Hell awaits: 20 years of Doom.

Sure, there were first person games—and even first person shooters—before Doom. Nerds will point out Maze War or whatever, and grizzled Mac loyalists who remember the dark ages before the iPod will curse your name forever if you don't accord proper respect to Marathon. (The harsh truth: by today's standards Marathon is about as fun to play as a rousing game of "poop your pants at work.")

But in the final analysis, Doom is the ur-shooter, the primordial ancestor from which all modern day virtual gunplay evolved. It is the Sistine Chapel of blood splatter and shell casings, the Mona Lisa of circle-stafing. Doom is a symphony of crisp, frictive mechanics working in lockstep to create an experience that remains unmatched even today, two decades later. (Doom came out on December 10, 1993. Happy birthday, Doomguy.)

Booting up Doom now is a revelation. All evidence seems to suggest that a PC game from 1993 should be like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, out of place and struggling to adapt to a world it cannot understand. But Doom feels speedy, rewarding, and infinitely playable. In many ways, today's market colossi remain pale imitations, their small refinements taking place in the shadow of a towering, nonplussed Cyberdemon. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, Doom is the ultimate game, awaiting the ultimate player: Homo fraggus.

This is my Doomguy. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The story of Doom is flimsy, but no more so than most games of its era. (Or today, frankly.) You are a space marine, stationed at a Martian outpost that has been overrun by demons thanks to reckless scientists opening a portal to hell. There are distinct shades of Evil Dead and Aliens (id's chief inspirations, according to David Kushner's Masters of Doom), but it all coheres into a unique vision that combines the tension and suspense of a horror movie with the nervy, twitch action of classic arcade games like Robotron 2084.

Over the course of the game's campaign—which is broken up into three episodes, the first made available via shareware—the player traversed a series of increasingly nightmarish stages, battling the forces of hell with a growing arsenal of powerful weapons, from the buzzing chainsaw to the fearsome BFG. But much like his forefathers Ash and Corporal Hicks, Doomguy would often be seen wielding the shotgun. You know, for close encounters.

Doom features one of the most iconic casts of enemies to ever grace a video game. The monsters are unforgettable, from the Cheshire grin of the Cacodemon to the purposeful, menacing stride of the Baron of Hell. (Countless players will still feel their hackles rise upon hearing the lo-fi sound of a Baron's intimidating howl.)

And then there are the weapons. The weapons! Every booming shotgun or rattling automatic heard in today's online arenas represents an iteration of Doom's simple, timeless archetypes. Call of Duty's myriad of subtly different assault rifles? All variations on Doom's classic chaingun, just like the one Jessie Ventura shredded foliage with in Predator.

They should've sent a poet.

This is to say nothing of the maps themselves, which mostly succeed thanks to John Romero's keen sense of pacing and balance. (Like countless tragic heroes, his brilliance would eventually turn to hubris—and like Icarus, he would plunge back to earth.) But one of the game's finest moments came from Romero's co-designers Sandy Petersen and Tom Hall: in "Phobos Anomaly", the final level of the initial shareware episode, our heroic marine comes to an enormous stone pentagram, where a set of doors slide open to reveal not one, but two Barons of Hell.

It remains one of the best boss encounters ever, and a perfect capstone to the first episode. After playing this, how could you not purchase the full version?

Unfortunately, as with so many shareware games of the era, id never really topped that first episode. This definitely doesn't mean that episodes two and three are bad, although you can probably find some grizzled veterans lurking on message boards who are willing to go that far (and seriously, fuck "Halls of the Damned"). It's just that id led with their best material: the first episode has a crackling sense of tension and logic to its levels, which still remain imprinted on the minds of a whole generation of players.

Gaming's greatest ever "oh shit" moment—at least until the first time you see the Cyberdemon. Or the Spider Mastermind. Or an Archvile. Lot of "oh shit" moments in the Doom games.

A term that's bandied about a lot these days in upper-level video game discussion is "ludonarrative dissonance." It refers to how the increasingly ambitious storytelling aspirations of games can clash with the act of playing them; it's when the game part gets in the way of (or is itself disrupted by) the part that's aspiring to the status of film or literature. Even the recent, critically acclaimed GTAV struggles with this, as it attempts to present a classic American crime saga on the order of Goodfellas or Heat—but at the end of the day it's still the game where you can blow up old ladies with a rocket launcher.

