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Free Drinks posted:I have now watched this film a LOT, looking for different things. I am still comfortable with the conclusion that the drug and/or mysticism angle is being depicted exactly as Panos intended. Truly, utterly and purposely ambiguous. Not really. At the end of the film, Red quotes Joseph Campbell by way of New Age ultra-kook Stanislav Grof. Campbell said “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight”, to which Grof added that the mystical experience is often harrowing and not very delightful at all. Grof pushed LSD experimentation as a means of becoming a “psychonaut” - accessing past lives, achieving ‘cosmic awareness’, reliving prenatal memories, contacting demons and UFOs, etc. Grof was an admirer of, for example, L. Ron Hubbard. The joke at the end, of course, is that Red is so psychotic that he’s swimming - he’s actually achieved the ultimate mystical experience, making New Agers like Grof and Sand look like fuckin losers by comparison.
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Oct 14, 2018 22:16
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Yeah, to fit it into SMG's analogy, people aren't questioning whether Red is drowning or swimming in the waters; they're questioning whether the waters are there at all. Cosmatos' films are both characterized by their materialism. Yes, the bikers are xenomorphized by hyper-LSD, but they also still live in a house and use a toilet (a nice touch). They're not, like, ghosts or something. They're people. As Free Drinks notes, nothing particularly outrageous actually happens in the film. Altered states of consciousness are conveyed mainly through lighting effects. The trickiest 'impossible' stuff all surrounds Mandy, and that metaphorical imagery is all derived from her fantasy novel(s). Given that Seeker Of The Serpent's Eye is not a true story, the point is that the fantasy novel actually does reflect aspects of human psychology. Like, no, Red doesn't actually travel to a different planet at the end.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:59
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Basebf555 posted:People seem to love to point out that it "doesn't matter" in these kind of discussions but what if it's just fun to think about and talk about? Like, the literal meaning of Jack appearing in the photo at the end of The Shining doesn't "matter" but its still a fun thing to toss around in your head. Saying 'it doesn't matter' is just obscurantism. The trouble with debate over whether the events are real or not is that it skips over the far more pertinent question: what are the events? This is where, for example, this guy gets tripped up: Your Parents posted:This also reflects the relationship in the beginning of the movie. Mandy's ideal world is the one she paints. She has goals and dreams and all that independent of her relationship. Red's ideal world is "being with Mandy". The entire point of the film is that Mandy did not die in the bag. She is still burning, she is 'between two deaths', silently demanding revenge. So when Red leaves in the car, driving away from the 'primordial landscape' at the end of the film, he is specifically ferrying Mandy towards her second, absolute death.
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Oct 20, 2018 22:30
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Your Parents posted:The point of the last shot is that Mandy is not in the car and out of all the crazy poo poo we just saw, Red thinking he won and did it and gets to be happy with Mandy is the hallucination utterly detached from reality. No, because the reality is that Red is haunted by nightmares of his undead wife. The reality is that he did in fact meet Mandy at a bar, and he remembers this as the best moment of his life. The actual ambiguity of the ending concerns where Red is driving to; because most obviously he is driving back to the start of the film. There’s a circularity to the narrative, where its ending overlaps with its beginning - with Red meeting Mandy at the bar and driving her home. That is to say that the danger to Red is that he will be lost in his memories. It may be helpful to pause the film and actually read Seeker Of The Serpent’s Eye. In the novel, the cursed warlock Feid tricks a caravan of mercenaries into escorting him through a precarious volcanic landscape. Feid promises them gold and jewels, but the truth is that there is only The Serpent’s Eye - an artifact said to carry incredible destructive power. Nearing the location of the Eye, Feid deems the mercenaries fools and poisons them all to death, then shoves their leader (a boastful warrior named The Thrain) off a cliff. Finally grasping the Eye, Feid’s relishes his power - but his mind begins to fade. The world goes black around him and he wakes up over The Thrain’s corpse, without the Eye, his memory erased. It turns out the Eye itself was the source of the curse, and now Feid is unknowingly doomed to remember (and thereby relive) these murders over and over again... Now you may be tempted to read this as a 1:1 allegory for the events of the film, but the fact is that both Red and Sand resemble Feid - and therefore both Red and Sand resemble The Thrain, trapped in this eternal battle. But then, the difficult truth is that it is ultimately the undead Mandy who is the wretched sorceress, seen in the last dream sequence literally clutching the Eye. The point here is clearly linked back to the scene of the merging faces: Mandy and Sand are linked in Red’s mind, so Mandy is ultimately only freed from the curse if Red kills her.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:34
