a bad dream expresses this growing worry and suggests that maybe they should move but Mandy quickly shuts him down, “this is like our little home…” and it breaks the heart the way she says home like she has never had one. Mandy is a sensitive soul in a cruel world, traumatized by the Patriarchy (her father and the starlings!) and here we can begin our dive into the Gnostic allegory, with a little background first.


-Gnosticism was and is an unfixed and unfinished thing, encompassing a multiplicity of views and sects and ontological frameworks which grew alongside and thru the early centuries of Christianity and which incorporates many controversial ideas. One of these is to flip the traditional narrative of Genesis so that the Creator God (s) or Elohim (you know, the old Rule-maker. The let-us-not let- man get too big for his britches asshole type) is the oppressing force of the thug-like Archons and switching the Snake into the role of messenger of Sophia (Goddess if Wisdom- fallen into and trapped in matter). Later in the movie we encounter the Horn of Abraxas which is another Gnostic deity or character and though it is hard to pin down a definitive definition of the God Abraxas or Abraxis we could say he is the Demiurge, The God below God who thinks he’s the only God, the unplanned progeny of The Goddess of Wisdom Sophia or Barbelo (or Babalon of the Holy Spirit) who believes himself to be the one true god because he is blind to his parentage and thinks he created the world he finds himself in.

     The Demiurge is considered by some to be represented by the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah). In our little allegory this role will be played by Jeremiah Sand, an ex-folk musician and full time mind-controller / cult leader. As one of his devoted followers tells Mandy as she is being drugged and slapped around; “it’s all just his dream…”


     This is hippie solipsism taken to a sociopathic level, the universe revolves around me, everything I see is mine, the white man entitled…

Whatever happened to the hippie dream?

This idea is something further explored in Panos’ first film; Beyond the Black
Rainbow...

...where we are witness to the last days of “Arboria”. A New Age Theme Park/Psionic Laboratory extraordinaire. The founder of Arboria is now a feeble minded addict, kept drugged and distracted watching old VHS Promo tapes of Arboria’s illustrious beginning by his right hand man, another Jeremiah Sand type who tripped one too many trips and now has been possessed by something nameless from some dark dimension.

     He keeps the founder’s daughter; a telekinetic moonchild, trapped in some kind of psychic power dampening pyramid prison (Prison/ Prism/ Rainbow)…

     Here we have another Gnostic idea; the rape of Eve or the imprisoning of the Female Wisdom Principle or Holy Spirirt by the “Rulers” (Archons/Powers/ Principalities). The same Corporate Thugs who wanted to make sure Adam and Eve didn’t get to that other tree and get their old monkey brains jacked up enough to be a threat.


     So we have our Players: Mandy, Red and Jeremiah, our classic love triangle (pyramid).

Jeremiah Sand –

     Jeremiah Sand stages his first meeting with Mandy like some time type of nightmare version of the Last Supper, robed in glory, arms raised in benediction in the middle of the assembly like he is the big J man.

     Mandy has been put under the influence (psychedelics and some kind of insect sting to bring on the effects more quickly) so as to be all the more impressed. Classic Charles Manson move.

      Is Jeremiah a symbol of the demiurge? Well, does he think he is God himself? Check. Does he represent the Patriarchy as it oppresses the sacred feminine? Well, he disrobes and throws his patriarchal phallic symbol right in Mandy’s face so that’s a double check! When he talks about meeting God he mentions God’s hot loving light and right there you have some Solar/Masculine symbolism. And he is in possession of a “Horn of Abraxas” (horn, that’s phallic) as mentioned before which he uses to call up his servitors or “Gnarly Psychos”. He himself never gets his hands dirty and he plays his followers off against each other psychologically to get the results he wants. You know, your basic CEO.

Full disclosure; I grew up in a Jesus Hippie Cult. Subtract the LSD and the gnarly psychos and you basically have my upbringing. My parents had their own Jeremiah Sand who put them through the same off-balancing, mind control techniques.

Let’s contrast him with Red:

Red -- I am thinking ex-military… Nam vet? Some Shadowy Op?

