Introduction

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By Gary Indiana

This April, writer Gary Indiana graced Metrograph to present Mike Hodges’s Black Rainbow (1989), part of his curated series Gary Indiana Selects.

I can’t hear a thing. My ears popped or something. The film that that’s playing tonight was done in 1989 with Rosanna Arquette and Jason Robards. With the program, I picked a lot of stuff-some of which they could get, and some of which they couldn’t-so there’s no consistent theme running through. A little bit of it had to do with the spirit world, etc. Like, Atlantics is very much about the spirits of the dead.

And Black Rainbow. You know, I met this director [Mike Hodges] 20, 22 years ago. I really didn’t know anything about him. He hired me to be a talking head in a documentary on depictions of serial killers in the movies…

But anyway, I didn’t know until very recently that ‘black rainbow’ is actually a thing. It wasn’t just a title that he pulled out of the air, it’s something in voodoo, though I don’t know very much about it. I think the people in South Carolina, or wherever this was filmed-and this was made just before people would take all their yearning for answers and their futile desire for happiness and dump it onto the internet, instead of going to a place where there’s a medium telling them that everything is okay over there, on the other side.

One of the other films that I programmed for this, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, sort of deals with the same thing.

But I don’t think this film is really about that, it’s really about capitalism. I don’t even need to get into it, you can see it very clearly from the film. There’s a woman who comes up to the medium and says, “Maybe if we just stop thinking about the hereafter, and how great it’s going to be when we die”-I can’t quote it exactly-“we might pay more attention to what we’re doing here now.” And I think that was the point of the film. But you can decide what you think the point of the film is, and that is all I really have to say on this.