Although many gamers are probably loathe to admit it, this is what Roger Ebert was talking about when he denied that games could ever be art. For Ebert, art is still bound by a version of the auteur theory: it is the product of a singular, Promethean vision, and nothing disrupts that vision like allowing the viewer/reader to play a game inside of it.

Some games have acknowledged this problem: towards the end of Uncharted 2, a villainous mercenary asks Nathan Drake how many men he killed to reach this point. It's a fair question, since the wise-cracking, pulp adventure tone of the Uncharted games sometimes feels terribly at odds with the fact that you spend most of your time shooting hundreds of guys in the face. (One of my favorite Penny Arcade strips makes light of the game's genocidal body count.)

Or consider the recent Far Cry 3, which tells a story about a tender-footed, first-world college student who manages to become the most feared gunman on an island full of ruthless pirates and guerilla fighters. Although the game is at pains to continually refer to your dramatic transformation, the truth is that under the auspices of the player, the character takes to bloodshed like a fish to water. He seems like a natural born killer from the moment he picks up a gun—because you are.

Fortunately, they later made an improved version of Far Cry 3 where they replaced the undergraduate hero with Michael Biehn, and everything else with neon. Doomguy would approve.

But Doom, unlike so many of its progeny, suffers from absolutely zero ludonarrative dissonance. Some would contend that Doom is not trying to tell a particularly complex story, and of course they're right—but maybe that's sort of the point. Doom's plot may be rudimentary, but it's a perfect match for the way the game actually plays. A lot of modern game developers fail to understand that "complex" is not always better; most folktales are pretty simple too, but they get the job done.

Doom presents the player with a world in which there are only two possible responses: kill or be killed. There is no dialogue, no stealth, no "hacking" minigames, no friendly NPCs, no moral choices—there is only a threat, and the tools for an appropriate response. You are the last surviving human, surrounded by hideous ghouls, demons, and monsters from the abyss. There is no non-violent remedy to your situation, no "speech skill" to be used when negotiating with a Cyberdemon. There is only force; you negotiate with a rocket launcher. It is a Hobbesian world: nasty, brutish, and short.

I mean really, how much context do you need to know that you're supposed to shoot this thing? (Then again, good monster design is something of a lost art these days too.)

Doom's violence was sensational and controversial at the time of its release, and its brutal (if primitive) death animations retain a queasy power even today. But viewed another way, it's a little hard to see what the fuss was all about—not just because games since have upped the ante in so many ways, but because of what the violence is targeting.

Mapmaker Sandy Petersen, a Mormon, made this same point to John Romero, who worried that the hellish imagery would offend him. But why, Petersen countered, would he would be offended by a game about fighting demons?

Doom is much like Black Sabbath, whose piously Christian, resolutely antiwar lyrics are often overlooked: it's a game about combating the devil, by any means necessary. (Of course, Romero and artist Adrian Carmack—no relation to John—reveled in the game's demonic aesthetics, like any good headbanger.)

Before DLC and microtransactions, there was only huge guts. (From the one-issue Doom comic, which is totally as ridiculous and deranged as this excerpt suggests.)

Despite the simplicity of its plot, Doom still tells stories. It mostly does this through the maps themselves, many of which have small arcs of their own. Doom II in particular does this, and sometimes at its own peril—but when it works, it really works.

A good example is "Tricks and Traps" by the aforementioned Sandy Petersen, which begins in a circular room with eight doors. Each one leads to a setpiece monster encounter, such as an enormous and seemingly empty hall filled with alcoves that house Cacodemons. In another, you encounter a horde of dormant Hell Barons with their back to you, and one angry Cyberdemon at the far end. Your natural impulse is, as always, to start shooting—but this is the worst thing you can do, since the best option is to let infighting weed out some of the demons first.

As with any Doom map, your mileage may vary; some Doomers hate "Tricks and Traps" with a passion. But plenty of others love it—and to me, it's a grisly setpiece as memorable as anything in Uncharted or Mass Effect.

(Despite triumphs like "Tricks and Traps", Petersen is a controversial figure in the Doom community, mostly because his levels are designed around making you feel like Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, staring at a finger-wagging Nedry, scolding you that "you didn't say the magic word.")

You know that level of Doom 2 where you get sick of its shit and stop playing? Regardless of which one it is, Sandy Petersen probably made it.

Doom's 3D labyrinths, potent weapons, and imposing enemies guaranteed it would be a huge smash. Gone were the interchangeable, right-angled mazes of Wolfenstein, and even though by today's standards Doom's maps only vaguely resemble the locations they're supposed to represent ("Nuclear Plant", "Toxin Refinery"), by 1993's standards it might as well have been virtual reality.

