Girls Against God Page 2
I grew up in southern Norway’s white Scandinavian paradise: white walls, white fresh snow, white painted laminate and white chipboard, white flagpoles and white chalk lines on the blackboard, white cheese and white fish, milk, fish pudding, fish gratin and fish balls in white sauce, white pages in books, white pills in pill boxes, white roll-ups, platinum-blond hair, white brides and white doctors’ coats, meringue and cream cake, Christian virgins from Jesus Revolution with white wooden crosses, Christian grunge, listen, the music sounds like regular grunge, if you just forget about the lyrics, irony, nothing means anything, boys from White Revolution at summer camp, girls who think it’s fine that the boys are racists because they’re hot and because boys will be boys, boys and their Nazi punk songs, listen to this track, the lyrics are so distorted you can’t hear it anyway, listen, the melody’s great, you girls are gonna love it, it’s got acoustic guitar. Sugar and salt are the only spices. Sugar and salt look exactly the same. White revolution and Jesus Revolution, Nazi punk and evangelist grunge, swastikas and purity rings, mid-morning gruel, pimple pus, egg whites, cream of wheat, semen.
The word white even has an h in it, imagine, a hidden letter, white. And we let that pass, linguistically. What does it do to us, that hidden letter, what (what) do we hide in that h, what hides in the white?
The white postwar period is scrubbed so clean it doesn’t have shadows, like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films. Protestant, newly rich, superficially liberal, minimalist and modern. Southern Norway in the late ’90s is not as newly rich and a little less modern, but just as white: It’s completely acceptable to point out the rightful supremacy of the white race. It’s totally fine to call someone a nigger, to beat up boys who look feminine in any way, or to raise your hand and ask to leave the classroom when confronted with a lesbian teacher, because homosexuality is not respectable (we respect you as a person and pray for your salvation). It’s acceptable to look down on those miserable wretches who aren’t Christian, who aren’t Norwegian, aren’t white or who aren’t straight. Inside that hidden h there are hundreds of commandments, from the ten first and onward into white eternity, ones that no one can pronounce, but everyone knows. The childhood I have left behind/tried to leave behind is like a metaphysical cesspit surrounding me, where the Christians have dumped their thoughts and their prayers for my salvation and purification.
Purification reverberates in every conversation. Dear Lord, and My Word, the evangelist Christian girls say when they’re angry, because they can’t say God – that would be taking the Lord’s name in vain, which after all is an act comparable to murder according to the Scripture. Language shouldn’t transgress boundaries, language should be tamed, you can’t just go wherever, don’t come here with your words. You have to keep the h silent.
The only thing I can do to stave off the south is to turn pitch-black and severe. I start playing in a metal band, dye my hair black, the colour of blasphemy, and dress in the darkest colours possible. I imagine that my presence in the classroom is itself destroying or disrupting something, even though the clothes I wear are what I call provincial black, meaning whatever you can get in dark velour or velvet, down at the friendly Arena shopping centre in Arendal. I walk the halls at school with Dostoevsky, Joyce and Baudelaire in my arms like an armoured plate across my chest. Around my neck is a chain with a black rose on it, one of the flowers of the dead, and through my headphones walking to and from school I listen to music I imagine is made in black and white. I christen the room I rent near college the witch’s dorm, and hang black velvet over the curtain poles, light black wax candles and write obscene comments in tiny print in the margins of the copy of the New Testament in the drawer of the nightstand. These objects, words and symbols, all 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 i
n 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 of the canon, bring in monochrome, a room full of formless black components. Hatred isn’t subtle, but it’s beautiful. Hatred is my pleasure dome.
Maybe Nicolas Roeg managed something that’s simultaneously subtle and challenging when he made Insignificance. In that film, made in the mid-eighties but set in the fifties, a series of characters meet in a hotel and act out philosophical and political issues of the postwar era. The characters are fictional, but the spitting image of fifties icons: a movie star looks like Marilyn Monroe but isn’t her, a professor looks like but isn’t Albert Einstein, a senator resembles but isn’t Joseph McCarthy, and a baseball player isn’t, but looks like, Joe DiMaggio. That they are fictional copies of real people seems at first disruptive and artificial, since they look like representations of Marilyn Monroe and so on, as seen in other films. Then that impression fades, and the gap between film and reality grows increasingly complex. The characters mimic the icons but act out completely fictional scenes in which Almost-Einstein and Almost-Monroe test out each other’s roles, and she retells the relativity theory with children’s toys, a flashlight and balloons. When it all ends with the hotel room exploding, all resemblance to reality crumbles. This wasn’t an event that really happened. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the plot of the film, either, aside from the time of the explosion, 08.15, the same time that the atom bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. It turns into an aesthetic feast, as toys, balloons, a flashlight and Almost-Marilyn’s body are dismembered, scorched, and liquefied. The film’s structure has managed to accommodate another disjointed footnote, another almost-character, Almost–Little Boy.
What explodes is primarily fictional. The film’s plot has unfolded in a hotel room built in a film studio. A hotel room is a sort of illusory, temporary home, perhaps in the same way that the film and the film studio are a temporary home to the production of an illusory reality. When the illusion-space is blown up and the room pulverised and drizzled in front of the camera in slow motion, it’s as if the film has blown the roof off the entire history of film. The illusory construction, the one that tells us we should foster real feelings for something that looks like reality but isn’t, is pulled apart. Little bits of wood and metal, pillow feathers, clothing fibres, flesh, drops of blood and bits of intestines float around the room in slow motion and find new places there, like food morsels about to congeal in aspic.
