>>PREVIEW
METAL: A HEADBANGER’S JOURNEY
FEATURING
Directed by Sam Dunn, Scot McFayden and Jessica Joy Wise
Saturday, October 1
Plaza Theatre
People in this world can be divided into two categories – those who bang their heads whenever they hear the riff to Black Sabbath’s "Paranoid" and those who think the first kind of people should cut their hair and bathe more often.
For more than 30 years, heavy metal fans have been disparaged for their fashion choices (denim, leather and Iron Maiden Ts worn without precious irony) and worship of all that is gnarly. Yet outsiders have rarely had the opportunity to see the richness of the global musical netherworld that’s been forged by these children of the grave. What will it take to earn the metalhead some respect?
Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey is a most excellent start. Offering a guided tour through metal’s storied but largely ignored history, the new Canadian doc draws from interviews with the genre’s godheads (Tony Iommi, Alice Cooper, Lemmy) and contemporary extremists (Lamb of God, Slipknot and some hilariously evil Norwegian black metallers). It serves as both an insightful exercise in cultural anthropology and an exhilarating tribute to rock’s dark side.
Serving as our metal ambassador is Sam Dunn, an anthropologist and unreformed headbanger from Victoria, B.C. who had long wanted to reconcile his academic interests with his adoration of Iron Maiden. Helping his music-supervisor friend Scot McFayden find heavy songs for Ginger Snaps and FUBAR in the late ’90s got the two of them thinking about the possibilities. As Dunn explains in a recent interview alongside McFayden, he was originally interested in a book project.
"There were books like Robert Walser’s Running With the Devil but no one had done a comprehensive history," says Dunn. "The reason I was particularly interested at that time was because of nu-metal. I wasn’t necessarily a fan of that music, though I thought Slipknot was intriguing because it sounded like eight death metal bands having a wrestling match. But it did get me thinking about it within the scope of the history. This music is changing and evolving and always has been."
McFayden was more enthusiastic about the idea of a doc, even though he still had much to learn. "Sam took me to see Sepultura and I was pretty amazed. There was so much space in front of the stage," he recalls. "I thought, ‘This is great, I’ll just stand here.’ Then they launched into their set and someone tried to launch off of my back. I had no idea why. I had the guy on the ground, screaming, ‘What are you doing?’"
"Scotty fucking suplexes the guy on a moshpit floor," says Dunn, laughing. "I turned around and was like, ‘Oh no.’ I just shook my head, thinking, ‘This is gonna be a long road.’"
And so it was, although that had less to do with the subject than getting financing for a project by three neophyte filmmakers (Dunn and McFayden enlisted Jessica Joy Wise as a fellow writer, director and producer). "Because it was such a mammoth task, there was doubt we could do it," says Dunn.
"People would ask, ‘How’re you gonna do that in two hours?’" says McFayden. "I thought, ‘I dunno, but we gotta start somehow.’"
While Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey earnestly investigates issues like gender, censorship, religion and violence in metal, it only rarely comes off as an academic treatise. One reason is Dunn’s unabashed fandom. He’s clearly thrilled to meet heroes like Bruce Dickinson. Troll-sized metal legend Ronnie James Dio even gives Dunn some love, a sight McFayden likens to "seeing Bilbo and Gandalf hugging."
The filmmakers could also count on metal’s own capacity for spectacle and silliness. "We did one edit where we tried to stay away from some of the obvious humour stuff," says McFayden. "Then we realized we needed it. Everyone makes fun of metalheads, but they can laugh at themselves. They love This is Spinal Tap, too."
"We had to figure out how much humour we could incorporate without alienating metal fans or excluding the non-metal fan by making it an insider’s story," says Dunn. "Creatively, that was the biggest challenge for us. Either naively or stubbornly, we knew we could make a movie that would appeal to both."
Despite the meatiness of such ambitions, the filmmakers never forget to convey the music’s sheer visceral power, an element fuelled in part by the tritone, the so-called "devil’s interval" that was banned in religious music and now allows metal’s purveyors to tap into primal human responses.
"What I learned from making this movie is the value of that visceral response, that rush you get when you hear that riff come in," says Dunn. "You don’t need to think about it and you shouldn’t because the power is in that musical moment. I learned how much that matters to people and how much it’s always mattered to me. It doesn’t make me want to sit down and write poetry but it certainly fucking makes me feel powerful."
"Why is the tritone evil?" asks McFayden. "Because it creates a physical response and people associated it with the devil because they were afraid of that response."
"It comes back to one reason why metal has been dismissed," says Dunn. "It doesn’t provide that template for how we should change the world and make it a better place. It doesn’t provide you with that Bob Dylan kind of direction."
But as McFayden says before cracking up, "It will teach you how to slay the dragon." |
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