And for those who wanted to create their own maps, Doom has also proven to be one of the most user-friendly games ever—and this, as much as anything else, is the true secret of the game's longevity.

By the time id's newest game came out (be it Doom, Quake, or whatever), graphics wizard John Carmack had typically long since moved on to the next thing—and in 1997, he made the Doom source code freely available. (Carmack's influence on video games and shooters is truly incalculable: although it is certainly distinct at this point, the Call of Duty engine was still built on Carmack's technology.)

Even today, the Doom community continues to crank out new maps and gameplay mods for this infinitely durable, 20-year old game. As recently as 2012, Doomers saw one of their best years ever, with at least three landmark creations: Doom the Way id Did, a fantastic set of levels designed to emulate the style of the original Doom episodes; Winter's Fury, an intense and atmospheric campaign featuring new monsters, textures, and a full-fledged story(!); and Reelism, a madcap, ludicrously entertaining mod that turns Doom into a Smash TV style postmodern slot machine.

Oh yeah, Winter's Fury also has cutscenes. CUTSCENES. And they're actually pretty good!

And the year before that, Doomers saw what may well be one of the biggest, most popular, and most controversial Doom mods ever: Brutal Doom, the work of one Sergeant Mark IV. In his own words:

Brütal Doom takes Doom into a whole new level. It makes the game much more violent than before. There's much more blood, plus it adds unique gibs, death animations, dismemberments, headshots, executions, fire and explosion particles, flares, shadows over all objects, and much more.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg though. Brutal Doom is a version of the game that's been retooled from the ground up, without losing the spirit of what makes id's masterpiece what it is. With new weapons and harder-hitting monsters, it makes Doom feel brand new—gorier, louder, and nastier than ever.

My favorite BD change is that the invisibility orbs become captured Marines; if you liberate them with a swift kick, they become bloodthirsty, AI-controlled buddies who rampage around the map at lightning speed (which just means they move at the same speed you do) firing a randomly generated weapon at any demon in sight. They can and will catch you in the crossfire, although I found it hard to stay mad at them. Still, if one spawns with a rocket launcher—run.

But a YouTube video is worth a thousand words:



Some Doom grognards hate Brutal Doom because its numerous gameplay tweaks (all of the weapons have been redesigned, for example) make classic Doom megaWADs* like Deus Vult or Alien Vendetta virtually unplayable for all but the most superhuman of Doomers. This outrage is actually pretty understandable: Doom has an exquisite sense of gameplay balance, and for Doom fans it's not something to be meddled with lightly. 

(If you've never played a WAD like Deus Vult, watch this video to get an idea of just how frantic these maps can be, even playing with vanilla Doom. Also, marvel at the epic architecture built using the humble Doom engine! And a WAD, in case you're wondering, is a Doom file. A megaWAD is just shorthand for a collection of levels—a full-fledged episode, or a whole campaign. The file still ends in .wad. WAD stands for "Where's All the Data?")

Still, Brutal Doom's sheer scope and Sgt. Mark's unrelenting commitment to turning Doom into a literal reenactment of Slayer's "Raining Blood" can only be described as sick as fuck, and if you like Doom and have never heard of Brutal Doom before, I'll understand if you're frantically rushing to play it after watching that video.

War ensemble, burial to be.

Doom is a lot like Tetris, if Tetris still had a vibrant community cranking out game content that went far beyond anything the original creators could have imagined. From fun and challenging campaigns like Scythe, to mind-boggling "slaughter" WADs like Sunder (where some levels boast a monster count in the thousands), to ridiculous and over-the-top game mods like Brutal Doom and Reelism, there's never been a better time to play Doom than right now, on its 20th birthday.

What are you waiting for? Hell awaits.

Christmasbland: NOS4A2 (2013).

When he was in Big Black, Steve Albini once said something (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how most bands fall back onto little signifiers of brutality, rather than trying to create a genuine sense of physicality and impact. This observation has always stuck with me, because I think it's an eloquent summation of a phenomenon you see absolutely everywhere.

With enough repetition, even the most outlandish aesthetics can become rote; consider how something like death metal—a musical style that would've been inconceivably harsh to earlier generations—can become surprisingly boring in the wrong hands. What once sounded sickeningly brutal becomes irredeemably silly, and vocals that were once frighteningly demonic are refined into the sound of a guy burping.

