BONUS CONTENT
PseudoPod 747: Keeping House

I want to talk about Mandy because I didn’t like Mandy. And at the same time I find myself thinking about it almost every day.

Mandy was recommended to me by a coworker after they tried to make a joke I didn’t understand pertaining to a fictional “Cheddar Goblin” that hawks boxed pasta a la Kraft mac n’cheese. Which is why I entered this movie expecting a cross between Gremlins and The Love Witch. That is not what Mandy is.

The movie has rave reviews from most of my horror sources, including my video store (shoutout Beyond Video) and Elijah Wood’s podcast, Visitations. I recommended it for a movie night with a friend and we tucked in for something I hoped would be little lighthearted, or at least original.

The visual effect of this movie is incredible, and if it were instead a series of still images that flashed on my television I would probably have enjoyed it more. I think about the visuals in Mandy all the time; the long black hair, the oversized Black Sabbath shirts, the scar, the sci-fi illustrations, the screeching purple color scheme, the house of windows tucked back in the woods, the very 1970s-esque feel of a place a little outside of time. There are elements of Twin Peaks here for sure, and elements of Holy Mountain.

I’m going to spoil Mandy now. She dies. She dies when a cult leader sees her walking along the side of the road and becomes obsessed with her. The cult breaks into her home, drugs her, and attempts to rape her. When she refuses, they burn her alive in front of her husband, fueling his vengeance rampage.

What Mandy is, when you pull back the aesthetic glazing of set and costume and lighting, is a movie where a woman is killed in order to give a man agency. It’s called the Disposable Woman Trope, and while Mandy herself is more of a character than many women summarily disposed, it fits this film still. It is brutal in its death scene, almost unwatchably so, and the bad guys commit such heinous atrocities that the pain of her demise is diminished under their unfathomable villainy. Elements of the very real dangers women face is part of what made me uncomfortable about Mandy. The reality is, I see myself in her as a potential victim of male entitlement and male violence, and I wonder that all the men who recommended this film to me do not.

I recognize that Mandy is based on splatter films of the 1970s, which became the torture porn of the 2000s that we loved so much in Hostel and Saw. I have never cared for torture porn, although I eat up the grotesque practical effects of The Thing and Return of the Living Dead. That’s to say, I see where it’s coming from. That doesn’t mean I like it.

But there is such a dreaminess to Mandy in all its electric glory. The movie has unexplained elements that hint at depth of narrative never touched on in the film. The characters’ backgrounds heavily inform their actions, and yet remain unknown to the viewer. There is a lot left unsaid.

In some ways I find myself wanting to live inside the image of this movie, where colors and actions have an underlying richness that is impossible in the real world. Only art can create that, can heighten it.

I think Mandy could have been great if it had built its own narrative path instead of relying so heavily on a sexist trope with no subversion. I was disappointed, ultimately, to find that something so promising and beautiful was actually hollow inside. It didn’t sit well with me. Yet here I am six months later still thinking about it all the time, so maybe it did its job.

Against all odds I bought a house this last year. The road to this goal was paved with the dead-end jobs, sexism, discrimination complaints, and devaluation of my work that consumed most of my 20s. There are many lessons bound up in there I hope no one else ever has to learn, and I have come out of it a harder, sharper, and more wary person because of it.

Against all odds I ended up in a stable, relatively well-paying position in an organization where I feel more genuinely supported in my professional goals than I ever have in my life. These experiences frame what I want to tell you about. 

I got tired of podcasts last week because I could not take one more voice in my head, at least not besides my own. So I dug up the last music that made me feel good, that gave me a genuine feeling of happiness – which was Florence and the Machine’s How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.

In June 2019 Florence came to Merriweather Post in Columbia, which fell right between my exiting the bad job and starting the good one. I wore a long batik-print dress and danced barefoot on the lawn with my friends on a summer afternoon. It was a brief moment of absolutely no obligations to the universe, just sound and people and warm sunlight.

There is a song on that album I had almost forgotten about, but like most forgotten things it crept up on me while I was re-listening to the album in the car. It’s one of maybe two songs that will turn me to tears on contact. It is “South London Forever.”

“South London Forever” has a lot and absolutely nothing to do with South London, so much as it has to do with the fresh feeling of freedom in your early 20s curdling in the heat of crisis. The assumptions that I grew up with – going to college, getting a good job, getting married, buying a house – I began to realize were unattainable about the same time I began to realize I was an adult. Also about the time I realized winters were getting warmer and everything we thought we could have was just someone else’s memory.

This might not be the intention behind the song, but there are lines in “South London Forever” that were ripped right out of my own heart. I will not go through them all because to examine them would be to destroy them. This is just to say, I really love “South London Forever,” and I think you might too.

