LORDS OF CHAOS

Aaron Guadamuz

In the mid 90’s…

I was the lone rock guy working amongst a crew of dance and hip-hop music DJ’s moonlighting as salesmen in a cramped record distributor office just south of the San Francisco Airport. I would often come to my desk in the morning or after lunch to find things that nobody else wanted laid out for me. This included “Blaze” Bailey era Judas Priest tapes and unlistenable CDs from local rock bands and folk singers. One day there was a curious tape sitting on my computer that was the soundtrack for a movie called Gummo. The tape had no cover but stickers on the case and both sides of the tape like it was made in a cheap dub house. I looked it over and was both surprised and delighted to see that my friends in the band SPAZZ had contributed the “love theme” to the film. Being a huge fan of heavy music, I listened to this tape backwards and forwards several times and didn’t quite understand it but I knew that I had to see this movie. This was long before access to films was easy and I had no idea how I would.

Sometime later, I ran into Max from SPAZZ at a Gilman Dystopia show and told him that I had a tape of the Gummo soundtrack. He obviously knew much more about the European underground metal scene and told me that there were Black Metal bands that wanted the head of Harmony Korine because actual cats were killed in the production of the film. Shortly after, I heard that the film’s distributor, Fine Line, had dropped the film for these very reasons. This both enhanced the legend of the film, taking it into illegal territories, and meant that it was going to be all the harder for me to see. Then came the day that I found out it was playing for one day at the Red Vic on Haight Street in San Francisco. My friend and I hopped in the car and rushed to the theater because in these days it truly felt that if you missed a screening you would never get the opportunity to see a film again. It is the only time I have seen the film and I do believe that Korine was able to clear the air about the treatment of cats by his production.

Fast forward again, some years later I was on the East side of New York City with some friends heading to an art show. We finally found the place and although I did not understand the art, there must have been something to it by the faces that I recognized in the room. The only memorable thing in the main gallery was that there was a police car hanging upside down in the center of the ceiling. We discovered there was a back room with some kind of film looping on a screen. Looking like it was poorly shot on cheap video equipment, the film was of kids dressed in black metal corpse makeup performing meaningless shenanigans. Once again, I was unsure of what to make of this but had the feeling that black metal and high art were flirting with each other in the most unappealing of ways. This was later confirmed in the documentary Until the Light Takes Us when Fenriz of Dark Throne walks through (and seems thoroughly unimpressed by) a photography exhibit by Bjarne Melgaard that appears to take the pretention of both high art and satanic musical sub-genres to all new heights.

In the following years, I became thoroughly familiar with the notorious story of Euronymous, Dead and Varg Virkenes through the many writings, books and docs on the subject. There was even a reference to the story made on the TV show Friday Night Lights by the character Landry (Coach Taylor’s 3rd string kicker and front man of the Christian rock band Crucifictorious…. gag). It is arguably the most gruesome and notorious story in the history of music. It also leaves one to wonder if this sub-genre would have had the same legs and influence had it not been for the crimes that brought the scene to international attention. It could have merely been just a bunch of well to do kids who learned their way around instruments by playing bad Celtic Frost covers.

In the middle of the film Lords of Chaos, the characters are gathered in a bar having a good time and amongst the chatter someone says, “I wonder what ever happened to the drummer of Bathory”. This is an inside joke because he happens to be the director of the film, Jonas Akerlund. If you are a fan of U2, Metallica, or Madonna you have likely seen a video or two that he has directed. If you watched the HBO special On the Run Tour: Beyoncé and Jay Z, you have seen Akerlund’s work and their involvement with him has fueled the fires of internet conspiracies that believe the power couple are members of the illuminati. Akerlund’s first feature Spun, a star-studded Chrystal Meth comedy, employed his music video aesthetic to great effect as did his hyper-violent Netflix film Polar.

Having been a founding member of the Swedish Black Metal band Bathory, Akerlund knows this world directly and is acutely aware of how opinionated the fans of the genre can be. It is a story that would be impossible to film and please its fans and those who admire the film are likely those who have never heard this story. Super serious metal kids are inherently cornball and watching kids head bang to music coming from boom boxes and stereos is almost as cringe inducing as the graphic, brutal murders and suicide in the film. It is also not a film for animal lovers either and it obviously wasn’t anyone depicted in this film that was concerned about Harmony Korine’s treatment of cats.

