Look at the picture this way, and then look at it again.
It’s impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot. Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts. A moment later everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed. But right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word. Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves. Everyone in the class is a potential sinner. The uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defiled. Just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher: they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her.
The photo is stuck in this moment, in the uncertainty. It comprises us, compresses us, cranks up the pressure and the temperature. The whole image, this place, is a witches’ Sabbath for teenagers.
In this moment there’s hope. There’s hope for transformation and magic. It’s possible to interpret class photos differently. Maybe all of Class 2B, and every student from all Norwegian class photos, are actually standing there hating. Maybe we all hate the photographer, the angelic blue background, and the Christian Democratic People’s Party’s first government, and the royal family and the school nurse and the teachers and the charismatic pastors and the laughing gospel choir and God, and What Would Jesus Do and the rhythm and the tempo and the vocals and the consonants in that outdated creed.
And who am I? I’m the one honking outside reality, disrupting and cursing. I’m the one who flares up like a shadow behind others, threatening to paint over and darken the whole picture in misanthropic black. Blacking out the images is always a possibility, even though we usually choose the concealer and the powder when we want to make ourselves invisible. I’m the other option, the smouldering dome, the black steam from the occult fires of hatred. I am Girls hating through centuries, THE END.
Or maybe it’s not THE END.
The most important thing about magic is obviously that it never ends. What’s most important about magic is to create meeting places, so that later, others can stretch further into this artistic space. The desire to go there never ceases. This need to change, translate, transgress, transcend, smudge, it’s never satisfied. We never stop hating. Hatred and hope don’t change. Hatred and hope will continue to chime together and curse the world with its clearly articulated h-sounds.
The film script is finished, but the writing of the film continues anyway. I never stop writing. Writing happens in the margins; the future bonus material is written there. The word END, or FIN, or SLUTT in Norwegian, in white on a black screen, has always just meant YOU’RE WELCOME. It just means that the screen goes blank, that the film’s images are swapped for an impenetrable black slate, a mysterious blank sheet which you yourself can continue writing on, or seep into. That’s why I like films better than books: they end in black instead of white. The book’s last blank pages always look like walking into a white cloud, the paper fibres are illusory optimism and total absorption, as if all the characters that were ever written into a book are angels in the sky.
The film’s ending, as I originally wrote it, is my tribute to the fade to black, to transcendence in the dark as an alternative to the light. When the girls enter the black orifice of the writing lodge, it’s me wanting to tamper with all the white, with the white sheet, the white silence and the white parish centres. I want to open up the Southern towns and reveal the darkness in there. This darkness should be both frightening and sensual, as if the South put two fingers inside its own body, pleasuring itself. In 1997, when I walk into an auditorium during a prayer meeting by mistake, the pastor is preaching about the dangers of tampering with yourself. To tamper: to finger, to pull at, destroy, manipulate. Smudging the Christian soul. A selfish sin, like the first text I hand my writing tutor, according to him, before I learn from the outside, with insight. Selfish, alienating and private, he says. Pitiful and primitive.
I never come to understand from the outside, with insight. But I understand that art can tamper with itself, with its own past, its own history, and create new bonds and new feelings. Now, after the film is finished, I think I can go further than when I wrote it. I dream of one last image in the film. This isn’t an image I want to write into
