Girls Against God

time machine, to pursue his dream of playing in a popular black metal band.
The plot wasn’t my idea, but came from a conversation I had with Venke and Terese before a band practice. Maybe that’s why I like it. It’s a communal document, detached from the lonely writing process. The story, and the way we throw together ideas, reminds me of Jubilee, that punk film where Queen Elizabeth I is transported to an anarchist violent version of 1970s Britain, with punk icons playing the leads. Elizabeth surveys her ravaged kingdom before returning to her own time, and the film might just be implying that she should have taken Elizabeth II and the whole British Empire with her, the empire that created this imperialist pigsty of a modern society.
As the conversation about our film takes place, I enjoy daydreaming about how the end of the finished picture should play out. I see the Puberty girl killing Munch off in two steps. First off, she’ll video one of his band’s gigs, and then she’ll play the recording as she paints on the film. She’ll mess up Munch’s face by drawing cartoon sketches, doodles and cryptic speech bubbles on it, and then she’ll draw infantile cocks hanging out of the mouths of the entire band. Finally she paints the whole image black. THE END.
That plot doesn’t pan out. I’m not able to write anything more than quick summaries of our conversation, and I ram my head against the scenes in which the actual story is being told, this story that’s supposed to go from A to B, from past to present, from character A to character B. The rules of realism in my head are far too strict, dictating how a 1890s character should react to being moved 130 years into the future, and when I sit down to write the scenes, my imagination halts. I can describe exactly, down to the most minute points, the moments when I stop and feel lonely, when the band and the bonds disappear and are replaced with writing rules from the university in New England, where my professor looms over me and tells the class that my submitted short story isn’t credible, that it’s just angry and messy, incoherent. Instead of raising my hand to say that Hemingway and Raymond Carver, and why not throw in Foster Wallace, are an insult to the brain, and ask where the women writers on the curriculum went, I write my next assignment as a satire of a Carver short story, the scene set in Norway and with a female protagonist, to make it as believable as possible. The teacher is impressed; he says I write as if it were me, but in a way that’s universal, from the outside, with insight. From the outside, with insight: that’s what the art of writing is, maybe all art, after the subjective structures and the subjective untethered imagination have been tamed, and when it isn’t the canvas, the screen, the compendium sheets, or Edvard Munch’s black metal band being painted black, but just my own seething hatred of the structures that are being erased by white.
Isn’t that why the underground, the avant-garde, the B movies and comics and fanzines and black metal originally emerged: to be free of the consequences and this relentless comparison to reality, and to open up to other structures? To the crawling and creeping and hissing and noisy structures? They were able to create space for a different kind of art, a different kind of writing. Or maybe they just created a new set of rules, new hierarchies? Am I stretched between spaces I can’t reach, that I don’t feel entitled to step into? I have to keep looking for that place that I could call writing, that I could call the film.
Some scenes I can manage. I have no issue with scenes where characters die or disappear, scenes where shapes disappear or dissolve. I’m better at killing people off than I am at giving them life through character descriptions and realistic scenes in which people interact. Something seems to be getting in the way of the exposition, the description, this world that looks like reality.
Perhaps it’s my thirst for revenge. Maybe I’m too vindictive to write anything from inside the structures, from the beginning, from the outside, with insight. Perhaps hatred does hamper writing, just as I’ve been told my whole life. Hatred isn’t plot or continuity, says my creative writing teacher in my head, and hatred isn’t a good motivation or intention, it’s a tale too short and primitive to be told, it can’t be the focus.
But that’s the short version of the film: the only version. I just want to take revenge on film history, literary history, art history, paint the whole picture black, paint the whole screen black, force Microsoft Word to let me write in white on a black background. I just want to be allowed to hate, unrestrained. THE END.
I wasn’t allowed to write that text at university in New England. The university, along with the whole art industry in that place, looked less like imagination and more like the South. In the South I never got to transcend genre and form, not in my essay assignments, and not in the classroom. I wasn’t allowed to hate.
Hate is the only word that Christian and heathen Southerners react to equally powerfully. Hatred belongs to the devil and to the Second World War. Only Hitler and the German soldiers hated, and we’re taught they’re the only ones we can hate back. That’s the one thing we’ve decided everyone here agrees on. And we never talk about it, sitting at our desks in the ’90s, primary school, secondary school, college. First it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, then the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day. We make fried turnips as they did during the war, and we’re taught about concentration camps, we’re taught about mass suggestion, about manipulation, but we don’t