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SlimGoodbody posted:When are you gonna stop cokeposting on these forums and just write an apeshit movie for us to watch and enjoy Mandy was already written, so now it’s just a matter of interpreting it. Recall that Red is already having nightmares at the start of the film, feeling strangely uneasy in the woods, thinking of moving out of the forest.... what better evidence that the narrative is circular? It’s Mandy who convinces Red to stay, with her monologue about the baby starlings. So, Parents has it backwards: Mandy’s (conscious) goal is to stay forever isolated with Red. The starling monologue is a pretty overt reference to The Silence Of The Lambs, where Clarice Starling(!) was traumatized as a child when she heard lambs being slaughtered at her guardian’s farm and (like Mandy) ran away from home. In Lacanian terms, Mandy’s childhood scenario with the starlings is her fundamental fantasy. So while The Children Of The New Dawn are ‘just’ some assholes in a van, their profound psychological impact on Mandy comes from the resemblance of Sand to her own callous father. The approach of the van is a nightmarish realization of Mandy’s fantasy of union with her father - the fantasy that Mandy exiled herself in the forest to avoid. “If what [subjects] long for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it.” -Freud And this is ultimately the source of the attack: Sand picks up on this fantasy, somewhat-accurately recognizing Mandy’s fear as a call. But we should be specific: the traumatic part of the starling fantasy, for Mandy, is not so much seeing the birds die as the fact that she ran away, disappointing her father. So, although Mandy is ultimately forced into role of the ‘squirming pillowcase full of birds’, when she dies, it’s already been pointed out that comes across as almost a sort of relief from the real horror of joining the cult. When Mandy is in the pillowcase, we have a sort of reversal where Red (who Mandy previously fantasized as a wounded animal (see the scene with the dead fawn)) becomes the child wielding the crowbar. Hence the paradoxical image, in the final dream, of the slain alien animal-warrior - half man, half tiger.
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Oct 21, 2018 21:27
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Why was Mandy crying in the bar in Red's vision at the end? It’s both a memory of the moment they fell in love, and the moment her ghost is finally laid to rest. Again, the other time Mandy sheds a tear is when she finds the dead fawn in the woods - point being that she sees Red as a baby animal, like the starlings in her fantasy. (See the line about the vicious snowflake later in the film - Red is in a way referring to himself.)
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Oct 21, 2018 23:32
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Flying Zamboni posted:Something else that occurred to me is that Red's line early in the film when Mandy asks him which planet he would be he says he wouldn't be a planet but instead is Galactus, eating the other planets. To be clear, Red doesn’t say he wants to be Galactus - only that Galactus is his favourite planet. And again there’s an ambiguity, given that Mandy also talks about how Jupiter could swallow up the Earth. Red is in a way agreeing with her. “The surface of its atmosphere is a storm that's been raging for, like, 1,000 years, and the eye of the hurricane is so huge that it could just swallow the whole Earth.” The main distinction is that Red is talking about destruction, while Mandy is actually referring to a state of calm. The eye of a hurricane is a peaceful area - perhaps the only peaceful area on the planet. As the Chemist says, Red ends up becoming a “Jovan warrior sent forth from the eye of the storm.” In context, this name - Jovan - is a mix of Jovian (“of Jupiter”) and Jotan (the name of an archery-god apparently worshipped by the warlock Feid in Seeker Of The Serpent’s Eye (possibly a reference to the Norse Jötunn)). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Oct 23, 2018 |
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Oct 22, 2018 00:56
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:I think it's fair to say that there's more than one thing that can pull you in about Mandy, and if you're just there for one of those things you're probably not gonna be fond of the others. That theory doesn’t really work, because the second half is the ‘artsy’ half. That’s where Mandy and Sand merge into a single character, you get the cartoon dream sequences, and Red tearfully confides to a xenomorph that he’s not ready to talk about his death wish (that he’s always had?). There’s an interesting metaphor where Sand’s church is built from the wood Red was cutting in the opening scene, and then the entire ending reenacts Sand’s spiritual conversion: “When I was at the bottom of the pit, screaming in the darkness, racked with unspeakable pain for having been denied all that was rightfully mine, He graced me with his light. His hot, loving light.”
