If you have yet to view the trailer for Nicolas Cage’s upcoming horror film Mandy (2018), please do so at your earliest convenience. This lurid, two and a half minute pastiche of color and chainsaws explodes with the force of a thousand metal album covers, yet retains an ineffable dreaminess. Mandy marks the second outing of writer/director Panos Cosmatos, offering an occasion to revisit his first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010).
Check out the trailer for Mandy:
(Mandy is screening at the Fantasia International Film Festival and is one of the films we’re most excited about.)
Beyond the Black Rainbow would work pretty well as an art-house prequel to Stranger Things (2016-). Both narratives follow the suffering and heroics of a magical girl (Elena or Eleven, respectively) who is raised in a laboratory and who is, herself, a scientific experiment. Both productions are stylized period pieces, set in 1983, the time period from which they draw their horror inspiration. (See 1984’s Firestarter based on Steven King’s novel. Or don’t—it’s pretty bad.) Beyond the Black Rainbow, however, is unusually dark even for the parascience fiction subgenre. Gone are the fun and friendship of Stranger Things. The film devotes itself to plumbing the depths of psychology from within the Arboria Institute, a laboratory dedicated to the pursuit of “simply, happiness, contentment, inner peace.” Thus narrates a crimson-lit Dr. Mercurio Arboria as dubiously as possible.
Beyond the Black Rainbow is less interested in Arboria’s omelet than the eggs he cracked, namely, Elena and Dr. Barry Nyle, Arboria’s protégé. Predictably, the Arboria Institute goes the way of all utopian projects, but its devolution is interesting. Nyle and Elena each manifest a particular doubleness of character, emphasized by filmic techniques such as costume and reflection, but it’s as each character resolves into their respective, unified gestalts that the Institute breaks down.
The Institute is, from the first frame, a whitewashed tomb. Everything is pristine, though the souls on both sides of the protective glass are dead. Thus, Elena, whom Nyle subjects to all sorts of psychological testing, is always reflecting off of every surface. She even appears ghostly in her white dress and long, limp hair. Her pale image on the walls reinforces her ghostliness. As Elena undulates between a drugged haze and migrainoid sobriety, she is perpetually split, diminished by the depredations of her imprisonment. Perhaps Nyle’s greatest crime is to cause Elena, whom he isolates, drugs, and prods, to become unequal to her identity.
Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) interviewing Elena (Eva Bourne)
In his unyielding harassment, Nyle is remaking Elena in his own split image. Though he tests her in a soothing baritone, beneath a healthy 80’s coiffure, Nyle’s brittle serenity fragments. The scion of the house Arboria, Nyle takes his be-tweeded appearance seriously, presenting himself as heir to the intellectual pursuit of well-being. Understanding himself to be proof positive of Arboria’s lifework, he strives to test Elena with a clinician’s equanimity. But the truth is that Elena, not Nyle, possesses the pearl of great price. Her resistance inflames him.
As Nyle drives back and forth between his home and the lab in a black sports car worthy of David Hasselhoff, his peaceful patina fades; the shadow self emerges. After rounds and rounds of sessions with Elena that reveal nothing but Nyle’s seething frustration, his id bubbles to the surface and manifests in the passenger seat. “You’re doing so good,” Nyle tells himself. The ego Nyle—the one behind the wheel—receives this praise with a child’s smile. It’s almost affecting to see such naked need for affirmation in the monster that Nyle has become. But what is most striking about this exchange is that the id, the not-there Nyle who coaxes the Nyle at the helm, is the well-kempt one while the real-world Nyle’s appearance has deteriorated. This hallucinatory exchange reveals that Nyle superordinates his basest instincts. Nyle sees himself at his best, at his most empowered, when he is violently imposing his will on others. The exchange also reveals a reality to which Nyle remains blind; as he pursues this path of violence, he degenerates. He weakens as his conflicted self resolves into one monstrous totality.
The Sentionaut waits (Roy Campsall)
In the third act of Beyond the Black Rainbow, Elena, too, begins the process of self-resolution, seeking an escape from the mirrored labyrinth of the Arboria Institute and its minotaurs. Here, Elena’s dualistic imagery becomes the most overt. The film portrays Elena as if by double exposure. When she stands still, as she often does to regain balance, she appears normally. When Elena moves, though, she splits into two translucent images, one trailing the other at a two-second delay. Her double image achieves a double effect. First, it visually portrays a drug-addled experience of time; her body moves before her mind is aware of it. Secondly, the double image indicates the major theme of Beyond the Black Rainbow: an interior splitness, a person who is, in the words of Julia Kristeva, a “stranger to herself.” To this point in the film, Elena has not once enjoyed a moment of clear-headedness. Nyle seems to have medically prevented even a moment of coherence for Elena, stunting the development of selfhood, producing this image of a bodiless soul trailing a soulless body.
Elena escapes
But Elena does break free. She emerges into Arboria’s gardens at night. The dark ecology creates a welcome break from the relentless fluorescence of the laboratory. For the first time, Elena encounters nature unmediated by one of Arboria’s screens. She traces her fingers across palm fronds. Elena grows endearingly childlike in this new experience of beauty, recalling and redeeming the image of Nyle’s own childishness as he spoke with his id co-pilot. Her experience of nature comes as the drugs seem to be wearing off, as she finally breaks free of her physical and mental prisons. She has come to the beginning, the garden of Arboria’s opening monologue, and has known herself for the first time.
Nyle, too, is reborn, but his rebirth is a diminishment. He appears broken and monstrous, more threatening and yet, when confronted by Elena, more impotent. Their final confrontation out in the green night feels anti-climactic, but perhaps a better descriptor would be post-climactic. The characters have completed their journeys already and thus embody coherent totalities. As ever, their relationship remains a one-way street; Nyle’s pitiful need demands Elena’s surrender, while Elena simply resists.
In the face of a free and coherent Elena at the end of Beyond the Black Rainbow, Nyle merely crumbles, and Elena proceeds. He doesn’t even require a final show of Elena’s psychic ability because, in his diminished state, he’s unworthy even to be put down thus.
Beyond the Dark Rainbow is available streaming on Amazon:
Trevor Babcock is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University where he earned his PhD in literature in 2017. He has written previously on Hereditary and the changeling myth for Horror Homeroom.
