Episode 121: Dream Theater: On 'Mandy' and 'The Band Wagon'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2022

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, each of your hosts bullies the other into watching a movie he would normally not touch with a bargepole. Phil has been (unsuccessfully) trying to get JF to watch Vincente Minnelli's 1953 musical comedy The Band Wagon and JF has been (also unsuccessfully) trying to get Phil to watch Panos Cosmatos's 2018 psychedelic horror film Mandy. For this episode, they decided they would compromise and watch both. What started as a goof ended up a fascinating Glass Bead Game from which emerge occulted correspondences between films that, on the surface, could not be more dissimilar. One film is a dream of song and dance, the other a dream of blood and violence. Either way, though, watch out: as Deleuze says, "beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for." Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack SHOW NOTES Iluminated Brew Works, Chicago JF's new course, [Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic](www.nuralearning.com) Vincente Minnelli (dir.), The Bandwagon Panos Cosmatos (dir.), Mandy Weird Studies, Episode 73 on Carl Jung Norman Jewison (dir.), Moonstruck David Thompson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image) and Cinema 2: The Time Image Henri Bergson, “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion”, from Creative Evolution Terry Gilliam (dir.), The Fisher King Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia” in Only Entertainment Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel.
0:53.4	Orson Wells once said, a film is a ribbon of dreams.
0:58.0	Put that alongside this other bit of insight from no less a personage than the mystagogue of modern dreaming
1:03.7	himself, Sigmund Freud. With all his tools, man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory,
1:13.3	or clears away the barriers to their functioning.
1:18.8	In the camera, he has created an instrument that captures evanescent visual impressions,
1:23.5	while the gramophone record does the same for equally fleeting auditory impressions.
1:30.2	Both are essentially materializations of his innate faculty of recall, of his memory, end quote.
1:36.4	This idea that tools externalize innate faculties would of course become the centerpiece of the work of Marshall McLuhan, for whom all tools, as media, constituted, quote, the extensions of man.
1:44.4	So we might ask, what innate faculty does film the moving image externalize?
1:49.7	Well, if the film artists of the past are any guide, the answer is a resounding, the faculty
1:55.4	of dreaming. Orson Wells was not alone in comparing the cinema to the dream, of course.
2:00.9	Fellini described films as, quote, dreams we dream with eyes open.
2:05.8	And David Lynch said, film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream in the dark.
2:11.9	Sometimes there comes a film that seems specifically designed as a kind of proof of concept for this idea,
2:18.2	the two we discuss in today's episode being wonderful examples.
2:22.0	In almost every respect, Vincente Manelli's 1953 musical comedy The Bandwagon,
2:27.7	starring the inimitable Fred Astaire, couldn't be more different from Panos Casado's
2:33.0	2018 psychedelic horror extravaganza Mandy,
2:37.0	with the also inimitable Nicholas Cage.
	...

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