The visceral extremity of a really wacked-out subculture is the sociological gift that keeps on giving. No matter your critical project, it will likely be possible to project it onto whatever awkward, formerly adolescent outcast you can dig up and put in front of a camera or tape recorder. Until the Light Takes Us, a recent documentary about the Norwegian black metal scene in the early 90s, seems almost painfully self-conscious about avoiding this sort of instrumentalization, and this is certainly the best and worst thing about it. Seemingly allergic to even the most basic documentary structure, UTLTU only grudgingly supplements the accounts of its subjects with desperately needed context or information. At its worst the film is a rudderless pretension, wandering from one needless, uninformative shot of someone traveling to a similar one of someone else walking from one unidentified place to another. Its precious, boring, and invested in a comic portentousness which serves chiefly to heighten the already cringe-worthy proclivities of its protagonists.

The result is two-fold. On the one hand, yes, you will likely spend a good portion of the film tallying up the myriad examples of rank amateurism and bemoaning what might have been. Get over that, though, and you will find, for all the lack of classically documentarian pleasures, one does emerge from UTLTU with a genuine feeling for its two leads, Varg Vikernes and Gylve Nagell, both significant figures in the moment under consideration. This feeling is not so much sympathy or understanding as it is the sort of queer clarity that comes from actually spending time with someone. Simply undermining ideological assumptions, be they those of the movement’s originators or of the film’s audience, is a less journalistic outcome than might be hoped for, especially for such a deliciously fascinating topic, but it is an important one. Indeed, the longer I thought about UTLTU, the more I appreciated the filmmakers’ almost pathological reticence to insert themselves or their ideas into the overall framework of the film, frustrating though the experience could be.

Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell (known as Fenriz), from Darkthrone, courtesy Variance Films

For those unfamiliar, the second wave of black metal chronicled in UTLTU took place in Norway from 1990-1994. Growing out of speed and thrash metal in the 80’s, Norway’s black metal scene became a sensation when it was linked to numerous church burnings and multiple murders. The most famous of which was the killing, by Vikernes, of Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous.

It’s the complementary portraits of Vikernes and Nagell that ultimately carry the film. Playing the roles of ideologue and artist respectively, their combination depicts with rare clarity the spectrum of sub-cultural radicalism. Vikernes, still imprisoned for the murder, is a powerful intelligence. Articulate, insightful, and by far the most compelling presence anywhere in the film, Vikernes also ends up as the most important primary and secondary source for the majority of the narrative. Invested in black metal chiefly as a vehicle for reprehensible ideas about race and nationalism, Vikernes seems totally unreconstructed; his incarceration having only deepened the paranoid hatred at the root of his thinking. There is something of a moral hazard in letting such a figure serve as his own interpreter, and anyone familiar with the extent of Vikernes’ ideological legacy will be likely be unsettled by its relatively partial presentation here.

Kjetil-Vidar “Frost” Haraldstad, courtesy Variance Films

Nagell, for his part, and by contrast, seems genuinely, almost sweetly, all about the music. When prodded to talk about the culture and events surrounding black metal, he can only mumble frustration at its becoming “trendy,” and offer a sort of shy sadness. When discussing music or art of any kind, however, he becomes animated and passionate, and it’s a shame the film doesn’t find more time for these excursions, as Nagell proves an incisive and fascinating critic. As it is, entirely too much time is spent following the man around hoping he’ll say or do something interesting or significant, which he rarely does.

The most illuminating moment on offer is when these two are asked to comment on each other. Both offer a cautious respect and hint at a mutual incomprehension. Vikernes admits that he doesn’t understand Nagell, asserting that he operates by some inner logic that he can’t penetrate. This would be funny if it wasn’t also quite so sad. Nagell is hardly some great mystery, he is simply an artist, sincerely invested in making music above all else. Of course this is totally inscrutable to a fervent ideologue like Vikernes, for whom black metal is inseparable from the larger project of Odinist reaction. That these two together should have anchored a movement says a great deal about the different sides to the black metal story and the different types that went into shaping it.

One is tempted to extrapolate and say that all art-centric subcultures operate in the spectrum bookended by Vikernes and Nagell, in the space between a radical ideology and a (relatively, relatively) autonomous aesthetic. Black Metal would then be a far-right instance of a pattern common also to genres like Punk and Dub, which offer a similarly elitist (because anti-pop) combination of words and music but in an ostensibly different direction. On the one hand it’s no surprise that the powerful narcissism of the little musical differences between punk and metal diverge much more vividly at the moment of their political reckoning. On the other hand, metal has always had the better musicians and punk the better ideas, and if that seems like an overly broad or bias statement, maybe that’s why UTLTU works so painstakingly hard to avoid arguing anything so definitive. The drawbacks of this approach, detailed above, are not unique to this film, but its virtues certainly are, and if that makes it less than enjoyable or impressive, it also makes it infinitely more valuable.

Until The Light Takes Us at Cinema Village

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