on metal

Last week I visited France on vacation (3 days in enchanted Paris, 4 in haunted Normandy), but I really want to talk about Metallica.

France is such an intense sensory experience: everything is so damn beautiful, and the butter is so damn creamy (and well worth breaking my veganism for), and I left feeling both very full and strangely dissatisfied, like I had missed something vital. I just wanted to breathe in all of Paris. I just wanted to tattoo Normandy’s fairytale half-timbered houses, the twisted cobblestone streets, the treacherous hedgerows and the ghostly bloodied beaches onto the backs of my eyeballs. But the damning thing about being a visitor is that, no matter how hard you want to consume the beauty of these foreign places, they are just too much of exactly that: foreign. I think you really need to be a local for some beloved place to satisfyingly seep into your bones.

There is too much there, in that trip, for me to sum up in one simple statement. So I’ll just talk about Metallica instead.

The 8.5-hour plane ride home, which I was sort of dreading (I have this weird thing about plane food, which I can’t eat, so I mostly subsist off of dried fruit and chocolate, which is great in small doses but not so much if you are expecting it to sustain you for a full day), turned out to be SO great. I experienced so many cultural revelations: for one, I started and finished Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel, Landline, which is less a testament to my speed reading skills and more evidence of Rainbow’s incontestable genius. Seriously, I wish she were my best friend.

Then I was left with a weird amount of time, and there were no good TV choices, and I was feeling intellectually and culturally curious. So I lept into Metallica Through the Never.

I say "intellectually and culturally curious,” because this is how I genuinely feel about exploring metal, and Metallica in particular. Throughout my nearly-10-year love affair with punk music and its many offspring, I’ve never been able to puncture metal’s steel armor, never been able to sink into those overly-testosterone’d power chords and industrial-strength, teeth-chattering basslines in the way I could with other very loud, very un-lovely musical genres. But I’ve always really wanted to understand metal. Not just understand it, though, but like it. I wanted to not feel like a poser in my vintage Iron Maiden T-shirt, which I nevertheless wear a lot because it’s super badass, but which has always made me feel sort of guilty because if I’ve learned anything from punk music, it’s that the posers and the diehards are separated by one major thing: the former are in it for the fashion; the latter are defiantly not.

So I went into this movie with an open mind, open heart, open ears.  With nonjudgmental immersion. With unconditional curiosity.

I don’t really know how to best explain the mindfuck that is Through the Never, so I will defer here to Wikipedia: “Metallica Through the Never is a 2013 American IMAX thriller concert film featuring the American heavy metal band Metallica…the feature follows young Trip’s (Dane DeHaan) surreal adventure during an urgent mission he is sent out on, sewn together with concert footage from a set of concerts Metallica held in Vancouver and Edmonton, August 2012.”

IMAX thriller! Heavy metal! Urgent missions! Metallica! Nothing more American than that. Iffy grammar aside, I appreciate Wikipedia’s apt summation of the film, which is, indeed, equal parts concert footage and surreal horror film. The footage and the drama unfold in parallel, with the young roadie Trip (the dreamy Dane DeHaan, who, to be honest, was a major reason for my watching the movie in the first place) being the sole uniting factor between the threads.

Verdict? I am in total awe of Metallica’s musical skill and bravado, and also this coterie of four middle-aged men’s ability to chug through a fast and tight 90-minute set better than people half their age. I understand why they are one of America’s treasures. I understand the success of their decades-long career, their open-arms embrace by both the mainstream and the cultish, the wholehearted recognition of their hero status even by non-metal fans. And I am proud to say that I found myself headbanging-lite (because there is only so much room on an airplane).

But I was also completely, totally horrified. The stage effects were the gnarliest, most intricate, least punkest carnival of Tesla coils and machine-gun spray and all manner of fiery danger imaginable. The narrative, too, was gorgeously shot – the setting, a dark, nameless, wet city, brought to mind the velvety gloom of a Romantic oil painting – but it was shockingly violent. Which is saying something, because who among us 21^st-century media consumers can rightfully claim shock at violence? Maybe it was because of my fragile constitution, compromised as it was by the altitude and the recycled stale air, but the violence was actually sort of nauseating, made all the more disturbing by the relentless soundtrack and Dane DeHaan’s sleepy-eyed perfection and those gorgeous Gothic shades. 

But being disturbed is never reason enough to stop me watching something. I actually couldn’t pull myself away.    

I wouldn’t recommend Metallica Through the Never to the faint of heart. I actually wouldn’t recommend it to too many of the discerning hearts that I know. But I just spent a week in France and this movie is what’s sticking with me - for good or for ill.