Maybe the film, with this blast, also expresses a primitive desire to transform reality into fiction. Not like the blockbuster films that transform death and violence into something beautiful in the service of a Crusader politics that romanticises war, but the opposite. Here the blast is something fictional and insignificant. Perhaps Nicolas Roeg is asking, could we have blown up something fictional instead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If what we blew up had been fictional and the bomb also fictional, no lives would have been lost. The explosion would have had exactly the same significance to the world as the snow globe that tumbles from of the hand of the dying man in Citizen Kane. It would have been historically insignificant.
Could we turn back time and blast fictional Japanese cities instead of real ones? asks Insignificance. Could we live out our fantasies without needing to cross the line to where real people have to die? Is the problem actually our perception of reality and the cap it puts on imaginative expression? Can art’s insignificant explosions blast our illusions to bits?
This is the space I want to write in, the blasted hotel room, in the long echo that follows the moment the illusion is shattered, as everything that mimics what we’ve been taught to call reality is ripped to shreds and drizzles down around us.
In 2005, the summer holiday after I finish my undergraduate degree in Oslo, and with it all the university’s fossilised film classes, I travel to Japan. Not to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but to Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, known for its many temples, kimonos, teahouses and paper shops. I remember a residential area with street after street lined with small wooden houses, like a little village in the middle of the town. It’s impossible to look through the windows that face the street: they are hidden behind fences, plants, or shutters, and I glide through the streets without the company of my reflection, a little more invisible and less myself than I’m used to. I understand that Japanese people like to keep things to themselves. They’re secretive beings. They’d rather look down than meet my eyes, and more and more people here wear a white mask over nose and mouth, supposedly so as not to spread or receive other people’s bacteria or viruses, but also to hide. They swarm around Kyoto, unidentifiable and untouchable behind their masks, like a web without connections. Their history is a long chain of disappearances, erasures and reconstructions. There are so many reasons not to exist here, or not to exist completely.
I’m given a tour of a Zen temple in the middle of town. It surprises me to see the walls, ceiling and floor looking so spotless, because the temple otherwise seems very old, and I find out I’m right, the temple is old, but the building is relatively new. It’s demolished and rebuilt every fifty years. This is done to preserve the construction technique, because the craft is more important than the object it created, the temple. Maybe it’s also to avoid cultivating attachment to a material thing. Or to avoid cultivating the self, and obliterating the illusion of value?
I remember this now, many years later, as though my film writing has summoned it: I remember talking to the temple guide about ‘magic’, never even questioning why I’m using the word at all. What do Japanese people think about ‘magic’, what are ‘rituals’, what are ‘spirits’? Japan is so alien to me that it doesn’t cross my mind that this is the first time I’ve talked about gods and spirits without feeling that hatred of the South pulse through my body. At some point the South must have let me go, or Kyoto has pushed it so far from my consciousness that I’ve been able to forget where I’m from. I’ve given up, or suppressed, the provincial black hatred.
In Japan it’s so easy for me to forget to hate, to forget my entire emotional register, everything I’ve brought with me. Here I’m a total stranger, even to myself. I don’t know a single character of the written language, and I have no idea which are used in the word hate or whether they even have such a word. People’s behaviour here, their tradition, their religion are so different that I can’t see my reflection in them. I’ve disappeared almost completely. If I haven’t already forgotten or erased myself, I can do it here. I identify with the temple, with what’s demolished and rebuilt without traces from its previous life, without revealing where it came from.
As I’m speaking to the temple guide, people keep stopping next to us, outside the passage into the most sacred room, where statues of guardian gods rest on their pedestals. As they silently pass through the rooms, cold now in February, the visitors greet the gods, or leave something for them. Later that day I realise that everywhere I’ve been I’ve also greeted something or given something or other away. I removed my shoes to enter the temple, removed the red temple slippers to enter the inner chambers, and handed my ticket to the ticket inspector. The barista in the coffee shop handed me the receipt for an espresso with b
oth hands, and I gave coins in return, attempting to make my thank-you just as ceremonious. In Kyoto, even buying coffee has significance: I give something, and the weight of the action, the bow, the emphasis, gives me the feeling that I’m also giving away part of myself. I’m participating in a ritual. This is how easy and free of sin it can be, like a magical transaction, a movement to participate in.
Later that evening I practise greetings. I bow to the rooms in the apartment where I’m staying, to the hands of the waiters that pour tea in my cup at a tea house. I stop and nod in an art gallery inside a metro station, and nod to the metro station’s revolving doors and to the guard smoking on the floor above me. I bow my head to the underground engine, the ticket inspectors, the drivers, the passengers that exit the metro before I get on.
It isn’t until now, as I write my film many years later, that I understand that what I was doing in Japan was a form of blessing, the same action practised by the pastors of the South. In Japan, I bless the rooms, the things and the people. Maybe without knowing it I’m compensating for something I never allowed myself to do. Maybe I don’t recognise the movement because it seems so easy without the Christian association. In the South, blessing seems to be about getting some sort of permission from God, a holy white stamp. I haven’t had access to that type of communication. I’ve only learned to use the curse, its depraved twin sister, profusely. From the window in my witch’s dorm, I surveyed Bible-belt suburbia, and I cursed the college, the supermarket, and Kingdom Hall, the gas station, the late-night McDonald’s, and car after car zooming down the motorway.