This is a film about the trance of war and sex,
made by a woman who read about Vikings
and recognised the symptoms
Background
I made this film after reading the canonical thesis on the Berserker warriors
The Myths and Realities of the Viking Berserkr by Roderick Dale
I read it on a Tuesday in the kitchen
I read it the way other women get ready for a date
Carefully
I turned the phone face down
The fan turned overhead
Slow, like it was thinking about it
Which should have worried somebody
The light was coming through the fly screen in small squares
I locked the door that has never needed locking
I took off my earrings
Then I read start to finish
In one setting
When I finished
I put the book down
And said out loud to nobody
‘That’s me. Except for the killing’
I Am The Berserker
I would put on the animal persona
Not pretending to be a bear
That is what a costume is for
I was wearing the thing under the costume
The oldest thing I own
And the only thing I did not buy
That argument is the only armour I have ever worn
Then the heat arrives in my face
My body goes off
Like a car alarm nobody owns
The phone rang eleven times
Face down on the table
Buzzing like something trying to get out
I have the insight
I write it
I shoot it
I cut it
I upload it at three in the morning
With the hard drive clicking like an insect
And the render bar crawling across the room
Another peep show in art is finished
Beautiful Words Doing Unusual Things
The Berserker frenzy left a field of bodies
And they called it a gift from god
In this film, mine leaves one body
Still breathing
And they call it filth
The Berserkers were forgiven because he was useful
I take no ground
I protect no king
Nothing comes of it
That is the unforgivable part
Not that I go berserk
But that nothing comes of it
I am now tame enough to be considered polite
I have never hurt anyone with cruelty
I have hurt them by being somewhere
I was not supposed to be
And not coming back when called
Which is how holy things die
Rage With No Boundaries
Today, going berserk
Is synonymous with running amok
Or be completely out of control
You may have used the word recently
About a toddler in a supermarket
About the homeless person on the street corner
About the weather
About the price of something
Perhaps you said it
Without knowing whose crimes created the word
The Rapid Vibration Between Fear And Hope
The berserker was a man
who found a door out of his social self,
and battle was only the excuse the culture allowed him.
So the film’s move is not a costume change. It is an argument.
The nakedness is not the confession.
It is the armour
The armour is a self-dehumanisation argument,
and the argument is that nothing can be taken from me
that I have not already put on the table.
I have taken the tradition at its word and swapped the object
Not the enemy. The self.
Everything else in the tradition transfers intact,
and that is the discovery the script exists to make.
Full Script
Prologue – The Trance of War
Berserker (noun)
An elite squad of savage Viking shock troops
Active between 900 AD and 1100 AD in northern Europe
Berserker’s were monster adjacent
They were addicted to the ecstacy of inflicting violent death
They were feared for their sadistic savagery
Their behaviour later gave rise to the modern adjective ‘berserk’
which is defined as ‘furiously violent & out of control’
Berserker’s prayed to Odin, the Norse god of war
They believed Odin granted them the power
to take anything they wanted
It was a protection racket wearing a fur coat
Berserkers fought without armour
Only their heads and backs were covered with bear skins
They fought with a wild uncontrolled trance-like fury
while howling like animals and biting their shields
This dissociative trance state released their
most aggressive, destructive & sadistic impulses
Berserkers were placed at the front of the shield formation
The Berserkers would then enter a deliberate, cultivated trance-state
of battle madness called ‘Berserkergang’ (berserk rage)
They acheived their trance state with mushrooms and alcohol
as well as ritual chanting, sleep loss, religious zealotry & group hysteria
While in this dissociative state,
they lost conscious control of their actions
They also had no awareness of their surroundings
and killed without distinguishing friend from enemy
They also had reduced sensitivity to moral clarity
and the consequences of their actions
Violence lived inside them like a second heartbeat
Interestingly, after the battle, they experienced complete amnesia
They could not remember anything they had done
while in the disassociative trance-state
This allowed the Berserker’s to live in complete denial
of their worst character traits
Berserkergang was a socially sanctioned permission slip
It created a productive role in society for men who were inhuman
Deep in my mind, a long time ago
sex and war became entangled
But rage and lust are not the same appetite
They are the same voltage
routed through different permissions
I think I adopted the Berserker battle trance at birth
so I could defeat the enemy within
Act 1: The Trance of Sex
I feel like there would have been a great deal of sadness
in the eyes of the Berserkers after their battles
The kind you sometimes see in those who want to die
but life won’t let them
War and sex
are sensory indulgences
They are addictions
Altered thinking, disturbed time sense, loss of control,
perceptual distortion, dissolution of boundaries & hypersuggestibility
The same as every drug
Deliberation is replaced by automaticity
Forensic psychiatry calls this a state of ‘diminished responsibility’
The Berserker battle trance was a collective system
that was optimized for diminished responsibility
My trance was optimised for sex
A state of total absorption
with time and space disturbances
What results is a subtraction
and the first thing removed is the part of you that watches
The Berserker did not lose himself in his trance
He lost the man who watches him
It was a powerful method of removing
high-level, abstract self-awareness
The trance identity is fundamentally different
from the self that escaped
The result is more depraved engagements over time
and escalating usage patterns
Such patterns of escalation
are markers for a multitude of addictive mechanisms
The addict’s mood is altered
as she enters the dissociative trance
Ritual intensifies the trance
The measurable thing about her
is how completely she becomes lost in the trance
The trance removes the part of the mind
that narrates and judges ones actions
The body does not stop feeling
It stops feeling the thing that would make it stop
The amnesia increases proportionally
to the depavity of the act
The frenzy and the appetite are already filed together
but nobody says so out loud
Berserkergang put a premium on anger
and not merely anger, but homicidally violent anger
Of the negative emotions, anger alone is approach-motivated
It moves towards its object
That is the same motivational direction as sex
which is why the two feel alike from the inside
If anger in desire was pathological, it would be rare
It is not rare
This inequity creates a moral incongruence
It represents the gap
between what a person believes, and what they do
For instance
The war trance is measured by what is done
And the sex trance is measured by what is thought of it
Which is curious, because nobody has ever diagnosed a Berserker
by asking whether his mother approved
Epilogue – The Sex of War
In my mind,
sex and war were the same
Except with sex,
the enemy lives
Most of the time
War is a drug
The hardest thing about war is having to give it up
Because it is exhilarating
Soldiers become addicted to the paratellic dopamine spikes
It’s the same as sexual arousal or drug-induced ecstacy
Sebastian Junger / In My Time Of Dying
The Berserker’s fatal flaw was that they could not be aimed
They were poor at formation warfare
And they were inclined to kill anyone in their path, whether friend or foe
Berserkers would even kill each other while waiting for a battle to begin
In the end, the invincible Berserkers were not defeated
They were legislated out of existence
The Berserker warrior fury was reclassified as a threat to society
The Icelandic Christian Law of 1123 ruled that a man who goes berserk
would be charged with outlawry and be executed
By the twelfth century, the Berserkers had vanished from history
All that was left was a single word
And millions of people had to die for it to exist
Next time a headline says a person, a market or a crowd went berserk
Listen very carefully
You are hearing an eternal echo as it travels back in history
to a much more brutal time
Watch 231 BERSERKER — the film page, with poster, credits and key themes.