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

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."

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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”