This is exactly what happens as NOS4A2 goes down the horror checklist: evil children who want to "play"; a serial killer who delivers sing-song rhymes with childlike glee; a stately, old-fashioned gentleman who is actually a predatory vampire; a symbol of joy and innocence (Christmas) warped into terror and bloodshed. It all just grates, because it's trying way, way too hard. It's the horror equivalent of one of those early '90s superhero comics where everyone has huge guns and clothes with a million ammo pouches on them, and every title is something like Bloodhammer or Darkfist or Killblade.

GIS for "90s comics", third result.

The biggest problem with NOS4A2 is very simple: it takes for granted that it's a Modern Horror Classic without ever doing the work necessary to become one. And since it is a horror story, this problem is most glaring when it comes to the villain. From the beginning, the book treats Charles Manx like a horror icon akin to the Joker or Hannibal Lecter, but he never actually rises above monster-of-the-week material.

Hannibal Lecter isn't scary because he eats people: he's scary because he's a well-respected genius with a highly-deveoped sense of culture and etiquette—who also eats people. The Joker isn't scary because he blows things up and kills people with poison gas, but because sometimes the things he says make a terrible kind of sense, leaving us wondering if it's true that the only thing separating him from us is one bad day.

But cardboard cutouts aren't very scary once you get past the initial shock. There's a reason why characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason and Chucky were all eventually played for laughs. People still get worked up over H.P. Lovecraft because the horror in his stories cannot be easily translated into cut-and-paste cliche, which is also why so many strict imitations of Lovecraft are so shitty—the idea of a profoundly indifferent cosmos is hard to fit into a rubber suit. (Of course, this hasn't stopped the Cthulhu plush industry from thriving.)

Unfathomable hate beyond time and space.

NOS4A2 isn't all bad. Vic McQueen is a decent character, largely because she exhibits the kind of complexity so lacking in the book's horror elements. Her combustible mix of decency and self-destruction is very human, and it makes her seem like more than another Final Girl from central casting. And the book's magical bikes and enchanted Scrabble tiles have a warmly nostalgic energy, recalling the way we invest such objects with power and potency as children.

But a lot of the time, NOS4A2 feels like an interesting piece of magical realism that got waylaid by a mediocre horror movie. Some of the early scenes when Vic is young crackle, and when she meets Maggie it seems like a whole new world is about to open up. But it doesn't, because it's been too long since we've been reminded that we're Making Christmas Scary™.

Note: this is not quite as fresh an idea as the book seems to think it is. See also: Black Christmas, Rare Exports, etc.

Did you see Insidious? It's a good movie, with some real standout moments. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the best part was the ending. For some, the ending is acceptable; for others, it nearly ruins the movie. (This piece only goes so far as to argue that it "makes sense", not that it's good.)

But it's nobody's favorite part, because it tries way too hard and lays on the "creepiness"—again, not real creepiness, but Little Signifiers of creepiness—way too thick. That's exactly what happens in NOS4A2, but it happens constantly throughout the whole book instead of just boiling over at the end. It's never scary, just numbing.

Like any well-articulated genre, horror runs on the clever revision of cliche. This can often tend toward the postmodern (e.g. Scream, The Cabin in the Woods), but it can just as easily be done with great sincerity: Insidious director James Wan has made a career out of creating horror films that pay homage to the classics while adding his own gloss, and doing so with a lot of love for the genre and a lot of heart.

What sucks about NOS4A2 is that Joe Hill can do this, and do it well—but here, he just doesn't.

My favorite scene in Horns involved an encounter with a stray cat at midnight, which is about as stock a horror setup as you can find. But Hill didn't just toss these elements together and call it a day: he carefully and methodically painted a scene with them, and the result was a powerful, almost numinous sense of something dark and terrible irrupting into the everyday world. It's the same feeling you get from "At the Mountains of Madness" or the climactic scene in Ringu—and unfortunately, nothing in NOS4A2 comes close.

In this case, a picture is worth 175,000 words (conservative estimate).

All these problems would still exist if NOS4A2 was a lean, tightly edited novel of the same length as Horns or Heart Shaped Box, both of which are around 400 pages. Unfortunately for the reader, NOS4A2 weighs in at a terminally bloated 700, which just makes all of its faults that much more glaring.

I read that there's even a novella-length segment that was cut from the final draft, and which is restored in the special edition published by Subterranean Press (which admittedly has a really cool cover). As NOS4A2 character Lou Carmody might say: dude, seriously?