When I was rifling through boxes of books recently in a failed attempt to properly unpack them, I came across an H.P. Lovecraft anthology I did not remember owning. But my focus has been shot to hell recently (see: 2020) and short stories seemed about all I could handle. In October I worked through reading Lovecraft Country (not as good as I hoped) and then Victor LaValle’s novella, The Ballad of Black Tom (surpassing all expectation), both of which reckon with Lovecraft’s blatant racism – an unignorable factor in his writing.

I have never been into Lovecraft, although I remember trudging through The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in college, but the anthology I found intrigued me and I spent a couple of weeks reading some of his more popular stories – At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. However, this is about one story that proved to be at the genesis of a narrative pattern I am constantly drawn to – The Color Out of Space.

Let’s actually start with the spring of 2016, when movie theaters were still open. The Charles in Baltimore was doing a revival of Stalker, a three-hour 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film about three men walking through an alien minefield searching for an idol that will grant them their wish. I was in a new relationship at the time and I agreed to go mostly so I could sit next to this guy in the dark for three hours. But reader, I was hooked on this film (also, consequently, the guy). In retrospect, it’s a movie that works best in a dark theater. I cannot imagine trying to watch it at home, with your phone and your computer and your cat yelling at you and no strangers to shush.

From the first ten minutes I was drawn into its quiet dreary slowness, the constant sound of trickling water in a place left behind, bucolic but rife with unseen and unknowable danger. It is an obvious allegory for nuclear fallout. As it was released seven years before the Chernobyl disaster¹ set the standard for fallout horror, watching it feels like a premonition.

I tell people about Stalker a lot, but it’s a hard sell. It is not paced for modern audiences; it doesn’t want to impress anybody. It’s more like an art film than a science fiction movie. Because of that I often recommend reading the 1972 novella it’s based on – Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

After seeing Stalker for the first time I went on a bit of a deep dive trying to find fiction akin to it. It is nominally sci-fi, but an odd kind of slow burn that is hard to pinpoint. The lesson is not heavy-handed, but it’s there; human influence on nature, the invisible havoc of industrial pollution, fallout, and waste. Rachel Carson released Silent Spring in 1962 and the environmental movement had birthed an awareness of our collective human tread, and a recognition of the vast web of life into which we were punching holes. Stalker built on these themes in a way that I can now only describe as Lovecraftian – the creeping horror – and it hit me deeply, pulling at my own latent anxieties. But it also lit a perverse hope. Perhaps we cannot destroy everything. Something new – however horrible – will at least remain.

It was not until I read Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation that I found anything close to it. My love of both the book and the 2018 movie are widely known because I will not shut up about them. I went so far as to download the soundtrack and listen to it on repeat for the better part of a year. Annihilation is in many ways the same movie as Stalker – a quest through alien dangers, a final goal, a transformation². A lush landscape mired in deep wrongness by a twist in the scaffold of life – the “shimmer.” The very name recalls Lovecraft’s Color. The horror of it is best underlined for me by the bear, which terrified me so fully that I blocked out my memory of the entire scene until I finally watched the movie again six months later.

But where does Lovecraft come into all this? Over the summer I watched the new Color Out of Space adaptation starring Nic Cage. It was mostly on a lark – I cannot take Nic Cage seriously, and I had never even heard of the Lovecraft story. The movie does not match the artistry of either Stalker or Annihilation, but the lighting is otherworldly and Nic Cage yells a lot. It is equally slow-paced, if a little more grotesque. It felt to me like a rougher attempt to hit the same sweet note.

But the use of color in Lovecraft’s story is one of the most perceptive things about it – because nuclear radiation and color operate on the same electromagnetic spectrum. Ionizing radiation itself is beyond our sight, something malicious, incomprehensible, alien, especially in 1927 when Lovecraft wrote the story. When Marie Curie discovered radium twenty-eight years earlier, the pale blue glow became popular in everything from cosmetics to aircrafts³. Radium’s light-emitting properties were touted as beneficial, and users believed radiation itself was both visible and knowable, even as evidence of its invisible dangers mounted.

The world was caught between the promise of better living through science, and meddling with forces it did not have the means to control. This is Color Out of Space in a nutshell, and when I finally read it – actually read the original short story – I was so astonished, so ecstatic to find this kernel of inspiration for so much of the media I enjoy and I wanted to yell at someone for not telling me sooner.

We can get farther into nuclear semiotics or radiation accidents or genetic mutations, all of which influenced the piece I did in 2018 called Atomic Garden, but for now I’m just glad I found the narrative nexus on which so many of my favorite stories rest. If you have recommendations for books or movie based on these themes, please comment! If you have evidence of radiant horror before 1927 – I want to be all over that! Load me up with all your nuclear anxiety media, I am here for it.

Notes:
¹see: Midnight in Chernobyl
²see: Hero’s Journey
³see: The Radium Girls