Nic Cage is my favorite actor of all time, and thanks to his questionable financial responsibility, he seems to take any movie offer thrown his way. In 2018, Cage lent his voice to two animated movies, appeared in one documentary, and acted in six feature films, one of which was Mandy. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, Mandy is a nightmarish revenge thriller, imbued with as much unhinged emotion as it is with psychedelic color. In other words, it is the perfect vehicle for Cage’s often over-the-top acting style. Playing the role of a reclusive, recovering alcoholic whose wife is kidnapped and burned alive by a Manson-esque cult, Nic Cage operates at maximum Cage-ness for the duration of his bloody rampage, and it’s a whole lot of fun.
While Nic Cage was perfectly cast for Mandy, the movie would not be what it is without Cosmatos’ vision and the skill with which he laces psychedelic drugs into the film itself. Drugs appear in most movies as plot devices, sold and bought and used by characters in order to move the narrative along. Replacing the cocaine in Scarface (1983) with cheeseburgers would not make any practical sense, but the plot would remain essentially the same. In addition, countless other movies attempt to depict or replicate mind-altering drug experiences through visual effects and camera techniques. For example, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) uses close ups with wide angle lenses to create a disorienting effect, and special effects are used to make patterns in the carpet move as they might appear to during a real acid trip. Many science fiction movies take inspiration from psychedelic experiences to convey a sense of otherworldliness, as evidenced by the “Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the countless other versions of the endless light tunnel. Most similar to Mandy in its attempt to craft a world dependent on psychedelics is Enter the Void (2009), yet the intimate camera of Enter the Void provides the film with a sense of realism that is noticeably lacking in Mandy. Mandy is the first example of a movie I’ve seen in which the mise-en-scene is wholly inspired by psychedelic drugs and in which both character actions and the movie universe are dependent on the presence of such drugs.
In this way, it could be hypothesized that the world of Mandy is actually the collective internal experience of its characters. The very beginning of the movie features no drugs, but the mise-en-scene in these opening scenes acts as a prologue to the full blown hallucinogenic heart of the rest of the film. The saturated lighting and double-exposures, though muted in presentation, are still apparent in the opening. In the scene in which Nic Cage’s character first takes the fantasy acid, the film presents what appears to be a montage of images within the character’s mind. These images strongly resemble the actual setting of the film, and in the final scene, Nic Cage drives away under a colorful, fantasy horizon. Once the drugs are introduced in the plot, many sequences take on a rhythmic, dreamlike quality reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961-1964). This is despite the very literal violence that occurs in the plot, which includes a chainsaw duel and a skull crushing. The plot is presented in a very linear fashion, yet the film works to meld scenes together, which limits the role of time and emphasizes the movie’s hallucinogenic nature. The saturated lighting, fade-ins and fade-outs, double-exposures, and dream sequences cooperate with the fantastical special effects to produce a film that both explores and inhabits hallucination.
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