But with all that said, I still think Mr. Hill is a great writer who has a long and storied career in front of him. I just think that once all of his books are written, NOS4A2 is going to be like the ending of Insidious: nobody's favorite.

Vivisected for your magazine essay: American Mary (2012) and S&man (2006).

American Mary (2012) deserves credit for being one of the few films where I really had no idea what was going to happen next. It's a unique, stylish, and surprising chronicle of the title character's descent into slasher movie madness—but it's also a bit of a mess, both literally and figuratively. Where the unpredictably of a film like Kill List only adds to the mounting tension, Mary's lack of direction sometimes just makes it feel unfinished.

Mary (Katharine Isabelle) is a medical student struggling to cover her expenses, resorting to increasingly desperate options to pay the bills. At first, she thinks stripping is the worst thing she'll have to do, but as you might imagine, things quickly take a turn. And then another. Before you know it, she's wearing a rubber apron and...well, you'll see.

In the first twenty minutes or so, I thought I knew where the movie was headed, expecting a familiar "boiling frog" scenario where tension and weirdness would gradually ramp up until Mary found herself in previously unimaginable territory. That's not really what happens, though. The film's arc doesn't look like a steady climb, but a jerky polygraph—although Mary still winds up in a very different place from the character we first encounter.

The recurring theme of the movie is perception: the plot turns on the way people respond to images, both of themselves and of others. Mary never seems quite sure about herself or her rapidly changing niche in the world, and her frank assertiveness reminds me of that one Jawbreaker song where during the bridge Blake just keeps muttering "I know...who I am", as if trying to convince himself as much as the listener. In this sense, it's actually a pretty effective coming-of-age movie (although it's the kind of coming-of-age I wouldn't wish on anyone).

The setup of American Mary (which really seems like it should've been titled Bloody Mary but wasn't for fear of getting lost in a sea of IMDB entries) made me think of the gleefully nasty Pathology, but as it moved along I was also reminded of Girls Against Boys. Both comparisons are a bit too pat though: this is no medical horror, nor simply a battle-of-the-sexes vengeance flick. (There are distinct shades of Audition at times though, as you can see in the cap at the top of the page). Mary is a strange and stylized affair, and it sometimes feels like directors Jen and Sylvia Soska had more ideas than they really knew what to do with; Mary can feel like it's made up of material from three or four different movies.

Perhaps unfortunately, American Mary also reminded me of the phenomenal Excision, which similarly chronicles the psychic dissolution of a young, would-be surgeon. I say unfortunately because Excision is stiff competition for any film, and it's tough for Mary to measure up to Pauline, Excision's oddly endearing anti-heroine, who for my money is one of the most memorable horror characters of the last 20 years. But Mary is still interesting in her own right, and worth spending 100 minutes with.

While Mary left me with mixed (although ultimately positive) feelings, S&man (2006) is a film I genuinely loved. Where Mary spotlights the subculture of extreme body modification, S&man director JT Petty points his camera at horror filmmakers themselves. What makes S&man great is the same thing that opens it up for criticism: it honestly can't decide if it's a documentary or a scripted horror story. 

While it ends on a distinctly scripted note, the bulk of the film is an honest documentary, and a good one. That really is the great Carol J. Clover, who coined the term "final girl", intelligently discussing the through-lines between films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the Abu Ghraib photographs. And those really are underground filmmakers Fred Vogel and Bill Zebub, discussing their own subterranean, DIY works (Vogel is behind the infamously depraved August Underground trilogy, while one of Zebub's movies is titled Jesus Christ, Serial Rapist).

But there's a fictional element too, in the form of the unassuming director Eric (Eric Marcisak, pictured above), the auteur behind the S&man series, which features the director stalking, tormenting, and strangling a series of young women. Initially framed as an extremely verite form of artificial snuff, director Petty begins to wonder how much of what he's seeing is "only a movie". (Marcisak's unnervingly normal performance is outstanding.)

I can see the argument that the scripted bits bring down the documentary sections, which feature some incisive and thoughtful interviews with Petty's principal subjects and really are surprisingly excellent. (Even as a diehard horror fan the idea of a documentary about horror filmmakers seems a little boring, but these folks have some fascinating things to say, and Petty draws them out expertly.) However, the sequences with Eric bring a crackling, nervous tension to the film, and some smart editing allows them to enliven and illuminate the talking heads' commentary—at some points, S&man is actually a better documentary for having scripted content.

