Fans Behind the Camera
Lower barriers to documentary filmmaking have ushered in a wave of artless enthusiasts. A case in point: the black metal doc Until the Light Takes Us.
By Cliff Doerksen
Until the Light Takes Us
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Until the Light Takes Us 
Directed by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
Digital democratization of the means of film production has brought us to the point where every subculture on the planet seems to have generated its own documentary. This summer alone, for example, programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center has included or will include reasonably well-mounted micro-docs about a Seattle school for amateur burlesque dancers (Deirdre Allen Timmons's A Wink and a Smile), die-hard Star Wars fans (Cristian and Cortney Macht's The Force Among Us), a coterie of 30-ish Humboldt Park hipsters whose social lives center on kickball (Ben Steger's Left Field), and the Norwegian black-metal scene, whose leading lights committed two homicides and a rash of church arsons in the 1990s (Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us, premiering Saturday, July 25).
At first blush, this trend appears to be nothing more than a positive development that will further the advance of human knowledge and add to the gaiety of nations. Unfortunately, the majority of these new docs are not distinguished, and even the best (e.g., Left Field) are not a fraction as interesting as they could be. The filmmakers' own enthusiasm for their subjects is to blame, leaving them unfit to engage audiences not already invested in the subject.
The purest example of this syndrome I've seen recently is The Force Among Us, a paean to the pleasures of Star Wars fandom by Chicago siblings Cristian and Cortney Macht. If the geeky subject strikes you as inherently tedious, I refer you to The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, Seth Gordon's enthralling 2007 dissection of power politics among world-class competitive Donkey Kong players. The King of Kong succeeds where The Force Among Us fails because Gordon has an actual story to tell, about the efforts of an outsider and underdog to defeat the legendary reigning champion of the game. The characters and narrative confer a comic dignity on what initially strikes the lay viewer as a ridiculously self-serious subculture, and the dramatic force of the story is proof that virtually any arena of human passion can be fodder for a satisfying doc.
The Force Among Us, on the other hand, has no narrative structure whatsoever. Worse, it was generated from within the subculture it explores and hauls with it the heavy baggage of special pleading. The filmmakers' agenda, declared at the beginning of the film, is to destroy "the stereotypes that are all too often related to Star Wars fans," but even on this level, the film is a marked failure. One of the Machts' strategies to rehabilitate the fans' nerdy image is to give lots of screen time to an attractive young female fan anomalously posed in front of a glowing fireplace in a low-cut blouse. (On the director's commentary track, Cristian Macht likens the setup to a scene from Cinemax After Dark.) This gambit backfires, highlighting the way the other interviewees look pretty much like you'd expect. Even less persuasive is the defensive testimony of Professor John Tenuto, an expert in "the sociology of Star Wars" (and of Star Trek, and Superman) at the College of Lake County, whose input suggests that Star Wars fans don't actually understand the charges against them. Tenuto considers it probative that fans are on average slightly ahead of the general populace in both education and earning power. "They're out there, they're earning money," he says. "So this concept that Star Wars fans have no life is not beared out [sic] when you look at the data." (Memo to Professor Tenuto: Prejudice against your people may have less to do with what they earn than with how much they'll spend on a Limited Edition Boba Fett Logo Watch, "never taken out of box.")
Tenuto also gripes entertainingly about the mass media's uninformed handling of Star Wars-related issues ("They don't let non-science experts write science reports"), but flashes of unintended comedy aside, the film is essentially an 86-minute holding pattern of relentless in-group affirmation. And if The Force Among Us is an extreme case, similar formlessness and boosterism afflict all of the films I've mentioned to some damaging degree.
Until the Light Takes Us, however, is in a class of its own for wasted cinematic potential. In Norway's black metal music scene, tyro directors Aites and Ewell have hit upon a rich vein of violence, stupidity, and delusion comparable to those mined by Nick Broomfield in his excellent Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, but they've been prevented from capitalizing on it by a daffy, SpongeBobian need to see their subjects in a positive light. Their press kit directors' statement sums up their unfathomably chipper outlook: "What truly inspired us and inspires us still is that at the core, there is a group of kids who actually thought they could change the world with their underground music scene, and who actually tried to do so."