What Akerlund has created is a film that is not necessarily supposed to be liked or enjoyed but makes a solid attempt at taking a look at a unique set of dynamics that could allow such events to even happen. In our current age of technology, it would be impossible to burn down centuries old churches, get caught for it and released for lack of evidence. Norway has notoriously lax laws and even the most heinous of crimes have a maximum penalty of 21 years. Emperor drummer Faust only served 9 years for the murder depicted in the film in which he stabbed a gay man 37 times, and Varg is out of prison making Burzum records again. Anders Behring Breivik who notoriously murdered 77 people in 2 domestic terrorist attacks in 2011, is currently serving a 21 year sentence in Norway. Documentary footage of Varg inside prison made it look like he had his own luxury apartment in there. It is almost as if the peaceful, sweater wearing societies of Norway perfectly set the stage for the darkest of musical genres and a splash of mental illness to redefine the aesthetics and history of the country.

The origin story of heavy metal and one of the bands that largely defined it, Black Sabbath, is one of youthful angst channeled into music that reverberated with disillusioned youth around the globe. Four young men whose only career prospects were factory jobs amongst the smokestacks and dreary day to day of Birmingham, England found and embraced a darker sound that was contrarian to the pop and psychedelia of England in the late 1960’s. As much as Sabbath’s story was born of poverty and despair, the story of Mayhem was born of affluence and means. Akerlund almost goes out of his way to show the comfort and privilege that was being voluntarily thrown away by the characters in the film.

As Dead begins to cut himself in his long, graphic and painstaking suicide scene, his father can be heard leaving a message on the house answering machine informing him that he has been accepted to a University and they hope to celebrate at the family vacation home. Euronymous relaxes on the couch at his parents’ house with his legs comfortable resting in his father’s lap. It is also made clear that the legendary record store Hell in Oslo was not kept afloat by itself. At the store’s opening, Euronymous shamefully hides a bouquet of flowers with a note of congratulations from his father who he admits bankrolled the endeavor. Before Faust leaves the house on the infamous night that he commits murder, he lets his mom know that he is going out for the evening. Parents are heard throughout the film telling their children to be careful as they leave the house, and a portrait of Euronymous and family in matching ugly sweaters with big smiles clearly shows the love between them. It is a society that many of us wished for in which our parents not only accepted but embraced our dreams, no matter how ludicrous they may have been.

The film took me back to the time when I took music a little too seriously. There was an entire slew of disillusioned teenagers who thought they were being informed about the state of the world by bands like Megadeth and Nuclear Assault.  As lame as it seems to be headbanging to music from a stereo, I have to admit that we were all more than eager to mosh. I remember hearing about how a pit broke out at a friend’s birthday sleepover when they watched a Minor Threat VHS tape. Another friend of mine told me that on the way to see a show at Gilman Street a pit broke out in the station wagon that was bursting at the seams with young punk rockers as it made its way north across the Bay Bridge. We used to be in every pit, whether or not we liked the band, but a flying shot to the balls eventually ended my moshing career.

Black Metal has evolved and, in some cases, got married to post rock and had screamo children with musical moments that even your mom would like…. cough…. Alcest…. cough… Deafheaven. I am surprised that Sigur Ros (who created the score for Lords of Chaos) have not churned out a black metal record yet. Being a hardcore fan of “true” black metal can be a slippery slope and if you are not careful you may find yourself on the fringes of white supremacy. In the film when Varg brings a journalist to his apartment to admit to the church burnings and hopefully gain some notoriety, he is questioned about the lack of focus behind his evil philosophy that is represented through an array of Satanic and fascist imagery on the wall. If the University of Phoenix offered one of its famed “general” degrees in evil, Virkenes could be their flagship professor.

As a rock biopic, Lords of Chaos could not follow the typical rise to fame/internal struggles/moment of triumph/aftermath formula simply because everyone in this story lost. Any glory that came from this tale is in the form of the legion of bands that later rode the wave of disillusion tucked away in bedrooms that were plastered with metal posters around the world . This film is likely the closest to a commercial venture that black metal will ever see and is a step forward for Akerlund as a filmmaker. Depicting the realism of violent crime within a realistic cinematic style is territory that has been explored by Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noe and Lars Von Trier, but Akerlund’s moments of almost silent and brutal violence woven into his flashier, music video style is something unfamiliar and jarring to say the least.