Girls Against God

this black, are little curses, magical armour that keeps the Christianity out. I am a provincial goth.
The metal band also attempts to drive out the Christianity, with lyrics, guitar riffs, dark bass lines and a MIDI church organ that sounds broken, like a tonal upside-down cross. During our gigs I expect something to give, that there will come a moment when I don’t have to hate so much. Instead I’m infuriated by all the mundanity I observe from the stage. The rock club’s emergency exit sign, the sad seventies curtains, the cracked wood panelling painted white and green. You might as well be at a Free Church recital. The teens in the audience look ordinary, too. They talk loudly by the canteen, buy fizzy drinks, and make the till ring incessantly and cheerfully, or they headbang with open mouths in front of the stage, looking, even though they’d never admit it, like the speaking-in-tongues Jesus crowd who right this moment are praying for us at the free churches of Filadelfia or Betania and calling it Jesus Revolution.
The band too, is just as ordinary, just as regulated, just as hierarchical. The boys stand quietly at the back, play riff after riff on black guitars, looking down at the floor as if they were bending their necks to a higher power, and I can’t go anywhere, either; if I do my microphone starts to whine and my voice disappears. I hang on to the microphone stand. I’m desperate to change it all, break out of the loop, jump into something else, something that can take me elsewhere, closer to something. I want the rock club to become a Zen temple, a medieval castle or, preferably, a Witches’ Sabbath.
In 1998 I plunge 2B’s college class photo into darkness. I’m in the top left corner with my black clothes and my black lipstick and at one point I’m so fed up with the photographer’s encouragements to smile that I say fucking hell. Around me, half the class cross themselves, as if they really believe that my words will bring Satan – hell himself – down on Grimstad town centre. (Or up to? Where is he really coming from?) The very man, in flesh and blood. We’re surrounded by belief in magic and transgression, by this terror that language will crush piety and Christian faith.
I hate God from 1990 to 1998, and when I say that, I adopt the same conviction, like a proper southerner: I hope that I can use language to step into the borderlands, the places in between imagination and reality, the material and metaphysical. That’s why we write, to find new places, places far from the south.
The Room
Let’s zoom out now.
We’re in a long hallway with grey and green walls. Fluorescent lights flicker on and off in the ceiling, the paint is peeling off the walls and the floor is covered with a fine layer of dust that shimmers in the flickering light. You can hear the sound of footsteps, but only a faint echo, as if we’ve got lost on the abandoned set of an old social-realist film. Not just the paint, but the realism, too, peels off in large flakes.
We’re in a world where only impressions are real, and the original sounds belonging to the film left the premises a long time ago. Here and now have been rubbed out, or don’t exist for us.
This is where I want to write, in an impossible place, a place that no longer exists. In the void left after films made as early as 1969 (Daisies), and 1974 (Penda’s Fen), and 1976 (Jubilee) … The empty studios still exist. Let’s go there. Maybe there’ll be other traces here, too, that no one cares about, that no one sees, that are impossible, in the margins of the film, in the perforated edges of the frames, in cut scenes, bonus material.
I want to start my own film here, in these remnants. I want to feel the moments where realism was dissolved, be part of the scenes in which unbreakable rules for narratives were broken as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I want to be where they unearthed the subtle and the sublime from the primitive.
The films I’m talking about reveal the gaps in our own consciousness, the restrictive framework of our daily lives. They also show me the holes in art’s paradigms of good and bad, which are just as mysterious and hierarchical as the southern evangelist norms. These films remind me of hatred, and make me value hatred, this feeling I’ve been told to put away by the South, God and the University, which also told me to ‘open my heart,’ or ‘show, don’t tell,’ or be more subtle. They don’t screen Daisies, Penda’s Fen or Jubilee in the film classes I take at university, first in Oslo and then in New England. In the film classes, we’re taught that Citizen Kane is the best film in the world, followed by everything that Tarkovsky and Bergman made. We’re not taught about the underground. We’re taught that it isn’t good to be primitive and paint with too thick a brush. We’re not even taught what a thick brush is. During my film studies, when I hear a teacher praise the visual motif ‘plastic bag floating in the wind’ in the ‘masterpiece’ American Beauty for the third time, I feel that brush, that hatred, stir in my throat and I daydream that my mouth opens and all that’s thick and black comes out, not to empty me, but to paint the entire canvas black, paint over the whole plastic bag scene in American Beauty, paint over every movie poster and every DVD copy of the film, every Orson Welles film and why not Tarkovsky and Bergman too while we’re at it, all of it, totally black, Stalker and Wild Strawberries and all that crap, get rid