Lords of Chaos

Young people do stupid shit. This is as certain as the sun rising, seasons changing and men with handlebar mustaches calling stupid shit “artisanal.” This is why bad parenting is so fucking important; it give teenagers a target at which to launch all their stupidity.

Adolescents are going to be pissed off no matter what, so all you moms and dads might as well be assholes. At least your kids can have focus. Without terrible, ignorant and mean parents, teenage rage is like a feces-flinging monkey, a random and scattered shitstorm. This is when bad things happen.

Bad things include Norwegian Black Metal, whose negligible difference from death metal is only detectable to people who listen to a ton of this kind of music. In other words, morons. For normal people, Norwegian Black Metal is the Miracle Whip to Death’s mayonnaise; both are tolerable only in very small doses. Both types of metal are lot more about martial timekeeping and technical skill than they are about creative. The faster, harder and more precise the better. So, more like ball bearings than art. Both do a hell of a lot playacting about blood and guts and death and other themes typically found on the sides of 70s vans and in Dungeon and Dragons manuals.

Norwegian Black Metal attracts kids from loving homes, kids who have everything they need, so they don’t know why they’re so angry all the time. The music sounds like it will freak out their parents and even more typical kids. Heshers imagine that others will be terrified by their love of this gothic horseshit. And kids find a community of similarly lost, angry shitheads with whom they can piss and moan, break shit and cause trouble.

Lords of Chaos is the largely true story of dumb-ass Norwegian metalheads who let their unfocused anger get away from them. I say it is largely true because the major facts in it line up with what really happened. Black metal kids in Norway burned down churches, murdered some people and made some terrible music with misinterpretations of nihilism as lyrics. None of it is done to make a statement. It’s done to impress each other with how fucking badass they are. The movie accurately portrays how fucking stupid these kids were, and how their community was a massive circle jerk, all masturbation for the sake of each other.

Oysten (Kieran Culkin) wants to have the biggest black metal band in the world. To do that, he must be more outrageous than everyone else. Think of the band KISS, but even stupider and lower budget. There’s face makeup, the fake worship of Satan, and a fascination with death.
He’s like an AM talk show host, saying outrageous shit he knows isn’t true but believes will lather up his listeners. And more than happy to profit off their oversized reactions.

It’s relatively harmless, except when a depressed lead singer kills himself, which Oysten exploits to further his own fame. Then comes along Varg (Emory Cohen), a certified sociopath who take all the gothic hokum at face value. He burns down a church. Then another. He has no guilt or remorse.

It’s shocking to Oysten, who needs everyone to think he’s the baddest badass in the Black Metal scene but is in reality a pussy. Others feel challenged by Varg’s acts to rise to his level and prove they aren’t poseurs. Peer pressure among kids who pretend not to care. One stabs to death a stranger who tried to pick him up in a bar. Others freelance in burning churches. Varg dabbles in Satanism, paganism and Nazism, not because he believes any of it, but because he thinks they are all appropriately evil.

Among the dipshits, Varg’s sociopathy is admirable. He does all these terrible things without the cost of guilt. They elevate him to near-god status, which makes Oysten jealous, leading to head butting. When a true sociopath meets a fake one, you know which will end up hacked to bits like a blind man’s Thanksgiving turkey. Oysten, the closest thing the movie has to a sympathetic character, dies in the hallway of the apartment his parents rent for him and Varg goes to jail.

Stupidity can be entertaining, or so I’ve been told by a lot people who’ve hung out with me. Stupidity alone, though, is no movie. Lords of Chaos establishes the dumb early, and by God, these kids are dumb as fucking goat balls, but less warm. Probably equally full of cum. The movie then repeats and repeats just how damn dumb they are. It’s really the only message this movie has.

There is no redemption, there is nobody to root for, there is no introspection or attempt at understanding. Because the characters are imbeciles, none of what they say is very clever, or elucidating.

Director Jonas Akerlund, whose previous work is mostly music videos, does little to distinguish one black-haired mopey kid from another. They look and act the same: Black Dumb. I was frequently confused as to who was in a scene and why. What they usually said didn’t clear it up. There is little effort by Akerlund or his writers to shine a light from inside the darkness. They just seem to want to document stupidity and death, which I can get by watching Face sof Death with the Harelip.

Akerlund’s direction lacks visual style Judging by the source material book, he’s right that these kids were stupid as fuck, but that still isn’t interesting. The movie plays like an uneven mix of gore and cheap gags, with the gags being tonally out of place in a movie about real and gruesome murders. And those murders are drawn out, played for sensationalism, as though Akerlund knew his movie was boring as fuck, so maybe a little blood would help.

There is probably a more interesting story to be told from Lords of Chaos, and that would be where these kids come from, how they transform, and where they go to after they pass through the Black Metal phase. That story would require the adults who pay for their children’s lifestyles, to have a bigger presence in the movie than the parents in a Charlie Brown cartoon. It would take too much thinking and too much effort for Akerlund and his writers, too. After all, they got dumb kids and blood to fill the screen. Two Fingers for Lords of Chaos.