One of the young idealists so inspiring to Aites and Ewell is 36-year-old guitarist Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes, a seething anti-Semite and self-styled "racialist" recently paroled after serving 16 years for stabbing bandmate Oystein "Euronymous" Aarseth to death and burning down four historic churches, including one built in the 12th century. Another is former record-store clerk Bard "Faust" Eithun, who served nine years for the 1992 knife slaying of a gay man. (The murder still yields Eithun big-time cred among fellow black metallers: "When I was told Faust actually killed this fucking faggot I was quite surprised, because I didn't think he had the guts to do such a thing," says one. "But I really honor him for that.")
Aites and Ewell's capacity to idealize these thugs appears to be informed by a credulous and highly selective response to what passes for political thought among them. Their worldview is a chowder of ideological cliches generously seasoned by standard-issue skull-and-pentagram aesthetics: they invest cosmic importance in musical anticommercialism, fancy themselves inheritors and defenders of pre-Christian paganism, and espouse a vulgar McDonald's-sucks line of anti-globalization. They sound more like cultural studies majors than shock troops of Odin ("I think it's to a big extent nauseating to see the beauty of specific cultures being contaminated by the not-so-beautful facets of other cultures"), and this is sufficient to get Aites and Ewell past their cheap, crypto-fascist nihilism and murderous homophobia. Burning the churches, burbles Ewell on the film's Web site, "was more about a symbolic negation of globalization, because the last big wave of cultural imperialism had been Christianity coming in and raising [sic] the heathen places of worship and erecting churches on top of them. It's so metaphorical, so symbolic and so doomed to misinterpretation."
Smarter filmmakers equipped with a sense of humor could have worked up this material into a vigorous hybrid of This Is Spinal Tap and The Weather Underground. Nevertheless, the film, however exasperating and morally obtuse, is still sort of worth seeing for the ugly information that manages to seep through Aites and Ewell's rose-colored lens. But it's a waste of pixels compared to what it could have been if the filmmakers had brought more to the table than fandom.
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The Force Among Us
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The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
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Until the Light Takes Us
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Cliff,
Have you ever done research on Norwegian Black Metal at all? Or did you just skim through "Lords of Chaos" and all of a sudden you are an expert on the subject? Obviously you're just one overpretentious hipster who thinks that anything with corpse paint and pentagrams is comical. Do your research, listen to the albums, and maybe you'd have a tiny bit of credibility to even review this awesome documentary on one of the most powerful underground music movements in the world. Maybe you should just stick to your Kings of Leon and Flaming Lips albums, since getting exposed to extreme ideologies gets your panties in a wad, exposing your extremely thin Nigel hipster skin.
Hey, prior poster KVLT, are you kidding? This review is genius! I laughed out loud several times. And death metal totally rules independent of this film -- so what if the documentary sucks? It's not like Doerksen is commenting on the entire genre (although he obviously has an opinion about the subject matter -- but hello, he's a CRITIC). And really, any film maker who would say something as asinine as, "It's so metaphorical, so symbolic and so doomed to misinterpretation" deserves to have his head handed to him for his pretension. Even if the church-burner himself thought it highly symbolic, the behavior is really rooted in the same good ol' fashioned destruction that drives punk, rock,etc. Maybe the same cool guy who kills "faggots" could do it. C'mon, man -- death metal doesn't have to be taken at it's literal name. I'd have hoped that metal fans like us were more enlightened than that.
Nice review, Mr. Doerksen.
Death Metal and Black Metal are two completely different genres, dumbass.
Death Metal aims for brutality, blast beats, acrobatic riffage and guttural vocals. Black Metal goes for the jugular through it's atmospheric atavism.
There is a huge difference between bands like Autopsy and Entombed versus bands like Darkthrone and Mayhem.
What I've observed is that the "critic" DOESN'T HAVE A SLIGHTEST CLUE WHAT BLACK METAL REALLY IS. Do you know who Venom is? Bathory? Tormentor? Do you know the difference between Orthodox Black Metal and Nationalist Socialist Black Metal?
