Girls Against God

could have been me. If I’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If I hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen. It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred.
The Juggler, says Fenriz in the clip. We wanted to play the Juggler.
Does he mean Jester? The court jester who turns everything upside down and transforms the world into a dark game, the comedian tasked with bringing the king the worst news? But Fenriz says the Juggler. It’s never easy to figure out what people mean when they translate their thoughts into a different language. He also says, bashed-out primitive shit. Total misanthropy. Total misanthropic black metal.
Boys from Kolbotn, or from Sveio and Rauland and Ski, or even Arendal: I’ll show you misanthropy. I go to gigs just like the one from the assembly hall tape. I go there because I want to escape Christian Norwegian conformity and because I’m searching for a new community, outside the classroom. I’m here, too. On stage there are only boys. Boys who throw their long black hair back and forth, headbanging with choreographed precision. Not far from what I’ve been taught in jazz ballet. But while jazz ballet codes girlish headbanging as sexy, the identical movement means aggression in the metal community. Here, black is the only colour, leather and velvet are the only fabrics, and the glistening guitar necks resemble swords or dicks, or both. When I look around the gig I see only boys in the audience, or no, there are other people, too. But none of the girls are headbanging, and I’m the only one like me. No one else seems to hate. 1997 is too late. After all the murders and church arsons, metal has run scared. It has passed into a lacy romantic phase. The hatred has been prescribed sedatives. Primitive recordings of buzzing chaotic riffs have been exchanged for aggressive angst. It complements southern Norway’s rainy climate, synthetic drugs and gracious reservation. No one in the room wears corpse paint. There are a couple of boys wearing black eyeliner, but they’re too busy selling ecstasy to secondary school pupils to listen to the music. I’m at the back, alone, hating, motionless, muted, squeezed into a corner between action and meaning. Like you were, too, perhaps.
We never meet. Provincial hatred is so lonely. But it saves us, so we don’t drown in our own frothing spit. And perhaps it saved the boys too.
I’m still working on this film. I’m writing it to figure something out, or to find my way out of something. A way out of language, perhaps? In a way, that’s exactly what it means to write a film. It’s a document that transgresses against the written domain. The writing doesn’t exist independently, but facilitates a different art form, the film; the text yields to it, as the bonus material yields to the Darkthrone albums. I think that’s how I want to write: unfixedly, sloppily, impossibly—primitive. A script is a curse that hasn’t been uttered. It’s a ritual that hasn’t begun. A magical document.
Maybe this document is where I should look for the primitive. Maybe this document is where I can attempt to dig something out of language, something that doesn’t exist in text or image but is somewhere in between. It has to be something new, a new space. It can’t just look like what has been. Writing shouldn’t just be repeating instructions. Doing that has to be the very definition of blasphemy. I was never taught to hate God.
When I write, I enter and exit scenes, I see everything. I am God in here. I can only hate myself.
I watch again the final clip from the bonus DVD. We’re in the forest again, always in the forest. The grove has darkened. Is it almost evening? Snow now. A winter forest. The guitar sounds are alien, as if they weren’t recorded using a cord and a microphone. It sounds like insects that crawl and buzz all over the four-track machine.
I’m trying to write a new scene into my own film, from a party I was at once: An opinionated and skinny sixteen-year-old from Nedenes is dead set on telling everyone what Satanism really is. People are only ever really looking out for themselves, he says, so man should cultivate the idea of himself as the hero of his own life. Or maybe he’s saying that Satan is just a symbol that represents our life force? He’s spouting something along those lines, some stuff he’s read in a book, a book that looks too much like the Bible and the Word and probably has just as many capitalised letters and just as few women’s voices. No one understands what the boy is saying anyway. But a little later, when he begins to cut his belly and blood starts trickling, we understand everything. Cutting we get. We feel it in our own belly and our own skin. We identify with the cutting, and the blood from the cuts. Blood speaks a language we understand, without that broken southern accent.
A girl character of about the same age tries to help him, manages to pull the knife away and sits chatting to him. Another girl just stands there, watches it happen and later walks home from the party through fresh snow, trailing a river of blood behind her. That’s supposed to represent me, obviously, the lonely bleeder. I could have walked home like that in 1997.
I scratch that scene. Too many lonely bleeders, a competition of teenage angst and loneliness. It’s too psychological. I hate psychology. Psychology looks like religion, and the psychologist character looks too much like God, someone you’re supposed to open up to, someone you’re supposed to approach with honesty, someone you’re supposed to use to break yourself to pieces, self-destruct in front of, so much so that the little splinters left