One of the central ideas in S&man and in a lot of horror is the porousness of the border between illusion and reality, and more than one of the subjects of the film make the point that watching people die on camera for real can actually be surprisingly boring. In one of the film's best moments, when Petty asks Vogel if he's seen the decapitation videos made famous by terrorists and drug cartels, he notes that his first response was that Toetag (his production company) can do it better. 

It gets at the idea that horror isn't really about watching real-life violence, which tends to be messy, awkward, and without dramatic punctuation. If you want snuff, Youtube is full of videos from Syria showing real-life deaths that make A Serbian Film look like an episode of Family Guy. Horror isn't just about watching people die: it's about exploring the sense of dread that suffuses human existence, thanks to the curse of reason and the knowledge that death is inevitable. 

It's Romanticism with a capital R, where the subject is swallowed up in something vast, impossible, and terrifying. An innocent young girl falls prey to an unholy malady that distorts her very being; beautiful people in the prime of life are butchered by a stalker without a face; alien forces invade our bodies and rip their way out. At its best, horror is a stark encounter with what Damien Hirst called the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living—the title, fittingly, to a piece starring one of horror's primal figures: a big, dead-eyed shark.

Bon appetit.

Confessions of a knife: Until the Light Takes Us (2008).

Norwegian black metal is a myth. It's a story filled with larger-than-life characters, startling events, and lingering mysteries. And for many, it stands as an irresistible beacon of authenticity (no matter how ugly), bereft of cynical market-based calculations.

But Norwegian black metal is also a myth because it has been mythologized. In one reckoning, churches were burnt by heroic, Siegfried-esque avatars of a resurgent paganism—but in another version, they were reduced to cinders by bored teenagers born into a placid and accommodating society. Viewed from a different angle, the saga of Norwegian black metal is not a grand, romantic tragedy, but just another tale of misspent youth, with a peculiar Scandinavian twist and some unusually tragic consequences.

I resisted watching Until the Light Takes Us for years for exactly this reason. I've grown weary of the mythological edifice that's been built around Norwegian black metal, mostly because it does a supreme disservice to a lot of great bands that have emerged since Varg's cell door slammed shut. There's also the fact that the music in question ranges from genuinely transcendent to criminally overrated, as is the case in most regional music scenes of legend. (I'll leave you to guess which is which; I will admit that I love Filosofem and most of the other Burzum records, but I think most of Mayhem's recorded legacy is indisputably awful).

But I'm happy to say that Until the Light Takes Us is a fascinating and worthwhile film—although maybe not for the reasons the filmmakers, Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell, had hoped. It's also not without flaws, chief among them the fact that it contributes to the mythological edifice in one very significant and disappointing way, even as it tears another part of it down.

If you're looking for a definitive exploration of the Norwegian black metal phenomenon, look elsewhere; Moynihan and Soderlind's Lords of Chaos is the obvious destination, and it remains an excellent piece of reportage. Until the Light Takes Us does next to nothing to really contextualize the emergence of the black metal aesthetic, and record nerds are definitely going to be disappointed on this front. But frankly, this documentary isn't about music, as embarrassing as that might sound. It's about the scandal, and even more so it's about the people.

Specifically, two people: Varg Vikernes, the man behind Burzum, and Gylve Nagell (aka Fenriz), one half of Darkthrone. While Aites and Ewell speak with others, such as members of Satyricon and Immortal (and Bard "Faust" Eithun of Emperor, who in 1992 stabbed a gay man to death, and appears here as a voice-distorted silhouette), all of these characters are largely inconsequential. The movie is really about Varg and Fenriz, and how they've navigated an enormous myth of their own making.

The segments regarding Fenriz are notable for precisely how banal and prosaic they are: he comes across as a truly regular guy, and even a bit of a geek at times (such as when he finds a Testament tape in a street vendor's bin). Metalheads may be happy to know that Fenriz truly is one of them, down to the marrow of his bones—or they may be disappointed at how thoroughly he undermines the mythology (in which case, they probably haven't heard the last several Darkthrone albums).

Varg is a different story altogether. One ingenious trick the filmmakers use is to introduce him in voice-over, talking about Darkthrone; you don't know that you're listening to the man Sam Dunn aptly called "the most notorious metal musician of all time" until they cut to his iconic, almost cherubic face. On-camera, Varg is winningly charismatic and charming: whether recalling an anecdote from black metal's halcyon days or inveighing against Christianity, his speech is crisp and eloquent. (In a chilling moment, his demeanor doesn't falter at all as he describes Euronymous' murder.) He is an immensely fascinating character, and one can't help but think that maybe the movie should've just been about him.