YOU ARE ALL JUST A BUNCH OF SELF SERVING CLUELESS MORONS.
Get your facts correct before you even comment, poseur.
Hey Cliff. I'd like to point out, as diplomatically as I can, that I think you're tarring black metal with a pretty broad brush. I am not going to defend Varg Vikernes or Bard Eithun or NSBM or any of the nastier elements of the scene--there's no good way to do that--but the fact remains that they're just elements, not the whole scene.
Criticizing fans for liking black metal because its practitioners include a minority faction of racists and criminals is a little like giving rock fans a hard time because Jerry Lee Lewis married his underage cousin and the Rolling Stones did a lot of illegal drugs. I'm obviously exaggerating to make a point, but I still think it's a valid point.
I haven't seen the movie, and I don't take issue with your review of it. It seems perfectly reasonable for you to wish that the filmmakers had been less starry-eyed (or glassy-eyed, or whatever).
All the same, not all black metal artists are homophobes or crypto-fascists or half-baked neo-pagans. At the risk of sounding like an idiot fanboy myself, I'm gonna suggest you look into an American band called Wolves in the Throne Room--they've responded to their own apocalyptic worldview in a positive way (in my opinion) and are homesteading and farming with the aim of disconnecting from the grid.
Of course, if you have no tolerance for occultism in any form, you're likely to be exasperated by pretty much any black metal band, even WiTTR. I'm just saying that these folks aren't thugs and idiots to a man. There are bad reasons to like black metal, of course, and it sounds like the filmmakers are pretty lazy about interrogating them. But there are also good reasons.
Jeez, and here I've been bracing myself all week for possible light-saber assaults.
Hi Phil:
I'm under the vague impression that there are other white-supremacist metal scenes out there (why, just now I was reading about something called "National Socialist Black Metal") but the notion never crossed my mind that all, most or many other metal fans share the Grishnackian mindset. My comments were meant to apply only to what I saw on the screen. And I disqualify myself from holding an authoritative opinion on the merits of the actual music. Where metal is concerned, my cultural development plateaued in high school, around the time of Black Sabbath's "Never Say Die," and at my advanced that's unlikely to change. For all I know, Darkthrone is the greatest band of its genre. But that wouldn't really have any bearing on my problems with the movie. Noam sayin'?
As for the occultism thing, I'll admit that all that Roger Corman-movie bric-a-brac does strike me as kinda, well, moribund. There's a moment in the Grishnackh movie where the dude who didn't go jail picks up a cassette tape and exclaims "Oh! Testament's 'The Ritual,' great album!" I was like, "Oh, I dunno, I prefer Ritual's 'The Testament.'" Not to get all Andy Rooney about this, but the feeling was not unlike the one I get when I see teenagers rocking the mohawk-and-safety pins aesthetic three decades after its best-before date. I mean, is it possible we're running out of youth culture or something? And if so, why not revive the Teddy Boy thing for variety's sake, or maybe dust off the zoot suit?
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Hi KVLT:
"Do you know who Venom is?"
Sorry.
"Bathory?"
Not unless you mean the vampire countess of Hungary.
"Tormentor?"
Doesn't ring a bell.
"Do you know the difference between Orthodox Black Metal and Nationalist Socialist Black Metal? "
Fuck no, but you've totally got my attention. If someone were to make a decent documentary about sectarianism in metal, I'd be first in line.
"did you just skim through 'Lords of Chaos' and all of a sudden you are an expert on the subject?
That's one of quite a few books I didn't read in preparation for writing this review. Another was Matthew Bortolin's "The Dharma of Star Wars." Point being that you're taking exactly the same position as the professor who objects to the fact that non-fans are allowed to talk about Star Wars in the media. Does it make sense to you when he says it?
"your Kings of Leon and Flaming Lips albums"
I take it these are not Orthodox Black Metal bands.
"since getting exposed to extreme ideologies gets your panties in a wad"
Dude, I live for extreme ideologies. Bet I know about more crank movements than you own LPs.
"hipster"
If only. I live in Berwyn.
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Hi Allison:
Thank you very much. I'm glad you liked it.
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