     His friend in the old trailer out in the woods is wearing a military jacket- holding Red’s crossbow “Reaper”. Where was that used previously? One of Mandy’s illustrations is of the classic Woman and Lion (Babalon and the Beast) And we see Red wearing a Tiger t-shirt, further hinted at in the scene where The Chemist sets his caged tiger free. Red is the beast kept in balance by the love of woman – but once she is gone the beast is unleashed! (Little spoiler – The last shot of the movie after the credits is Mandy’s drawing desk whichhas an unfinished illutration of Red with the tiger as an overlay, like it is his spirit animal…

"The power of love came into me, and I became fierce like a lion, then tender like the evening star."

- Rumi, The Book of Love



Red - Pierced in the side by the blade from the "abyssal layer", like the Lance of
Longinus that pierced Christ. The Chemist calls Red a; “Jovan Warrior sent from the eye of the storm” who exudes a cosmic darkness. Well, fuck man, his wife just got abducted by a biker gang of gnarly psychos whose presence filled the air with static and disturbed the magnetic fields in their home. Mandy chooses Jupiter as her favorite planet because it is in a state of constant flux or storm. Red chooses Saturn (aged, taciturn, dark, heavy) but then switches his allegiance to Galactus; the eater of worlds and this is what he has become by the end. The eater of Jeremiah’s world which is the Children of the New Dawn cult. In Red, Jeremiah confronts an actual example of what he thought he was; a being become more than human, ridden by a God, an occult engine, a mystical machine; powered and driven by a burning void at his center, a Golem hell-bent on an unholy mission, his wrathful purpose written on his soul.

"Such a Prayer builds a bridge over death…"


     By the end of the film Red has become one with his god, he is inseparable from his Goddess Mandy. The cult has called up Abraxas and forged their own beast just as Red forged his axe of destruction and Mandy augured the coming of the Reaper.

     There is a Gnostic tradition in which Christ is seen as being on a secret mission to “jailbreak” the Goddess, but there is nothing I have found yet about a vengeful Christ seeking to destroy those Archons. But this is Mandy’s dream, we are just living in it.

     After the run in with the cult and Mandy’s death Red, shattered, enters their home and comes upon a commercial playing on television for Cheddar Goblin Mac and Cheese.

     He’s not in Kansas anymore, folks. Red has entered the Goblin Universe, a phrase used to denote the Trickster aspect of all Paranormal Phenomenon. He is now dancing with the devil and all bets are off.

Spoiler Alert – Final Section Begins – Exegesis - My Theory


-Mandy is an artist and a dreamer. She is lost in her own inner worlds. She is Pixie-led. We see this in the beginning of the film when Red gets home and startles her. She creates worlds and lives in them, somewhat like Jeremiah the demiurge; but as the wisdom of the divine feminine she is not creating out of ego and pride but is also connected to the earth and is magical, bewitching. She arises out of the water like a nymph or a dryad; elemental, potent and haunting. We know from her starling story she had a bad relationship with her father, the cruel demiurge of her world. She is damaged but still vital. She walks in the dewy cool early morning of the forest like a faun, a creature of the primordial earth, bathing in the images rising from her soul, smoking her pipe and exhaling her visions onto the canvas…

"The souls of all phenomena unite to comprise a world of sensuous images, and it is only as unmediated images that the essences appear to the pathic soul who receives their meaning-content." 

Ludwig Klages

     Mandy spins herself a reverie of a dark warlock just like the one she has been reading about in her fantasy novel, Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye by Lenora Tor:

     The warlock in Mandy’s story is an Acid-Christ with his own backwoods Family and the serpent’s eye he seeks is Mandy herself.

     The next scene after the Fantasy begins swirls in with smoke and fog and Mandy walking in the forest. Fog and smoke are a traditional symbol for the characters travelling into an imaginative past of other dimensions. The cult drives by and Jeremiah sets his Manson Lamps on Mandy and decides he has to have her, he feels "naked without her". Mandy has "called out" to him and he has listened.

Tragic events follow.