But that's also part of the problem. Anyone well acquainted with Burzum and Varg's politics can have no doubt that Aites and Ewell probably filled several canisters of film/tapes/memory cards with Varg ranting about how the Jews are the greatest scourge humanity has ever known, and the inferiority of all non-Aryan races. Unfortunately, none of this (aside from an inoffensive comment about "Judeo-Christian" culture) makes it into the film.

From Varg's blog: how European musicians should look.

The result is a deeply flawed portrait of the film's central character, and one which can be corrected in seconds by merely glancing over the entries in his blog, which features such entries as "Crypto-Jews at large." While I firmly believe that Varg's artistic accomplishments should not be outweighed by his fringe politics (any more so than the work of, say, Ezra Pound), it's troublesome to see such a shallow portrayal in a film like this. Not just for being inaccurate, but because it contributes to the mythology built up around this milieu; Americans may have trouble mythologizing Varg after hearing about how he stopped playing metal because of its "Negroid" elements, and perhaps that's as it should be.

It's also a missed opportunity: one of the most interesting facets of the growing popularity of black metal with young music nerds outside the headbanger spectrum (who a less charitable commentator might call "hipsters") is the whole-hearted embrace of a band whose politics are essentially neo-Nazi. It speaks to both the decoupling of art from context in the era of streaming and file-sharing, as well as the non-committal political agnosticism of the typical hipster new Burzum fan in 2013. But Aites and Ewell pass over all of this without comment.

But they don't entirely miss the opportunity to comment on black metal going respectable, in much the same fashion as modern art taking its place in stodgy museums. A substory of the film concerns a local artist doing a black metal-themed showing in the former location of Helvete (Euronymous' record shop, Norwegian for "hell"). Speaking as someone who typically rolls his eyes at true guardians of metal who doggedly insist that anything outside the Von-Sarcofago-Darkthrone axis is false, I can still only describe this tableau as hideously embarassing. It reaches a climax when Fenriz himself visits the gallery, looking as bewildered and uncomfortable as humanly possible when confronted with the awkward spectacle of his younger days. It's a scene worthy of The Office.

In the end, Until the Light Takes Us is basically a treat for the fans. Whether they want to worship at the altar of Varg or pillory him will depend on the viewer. I suspect the filmmakers were aiming a bit higher than this, but the last word on the scandalous heyday of black metal this is not. And it's hard not to think that such a definitive account will never emerge, for the simple reason that Euronymous, one of its most central actors, isn't here to provide his version of the story.

Endnote: a much more revealing and interesting depiction of the genre is provided by the YouTube documentary "One Man Metal", which profiles three modern descendents of Burzum: Xasthur, Leviathan, and Striborg. I thoroughly enjoyed this doc for its resistance to hoary Norway worship, and for its shockingly intimate portraits of the three artists.

The sight of Malefic hanging out on a park bench wearing a backwards LA Kings hat (!) no doubt rustled many a metalhead's jimmies, and would certainly be decried in the strongest possible terms by the teenage incarnations of Euronymous and Count Grishnackh—but after seeing the stark, intense isolation of his lifestyle, it's tough to say that the hateful, misanthropic streak in his music isn't for real. After all, even Burzum had friends.

The people who grinned themselves to death: The Comedy (2012).

The Comedy was reportedly shot in 15 days, using only an 18-20 page treatment, with the lion's share of the film emerging from improvisation. This is not exactly surprising, given the players involved, but it's still impressive, because every instant of The Comedy feels perfectly controlled. This isn't an aimless indie curiosity like The Brown Bunny or Gerry; even though it's a film without much in the way of dramatic conflict or rising action, it still has a laser-beam sense of focus, and never wastes a single second.

The Comedy is the "story" of Swanson, an aging, terminally jaded Williamsburg hipster facing the imminent death of his wealthy father. Swanson passes his time lounging on his boat, taking jobs he doesn't need, and engaging in endless competition with his "friends" to see who is the most disaffected. (The scare quotes are practically mandatory here, as saying this film features a story or friendship would be simply inaccurate, like saying it's a documentary about women in Afghanistan.)