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Oct 24, 2018 08:35
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Al Cu Ad Solte posted:Wish there was a full transcript of the pages shown from Seeker of the Serpent's Eye. That one passage that Mandy reads from is surprisingly well written for what's supposed to be a trashy paperback. Feid's eyes slowly opened. Only a dimness came through. A faint red glow shimmering upon a background of glassy ebony. An even dimmer blue flickered in his eyes, licks of fire hissing forth from pools of lava so intense they burned azure. He could not recall what had happened since the last closing of his mind. He mustered all his discipline and tried to form a story out of what surrounded him. Here: an armored boot, singed with soot. He crawled forward and looked more intently. Two boots, a pair of greaves, legs and then a waist shrouded in charred cinders. Then the smell of burnt flesh. Beyond the waist was only the most intensely burnt parts of human flesh. The smell made him salivate. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, though the curse had rendered him unable to hold down food weeks ago. If not for that, he might've been tempted. Someone had pushed this armored soldier into a pool of volcanic lava, and his armor had only perhaps expedited the agony of his burning alive. It was an immensely painful death, as the victim's head and raised arm had hovered just above the lava long enough to freeze in burnt place. Then it came back to Feid. The Thrain, furiously searching in the dark for him, his voice booming, bragging, insults and arrogance. After summiting the crag, Feid had poisoned his men and the horses. It wasn't a terribly easy decision to make, or particularly convenient. Feid was hoping that once he seized the Serpent's Eye he'd have living subjects to examine just what it could do. But now he realized that The Thrain and his cohorts weren't even worthy to see him seize upon the Eye. These useless fools had spent days dragging him up the mountain with incessant talk and bluster. Of women they'd have by force or money, of riches they'd gather after this pathetic sorcerer had taken them to treasure. That was the fatal mistake that doomed them, Feid realized, more than entrusting him. It was their lust for treasure over power. Only he [...] come to an enlightenment that power was an [...] river spilled from the breast of Vengas [...] the arrow of Jotan, that flowed down [...] of stars that all living things [...] torrent that ran down the sky that [...] all users of Magick pulled from. The Thrain had paused for a moment while looking for him, and gazed up at the sky from the mountaintop, his vision faintly tinged by the heat of the pools of volcanic water and molten rock. And he had seen the enormity of this river in sky and it made him pause, go silent for a moment, in humbled awe by the enormity of the world, incomprehensible, overwhelming. That was when Feid struck. All it took was one simple push to send this plate armored mercenary to his death as he pondered the stars. Feid weakly pushed himself up. He was entirely depleted, but in such closeness to the Serpent's Eye it did not matter. He was beyond fatigue, beyond exhaustion, beyond morality. He saw some dozen men and horses with foamy mouths around him. He felt nothing. It was only when he stepped forward, and the memories of these murders vanished from his mind, that he felt something. A lightness. And there, as it had been written, as he had carved into his own flesh with ink, was the landmark. The jagged black rocks, the flat plateau of glassed rock. And a thin, gaping crack within. Under the crimson, primordial sky, surrounded by the jagged black rocks of the ancient volcanic mountain, the wretched Warlock reached into the dark embrace of the fissure until his hand touched a smooth glassy surface. Cold as ice. His fist closed around the Serpent's Eye. Slowly he withdrew it and held it before him in the fading light of the blood red suns. It glowed from within. A ghostly emerald light. Strange and Eternal. All the suffering, all the sorrow, all the thirst and hunger, the loss and murder and blood had led him to this sliver of time in which he now found himself. At last – were the only words he could conjure with his inner voice, his thoughts were so frail and weaknened. his fingers were trembling. The glow seemed to shudder with a ghostly trail in his hands, a verdant smoke in the air. But it was starting to fade. He had mere moments left. Of [...] consciousness, of memory as the curse ate away [...] himself. My SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Oct 25, 2018 |
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Oct 25, 2018 20:51
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The implicit last line is "My eyes slowly opened."
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Oct 25, 2018 22:32
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