Day of Wrath (1943) & Mandy (2018): the oppression of women at the hands of religious authority.
First things first, here’s a trailer of Mandy as clearly not enough people have seen this mesmerizing, thrilling, and even humorous film! If you’re lucky it might still be showing at a nearby cinema.
Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) and Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018) both represent the oppression of women at the hands of religious authority. This common thematic element relies on a comparable structure in the two films but they handle it differently, especially through sound, lighting, and color. Two pivotal scenes support this argument: Anne facing Absalon at [1:16:26] in Day of Wrath, and Mandy facing Jeremiah at [42:17] in Mandy.
Day of Wrath and Mandy represent the oppression of women at the hands of religious authority with a comparable structure. First, women are dominated by a religious authority. Anne has been taken without her consent by the local pastor, Absalon, to be his wife. Mandy is abducted at the request of Jeremiah, a cult leader, to be his in mind and body. Both first passively undergo a religious authority’s oppression.
Then, we observe a shift in power towards the oppressed woman. When Absalon first asks Anne if she ever wishes him dead, Anne answers by a question: “Why should I do that?”. She wants Absalon to admit he faulted: he never asked her if she wanted to be his wife. After he admits, answering the question, Anne shows Absalon she only pretended to respect his religious authority, she reveals she often wishes him dead and has an affair with his son. Absalon is humiliated. This scene has all diegetic and minimalist sounds with only the wind, the room’s clock, and the dialogue between Absalon and Anne. The wind can be seen as death presence: when Absalon was coming back home, Anne wished him dead, the wind strengthened with a massive gust and Absalon felt “as though death brushed [his] sleeve.” The sound of the ticking clock is constantly present in the home’s living room; it anchors Anne and Absalon’s discussion in this familiar place and adds tension to the scene. Absalon has been previously death cursed by Herlof’s Marte, an old woman he judged guilty of witchcraft and who was executed by burning, and his time is running out at each tick of the clock. The dialogue, dominated by Anne, is central as it shifts the power from Absalon, the religious authority, to Anne, the oppressed woman.
Sound is similarly central in the shift in power from Jeremiah to Mandy. The sound is mostly diegetic but completely distorted as Mandy’s perception under the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Jeremiah puts on a song he made about himself on the turntable. Whenever he speaks, the song volume weakens, highlighting his every word. Jeremiah is trying to make Mandy his in mind and body with his song, his words, and the help of hallucinogenic drugs previously administered to her. When he thinks she convinced her, Jeremiah denudes himself for her to surrender to him willingly. Mandy asks him if he made this song and if it is about himself; Jeremiah assents twice. Mandy then starts laughing at his megalomania, childish self-obsession, and attempt to seduce her. Her laugh is distorted and becomes nightmarish but only because it undermines Jeremiah’s authority and he feels humiliated: she is portrayed as perceived by Jeremiah. The latter, humiliated, orders Mandy to “shut up,” and his cult members to stop looking.
Both Absalon and Jeremiah dominated respectively Anne and Mandy at the beginning of the two scenes. In only a few minutes, the power shifts side essentially through dialogue (including laughter), and the religious authority is undermined and humiliated. Jeremiah momentarily doubts himself afterward, asking God or himself, the “prophet”, to tell him what to do. Absalon is dead but her mother and son do not react about Anne immediately either. But self-doubt does not last long, and the religious authority, undermined, reacts by labeling and burning respectively Anne and Mandy to preserve its authority. Anne is called a “witch” and Mandy is called a “whore;” such labels are used to justify burning the two women in the name of God. Jeremiah even mentions a supposedly “cleansing” fire.
While Day of Wrath and Mandy both represent the oppression of women at the hands of religious authority with a comparable structure, the two films handle it differently. Rosenbaum explains: « One of the many changes Dreyer made to the play was to desexualize the figure of Absalon […] and thus give further motivation to her [Anne] becoming sexually attracted to her stepson. » While Jeremiah wants to have sex with Mandy, Absalon seems impotent or not sexually interested by Anne. At the beginning of her revelation to him, Anne says “I have dreamt of a child to hold in my arms. You have not even given me that.” She mocks and reproaches Absalon his sexual passivity whereas Mandy laughs, in part, at Jeremiah’s attempt to have sex with her.
Rosenbaum adds “[…] we accept Absalon as a good man, or at least as a sincere and honest old fogey — struggling to be responsible about his own sense of virtue and justice. » On the other hand, Day of Wrath is purposefully ambiguous about Anne’s sorcery and morale. Bordwell explains “Dreyer’s mise-en-scene brings the ambiguity to the viewer’s notice, compelling us to ask at almost every moment what motivates Anne’s actions and how we are to understand her.” He points out how “lighting functions to cast an uncertain aura over Anne,” and “reminds us of the possibly supernatural sources of her power, even at moments when she seems most innocent.” (322) Lighting does so by often leaving a part of Anne’s face in the shadow. Bordwell notes it guides the viewer to compare and contrast the “old witch”, Herlofs Marthe, with the “young one,” Anne (321). When facing Absalon, Anne leans on the table, staring down on him as she speaks, and with her face partially in the shadow. Absalon becomes physically scared of her. Anne is then labelled as “witch” for both her supposed supernatural powers responsible for the death of Absalon and her adultery with Martin. Rosenbaum notes Anne “believing that her sexuality is tied in some way to sorcery” makes her “as complicitous in the society that condemns her as everyone else is.”
On the contrary, the opposition between Jeremiah and Mandy is more of a dichotomy: Jeremiah is portrayed as a violent megalomaniac cult leader and Mandy as an innocent victim. Marcks explains the film’s “production used primary colors as a vehicle to rotate through emotions, contrasting mostly blues and reds against the warm, natural tones of the early scenes between Red and Mandy in their cozy little pocket of the universe […]. » Mandy is often portrayed with taints of yellow which associates her with happiness and positive energy.
In the scene opposing her and Jeremiah, the filmmakers use purple and pink and a trailing effect to movement to visually show Mandy’s point of view under the effects of hallucinogenic drugs but also to break up with Mandy’s warm natural yellow of earlier scenes. Jeremiah tries to assimilate Mandy into his cult, to make her his, in mind and body, as you see her face momentarily fade into his.
She is drugged to loosen her grip on reality and on her own identity so that he can substitute his own. Mandy is pure in a violent and mad world impersonated here through Jeremiah and his cult. Margaret Atwood explained men are afraid women will laugh at them whereas women are afraid men will kill them. Jeremiah qualifies Mandy of “whore” and burns her only because she undermined his authority, laughing at him, and he felt humiliated. The film gives no ambiguity on Mandy’s innocence.
Works cited
Atwood, Margaret, “Writing the Male Character.” A Hagey Lecture at the University of Waterloo, 1982.
Bordwell, David, and Thompson, Kristin. “Narrative Alternatives to Classical Filmmaking: Day of Wrath.” Film Art: An Introduction (3rd edition), McGraw Hill Higher Education, 1990, pp. 320–328.
Day of Wrath. Directed by Carl Theodore Dreyer, performances by Lisbeth Movin, Thorkild Roose and Preben Lerdorff Rye, Palladium Productions, 1943.
Mandy. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, performances by Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache, SpectreVision, 2018.
Marcks, Iain. “Mandy: Edge of Darkness.” The American Society of Cinematographers, 2018, https://ascmag.com/articles/mandy-edge-of-darkness
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Figuring Out DAY OF WRATH.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2018, https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/02/figuring-out-day-of-wrath/