In some ways, the film that The Comedy most reminds me of is Man Bites Dog, a similarly warped character study that also mixed moments of jet-black humor with grotesque sociopathy. The only thing missing is Man Bites Dog's startling bursts of violence, but The Comedy is no less brutal for their absence. Ironically (ironically), Ben, the serial killer protagonist of Man Bites Dog, ends up being much more likeable than Swanson.

At times, The Comedy also reminded me of the excellent Martha Marcy May Marlene, as both films drift leisurely through a series of uncomfortable moments that gradually cohere into a profile of a deeply damaged person. They're also both anchored by an astonishing central performance.

The role of Swanson was tailored for Heidecker by director Rick Alverson, who thought the way that Heidecker exploited "awkwardness" with comedic partner-in-crime Eric Wareheim (also in the film) would perfectly suit the character of Swanson. Many critical responses to the film have focused on the idea that Heidecker is somehow skewering his own demographic, but I think a crucial point is missed here. 

The M.O. of Heidecker and Wareheim's comedy (both on Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! and their even-better prior offering, Tom Goes To the Mayor) is absurdity. One of the best recurring sketches on Tim and Eric is the saga of Carol, a lonely secretary (Wareheim) who is hopelessly in love with her ludicrously callous boss (Heidecker). Carol's desperate, unrequited love and her boss's casual cruelty are both rendered in the most exaggerated possible terms. 

Bathos is a key element of the show, as exalted sentiments and emotional rawness always arrive in the most ridiculous manner possible (often during advertisements and infomercials). But Tim & Eric is never purely about mocking its characters, no matter how pathetic they are: a figure like Dr. Steve Brule remains stubbornly lovable, partly because of what a screw-up he is.

The Comedy is different. Swanson's sensibility is pure schadenfreude, verging on sociopathy, and while his jaded, vacuous self-absorption may seem exaggerated, it's really not. Nothing that happens in the film seems beyond the pale, or enters into the realm of surreality where Tim and Eric takes place. It's all painfully real, and that's what it makes it so effectively off-putting.

There's a great quote from the blogger Bike Snob NYC (an early adopter when it comes to mocking hipsters) that has stuck with me. In response to a Craigslist "missed connections" posting by a Williamsburg aesthete, he wrote:

You know, I'm not one of these people who whines about the gentrification of New York City, and I suspect that many of those who do complain about it weren't around to experience the theft, violence, and urine first-hand. (Well, the urine's still around, so you can sample that all you want.) That said, there is a price to pay for a better quality of life, and that price comes in the form of giddy, puckish, whimsical, kite-flying dandies like you. Tragically, now that the sharp corners have been padded and the electrical outlets have been child-proofed, Brooklyn has become a giant romper room for latent adolescents who are free to traipse about at all hours unmolested. So I find myself conflicted. I don't want another crime wave, yet I do want one to come crashing down on you like a tsunami on a big wave surfer.

Such is the experience of watching Swanson; you're constantly waiting for somebody to kick his ass. But there is also real pathos in The Comedy, albeit of a very muted kind: a moment of tenderness between Swanson and his sister-in-law, or (spoiler alert) the film's final scene, a genuinely warm vignette of Swanson frolicking with a little boy on the beach. 

It's a credit to Alverson that he includes these scenes, allowing them to complicate the central character—even if only slightly. It makes the film more than just a screed about the vacuousness of the shopworn hipster archetype, and it certainly separates it from the day-glo, public-access nightmare of Tim and Eric.

But it's Heidecker, the connoisseur of the absurd, who really makes this film. His performance here is a revelation: there are elements of his other characters, but Swanson is his own man, without precedent or ancestor. And while there's none of Tim and Eric's funhouse exaggeration to blunt the character's sharp edges, there's also a profound sense of loss lying just behind his aloof, stubbly mask. 

Swanson is a kind of inverted Patrick Bateman: where the American Psycho antihero was a psychopath passing himself off as human, Swanson is a human being impersonating a perfectly emotionless observer, assuming an archly ironic stance towards all of existence. He treats the world like a playground for his own amusement, but nothing that he does (save perhaps playing in the surf at the end) is ever actually fun. It's a haunting, tour de force performance.

The Comedy also feels like a requiem for a moment that's already passing away. As a figure of widespread cultural disdain, the ironic hipster is beginning to be supplanted by newer, decidedly un-ironic characters: the hysterical Tumblr blogger, the "brony", the Men's Rights Activist. The best proof that irony as a reigning mode is passing away is how much attention is being paid to it—and after The Comedy, it's hard to imagine that there's even much left to say.