Satan Rides the Blog

For my last research based blog, I have decided to tackle as my main subject of discussion, the documentary Satan Rides the Media by Torstein Grude. It focuses on the burning of the Asane and Fantoft churches, the murder of Oystein Aarseth, and the proceeding of the criminal case around Varg Vikernes, and his interaction with the Norwegian press.

Even for someone who has done a lot of reading on the Varg case (me), I found it to be a very interesting documentary that raised a number of interesting points, the bulk of which I will discuss here (I have to save something for my essay, don't I?).

The general narrative of the documentary follows the investigation that followed a journalist, Finn Bjørn Tønder's meeting with Varg Vikernes, which had been organized by two junior reporters who had found him, and developed a poorly written, and ultimately unpublished article about his extremist views and interest in the occult and criminal actions directed against Christianity. Finn Bjørn Tønder asked Varg more questions, which revealed the musician had intimate knowledge of both the arson and murder at Lillehammer which indicated Vikernes was at least partly responsible for the crimes. Bjørn Tønder claims that his enquiries to determine the truth of Varg's claims led to police who had also been quietly investigating the case to pounce on Varg and leave the finalisation of their evidence collecting until later. Because of this, Varg still blames Finn Bjørn Tønder for leaking his name and leading to an arrest that he still claims was unfounded and a miscarriage of justice.

Secondly, the documentary focuses on the way the Norwegian media as a whole interacted with the case. Understandably, the arsons, murders and Satanic views expressed by black metal musicians during the early 1990's caused a flurry of reports to emerge, and as the media developed further into a frenzy, so too did the public. People did not know which church would be next, with youth could become a Satanic murderer, when this terror would cease. Quite importantly, the documentary raises the point that had this media storm not ensued, likely the black metal movement would not have become so prominent, nor would have the large number of copy-cat arsons that occurred have become such a widespread problem. Indeed, if anything, Varg now admits to have enjoyed the attention as he admits in interviews in Lords of Chaos, stating that anything that helped undermine Christianity's authority was a good thing. As such, he sees his persecution by the media in almost a martyr-like role, comparing himself to the Nordic chieftain whose life was suffering for the betterment of his people. On the other hand, as Kahn-Harris argues, (man, I love that article), the mass attention on the black metal scene almost caused it to destroy itself through ever-increasingly transgressive behaviour without the stability of mundanity.

A particularly interesting moment in the documentary arrives when Varg attempts to explain his side of the Oystein Aarseth murder, at which point the footage fades out and disappears, leaving the viewer with only a half-told story, from which only negative inferences about Vikernes's character can be made. It would be rediculous of me to try and argue in his defense given how much I know about his crazy ideas, but it does clearly display the capacity of even seemingly informative media texts to influence their own reading through editing and careful display of footage. This is particularly relevant to the course I feel, because even though has little to do with new media, the presence of media of any form does provide some sort of launching point for my own discussion.

Ironically, from my own reading and understanding, if anything, new media has done the opposite for black metal that the news media did in the early 1990's. Whereas the news media latched onto the most violent aspects of black metal and brought out so much transgressive behaviour it almost collapsed, the new media, especially the internet, provides a vibrant ground for development and discussion of all sorts of extreme metal and ideas without going outside of the safe boundaries of the scene. As such, with new media at its side, black metal, and indeed all of extreme metal, is even more safely self-sustaining than ever.