John Furnish

Mayhem, Dead, Euronymous and Varg. You mean ol' Black Metal, church-burning Varg of yore? Yep, that guy. I know the history, read the book, followed the scene. I've been a metalhead since the first Black Sabbath album dropped in the states (my older sister brought it home, I was only three, but I wound up getting raised on a steady diet of heavy rock'n'roll and I'm still a metalhead today). I knew Metal was in for the evolution of a new subgenre but I was never expecting this. Today I'm a huge fan of Immortal and Satyricon (both of which the real-life Varg hates, actually) and I have come to deeply appreciate this sub-genre. But on to the film: It is exactly what it says it is in the beginning: based on various points-of-view, perceptions, outright lies and what actually happened. Would it ever be possible to get the real story? I strongly suspect not, although I think Varg himself is more truthful about it all than people generally credit him. What the director has successfully done is create a hugely entertaining story from the bloody giblets of the birth of a notorious subgenre, and replicated the feel of the heavy metal subculture overall. Metalheads have always been very militant about what is 'real metal': Euronymous rides Varg about having a Scorpions patch on his battlevest (my battlevests have always featured Black Sabbath patches, always the heaviest stuff, that's a big deal to traditional metalheads) and Varg takes it to heart, deepening his commitment to what is 'real' metal, certainly getting closer to the ethic of Black Metal, because of the influence of his tribe. One thing we metalheads are and always have been is a tribe. However, because authenticity has always been an immense issue to metalheads of all stripes throughout the life of the genre, Varg eventually comes to serious odds with Euronymous over what he perceives is his inauthenticity, and one of the things that has lent the Black Metal subgenre the notorious authenticity it has acquired with its devotees is the very fact of Varg's murder of Euronymous over this very issue. The insanity of all of the events surrounding the birth of the genre are all seen as engendering that notorious authenticity and flavor imbued into Black Metal by its birth. This energy it has carried with it wherever it has gone: witness what the Russians did when they got hold of it. Only Russians could take it further than Norwegians did. Darkness attracts darkness... The movie delivers this testimony while keeping the perspective that it was a musical youth movement, complete with teenage beer parties in secluded woodsy locations with loud music, fire and weed. Such is the stuff of rock'n'roll, no matter how dark and foreboding it gets. Even black metallers like to party. While Varg himself has, likely rightly, taken issue with some of the liberties taken by the director to bring an entertaining story while documenting the birth of a musical subgenre, I do think the actors did a great job of delivering living, enjoyable and distinct characters no matter the level of true relation to the historical personalities from which they were derived: they don't attempt so much to give us the historical characters and account so much as entertain us with the general atmosphere and twisted romanticism in the birth of Norwegian Black Metal. The heart of the whole story remains quasi-mythological, and it always will, by the very nature of its conflicting viewpoints and the energy the genre and its origin story carry for all of us who know them. The movie does its job, we enjoy it, and the legend - however mythologized - grows. After all, isn't that what eventually happens to all of humanity's great stories?