Home Dark Planet: Visions of AmericaDark Planet: Visions of America (2005, Illuminati)

When one makes a documentary about a specific musical culture, the risk is always that the film will attempt to appeal to members of that culture exclusively, thus eliminating any chance of communicating with the outside world. The four genres discussed in Dark Planet - straightedge, skinhead, black metal and zealot - are extremely fortunate that this film takes an outsider view of outsider art. By doing so, it no longer attempts to explain what the art is but what changes it desires in the context of society at large; in this, the documentary explains our society through the viewpoint of its dissident music, and does not become some silly MTV-style marketing exploit of the music itself.

Each of the four sections begins by defining and exploring the genre, then gets some general mission-statement-type summaries from those familiar with it, and then forages among some of the issues raised before going to the wide-angle view with a "Sixty Degrees of..." section that attempts to anchor the major concepts of each genre in history. All of this is good practice, and the final touch is while a bit tedious to watch, an excellent reference tool for people who are not acquainted with the genres in question. Unlike many documentaries (yes, I'm thinking of that fat bearded guy) we do not hear much of the interviewers speaking. They let the interviewees field the questions as they may, and seem to be able to encourage them without sticking in a bunch of interrogative dialogue. This method contributes a smoothness to the production which makes it easily viewable.

Although visually impressive, the opening scene of this documentary misunderstands its audience: the people who are watching this are looking for an introduction to the ideas of these genres and their importance in the greater question of what our future as a culture will look like, and therefore, don't really need a music video. We get the point that the music is angry and standoffish from short clips. However, the spliced images cartwheel across the screen in a merriment of chaos and provide a grounding for the younger audiences, some of whom we assume are dumb enough to be duped into thinking this movie is simply a long music video with talk sequences. After this introduction, the film launches into its four parts and concludes within the final one, thus eliminating the cheesy talk show tendency to bring closure to things by mouthing some tediously inconclusive by way of inoffensive opinion.

The skinhead segment: are any non-racist skinheads fat, or intelligent? They have a guy in here who seems to be attempting to debunk the stereotype of Asians as intelligent, and then a series of fat losers who talk about how skinheadism was originally a working class movement centered around dub music from Jamaica. That moments later they claim that society has "always been racist," thus making it more likely that skinhead culture also had a racial origin, or that historically worker's movements have followed a similar pattern, had zero impact on the thinking of the soft, giggly, unstable types interviewed for this segment of the movie. I would have blown this off entirely; if you're going to present disturbing viewpoints, don't start out with the apologists, as not only will they confuse the issue, but by definition, they'll try to bend a distinct artform back into the mainstream fold. I skipped most of this portion after realizing that the "nice" skins were the same sort of losers who have made emo music get the reception a plague deserves worldwide. When they did move on to truly alienated, racist skins, they thankfully found some smart ones, and conducted an impressively non-judgmental interview. In this section, the filmmakers opted for an academic sensationalism instead of some kind of shock/judgment, and the result is that much more transparent in conveying the reasons this culture is alienated and what contrasting values it esposues. To be fair, it didn't make skinheads look like people with a solution. They're a protest tribe, as seen in this video, and as contrasted with those in other sections of the film, a reasonably effective one.

To this reviewer, the straightedge segment was almost totally redundant. Straightedge and skinheadism could both be seen as offshoots of hardcore, and it would be more interesting to see the conflict in hardcore between moralists (straightedge, emo) and postmoralists (skinheads, anarchists, ecoterrorists) than it is to look at a bunch of straightedgers carping it up for the camera. To no credit of their own, the people interviewed for this segment of the video managed to make themselves look like former partiers who fried a lobe or too and now, speaking slowly, and trying to find a new way, y'know. It might have been more effective to spend half of this segment showing drugs and their effects on some people, hence why one might choose to be a straightedger, than listen to the scene drama tumbling out of the mechanistic mouths of these people. Again, fat losers wandering around feeling sorry for themselves.