     From here on we are in Mandy’s inner world and the action corresponds: when the cult member makes small talk with her in the grocery store she is still reading the same page of the novel, because she has not continued reading, she is lost in daydreaming. When she is killed her body jumps in the bag like the starlings. After her superhuman lover avenges he rides off into an brutal expanse under an alien sky with multiple moons and sun; he is in the world of her fantasy novels.

     In the scenes just prior to this ending Red is seen wearing the 44 shirt and so is Mandy. As he gazes at her in the passenger seat and smiles his rictus smile they both wear the same shirt.

     This is why we have the tiger spirit animal illustration at the end which is Mandy’s “earthing” of this extraordinary vision into an artistic object. Mandy has conjured up a mythology and a mythology is something that never actually happened but is true forever. Whether this particular tale of tragedy and revenge actually happened doesn’t matter as this story is true forever.

"Such a Prayer builds a bridge over death…
When the outer world grows cold, this star still shines.

There is nothing that can separate man from his own God, if man can only turn his gaze away from the fiery spectacle of Abraxas." 

Carl Jung

Stranger Things Soundtrack Review

Analogue Dialogue

This soundtrack album unpacks a slick vintage synth picnic, a moveable feast of 80's style sci fi score offerings from tense pulsing bass runs to pieces beamed in from the beautiful but sickly hazy wooze universe of Boards of Canada or early Ambient Eno.  

Seriously, there are like 18 plus tracks on here, definitely worth the money. I have purchased a few e.p.s from S U R V I V E; this is the guys who made this album's "Synthwave" band. I don't call it synthwave, I didn't call it witch-house or dark-wave back then. These are the progeny of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Harmonia, Bruce Haack and all the unsung greats who knew drum machines and keyboards could be used for much more than moving your booty. I don't call this kind of music anything, I just say; "turn it up, to Eleven! that's my jam!"  

The pieces here are minimalist, like little frozen sound paintings and all have that quality I look for in synth music which is really capturing an emotional state, like freezing consciousness in a pattern, like emotion affecting and making patterns in water.

Flesh-Portal/ Interface

The show itself was a lot of fun though the story gets bogged down a little towards the end. The weekend it premiered I had just been reading a bunch of this series on Reddit known variously as 9M9H9E9 or Interface but it is basically about Government experiences involving flesh-portals to other dimensions and the LSD-addled children who are able to go thru and come back but do so changed; psy powers, glimpses of unknown realms and higher beings... hmm, sounds a lot like Stranger Things?

Tapping In

 But that brings us to what this series did so well which was to Tap In. Tap in to what those images of seventies and eighties sci fi do to us, those images from the movie-dreams of our youth. Tapping in to what these sounds do to us, the soundtrack of Hope, of the Promising Future, now turned mournful and nostalgic, echoing around our skulls like empty chatter. Cosmic love to cosmic fear. The Gnostic Realization.

I am listening to this album now as I read William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, which has it's own synchro-mystic connections to these stories or flesh-portals and "interfacing".

Highlights:

The Upside Down - pulses flash and beat around octave pitches while a bass drum tiptoes up behind you

Stranger Things (Main Theme) - Amazing, has more heat and movement in it's one minute plus running time than most whole songs. 

Kids - That sad but sweet Emotive-Synth like early OMD or Yaz.

Friendship - small but sweet and soothing, like a little audio pot de creme!

...

I could gush on and on but instead how about you get this album for yourself? Stop youtubing and spotifying and start supporting artists?

Red and Black Attack

Welcome to the Dark New Age/ Sound Defense

Sitting With All the Cosmic/New Age Music to find the BEST... So you don't have to:

Ray Lynch - Deep Breakfast

It's Memorial Day Monday, waking up late after a heavy night. Waking up to a Bowl of Maybe not the most nutritious breakfast in the world;

starts with a song called Celestial Soda Pop; hey, what do you have to do today? That cover is unfortunate but the music is gorgeous, not too cheesy, lots of space and well-formed melodies and deep warm synth-strings. Reminds me a little of the second side of Brian Eno's Before and After Silence, that same stillness and quasi-classical synth work...

In Space No One Knows what You had for Breakfast!