I was always an indoor kid.
Summertime has long felt like a betrayal to me. I am restless out of this spring, but I still sit uncomfortably with the way skin buzzes from the sun, recoil from the return of smells. I get stuck, fantasize about diving into dive into that time-reversed parallel universe and relive fall-winter into perpetuity. It is nice, then, to recede into something with no expectation of warmth. Metal fills that void snugly.
Metal is complicated, a fact that is apparent immediately and more so than in other genres; Extensive research into a band’s history to check for bigoted beliefs is often required before diving into their catalogue. It’s hard to negotiate these subsections with a love for the genre, though it proves a real joy to find out the truly plentiful number of anti-fascist metal bands. It is not my place to suggest that people should sift through loads of hateful nonsense to find the communities that speak to a leftist agenda if that were to trigger someone, but what I’ve found is some of the most melodically complex, emotionally adept, politically astute art I’ve ever experienced. I am far from the most knowledgeable about the genre, but my deep affection for its noise, this ardent exorcism, grows deeper every day. Listening has become compulsory now, in a way few things are nowadays. The best metal is about acknowledging the loudness of pain; Metal offers validation, a rejection of complacency in the face of intrusive thoughts. It demands attention and the care it returns is one of my most cherished releases.
As such, the idea of a metal-adjacent cinema feels suitably sacrilegious; It is the visualization of something not meant to be seen. To further the irony, such movies defined in relation to such a noisy genre of music often liberally draw from silent cinema. Highlighting Tetsuo: The Iron Man here feels a bit on the nose, but its stop-motion industrial gore effects, reminiscent of the Lumiere brothers’ magic tricks. The gnarly, wicked picture centers around a man who finds himself morphing into scrap metal. The black-and-white haze of the film’s mise-en-scene recalls Jean Epstein’s ethereal romanticism, distorted into a perverted fantasy of capitalism. Horror is of course where metal manifests most frequently, the seduction of terror giving way to something sad, funny, angry, and gleefully hardcore.
Heavy-metal-star-turned-auteur Rob Zombie leverages this embrace most explicitly. His masterpiece, The Lords of Salem, pulls a handful of galaxy brained tricks, from reversing The Crucible to posit Hollywood as a natural extension of puritanical suppression, to doing a Ken Russell homage in a movie that is in part meant to read as an allegory for relapse. But perhaps its greatest trick is the way it charts movie history through a kind of back-masking, relishing the deviant supernatural effect of a camera. From the Trip to the Moon wallpaper above the heroine’s bed to the film’s diverse visual style, with its silent-era staging, actual noir lighting, New American dramatics, and the occasional hysterical subversion of a courtroom drama, Lords conjures an alternate chronicle of cinema’s evolution. A great portion of the movie is quiet and could work just as well on mute. But Zombie’s film achingly captures something central to the metal ethos: an explosion of agony heretofore refused expression.
An off-hand remark in Lords about the mule-centric Arthur Rubin comedy Francis leads nicely to my next example, The Turin Horse. Bela Tarr’s final film contains zero allusions to Satanic imagery, and as an austere darling of the 2011 festival circuit, was not borne out of a particularly uninhibited curatorial ground. A cannily surrealist parable of a farmer and daughter gradually losing resources on a desolate (and potentially apocalyptic) stretch of land due to a horse that refuses to move is a tough, nihilistic behemoth of slow cinema. Though almost entirely wordless, The Turin Horse features a disquieting string motif amidst a cacophonic sound design. So much of the film’s environment feels elusive; The wind blows out the mic as it whips the daughter’s hair into a banshee and clouds of dust are transformed by the black-and-white cinematography into shadows resembling an unevenly exposed photograph. There is never a moment where the audience can see more than twenty feet beyond the camera, and each agonizing event lunges into motion as if the story itself is wheezing. The world screams for its inhabitants. For as tactile a hell as The Turin Horse presents, even the mundanity could not be mistaken for realism. It offers catharsis for when intellectualization falters.
All three films carry explicit political and theological messaging: Tetsuo’s perversion of industry and the body, Lords’ damnation of misogyny within the church, Turin Horse’s resignation in the absence of a loving God. These ideas swirl around helplessly, clamoring for an easy answer that never comes. Metal offers a raging off-shoot of healing: Relief.
Both Lords and Turin Horse are divided into days by imposing, minimalist title cards. These counters lead to similar inevitabilities, the “end” of something, despite being theoretically neutral, infinite metrics. The prospect of a day, especially as it becomes harder to justify a heavy blanket, is daunting. The best part about metal is that it passes the time, gives enough to step outside my head, gives enough to step outside. The fires of hell are a solid primer for a sunburn.
with love,
helmet girl
pillow screams
idk how I arrived here but this is goddamn righteous