What defines the black metal segment are the interview clips with a highly literate fellow from a non-profit group for the analysis of culture. He represents the bridge between black metal and normalcy, and discusses succinctly some of the moral and psychological issues behind the choices made to embrace black metal as theory more than just another style of music. In this, the producers of the film did a great grace to black metal, because they tried to understand it as a functional artistic movement and communicate that not to the child "fans" of black metal, but to the adults who consider the place of all things artistic or philosophical in our society. While clearly the documentary would have had greater short term popularity had it attracted said audience, it would have also made itself irrelevant on the larger scale. Having someone from the world of adults who can offer sage and realistic commentary enhances this section a great deal. It does have its failings, however. The major shortage is that its interview subjects are primarily those who came after the black metal movement, and not those who were aware of its ideological motivation. Time is burned up with commentary from Noctuary, which makes no sense, as they are not a black metal band. Also, lengthy interview clips with some gent from Nachtmysticum expend a large amount of time on getting a few direct facts. Similarly, a fan named "Jason" who is interviewed gets in a few good basic summary questions, but then his articulation is wasted on probing around smaller aesthetic issues. What this section needs is an outline, and some kind of narrative voice that can guide it efficiently through the maze of ideas. As a result of this somewhat disorganized approach, the media buzzwords get too much time - Satanism and Racism - and very little energy is spent making clear the ideas for which it is worth using those taboo-breakers. Incongruously, some kid named Aaron Spell - ironically, almost surely a Jewish name - is interviewed for the achievement of (a) liking black metal and (b) getting drunk and robbing people at knife point. What the hell is being communicated here? On these points, the documentary loses sight of its goal and veers dangerously close to an erudite but still directionless Jerry Springer-esque revelation of extremity, but not motivation or ideology, which are closer to the two abstract topics of a documentary about possible future subcultures for the dying American social organism. What saves this section are the erudite commentaries from a highly literate fellow from a non-profit group and American band Averse Sefira, the latter being used sparsely from a seemingly lack of concise sound bites. For this kind of inspection of the black metal genre, the film is the best in its league, but inevitably, there is more that could have been done with the same resources. Perhaps what led these filmmakers astray was the absence of literate fans who understood what impelled the creation of this genre back in 1990 or so.

The position of genre inspected last is a coveted one, as it is the final option presented to the audience and thus, intentional or no, seems a concluding one. Darkplanet looks at the "zealot" movement, which consists of an extreme Christian version of a hybrid between skinheads and straightedgers. Whether intentionally or not, the zealots appear to be the only group in this film who have a chance of hell of success, and the reason is simple: they have a complete (albeit simple) philosophy, and they are committed to a course of action that goes beyond the music, which in this case isn't much more boring - if at all - than the grinding, derivative anthems of straightedge or post-1995 black metal. There are the obligatory interviews with people so brainwashed their eyes gleam and do not refocus during entire thirty-second clips (a bad sign) and forays into the world of missionary underground Christians who interact with the lost youth discarded by other subgenres (convincing). While many of these people come off as insane, and hearing one of them ramble through a historically-inaccurate deification of the Masada story was embarrassing, the lasting impression is that they are much more likely to endure as an organized entity than the image-conscious but directionless black metal, straightedge and skinhead movements. This may have been what the filmmakers intended, or they may be using this to remind others of what the stakes of this battle are, but in any case, it concludes the film powerfully with a motif of struggle and self-sacrifice.

On the whole, this video is competent and informative. It is not recommended for a "black metal fan"; such people want something that glorifies and repeats the symbols of black metal, where this is a more savvy contextual view that would be better shown to the parents and friends of someone immersing themselves in hardcore punk, straightedge, oi, grindcore, death metal, black metal, emo, metalcore, Christian rock, or the like. This documentary has enough content and literate presentation to fit in with the content on the History channel or PBS, and while that may seem like a kiss of death to those who eschew such things, to the more experienced it is a sign that someone has finally taken these genres seriously and attempted to explain them to other people not as antagonisms of this culture, but as its attempt to heal itself by producing a better future option from within.

August 23, 2005


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