WHATEVEREST: A short film based on the inspiration for Todd Terje’s Inspector Norse

Todd Terje’s 2012 monster jam “Inspector Norse,” Director Kristoffer Borgli has released the full 15 minute short film titled, “Whateverest.”

Winner of AFI Fest’s Jury Award last year, “Whateverest” is the story of a young failed musician named Marius Solem Johansen, who in order to care for his ailed father never leaves home and idles away his days alone producing dance videos and “drug recipes” which he then posts on YouTube.

According to the film (and Terje, who makes an appearance in the film early on) Johansen’s empassioned dancing and questionable choice of posting videos of himself making drugs out of household cleansers (one of which he calls the “Inspector Norse Special”) caught Terje’s attention and inspired him to write what was arguably last year’s biggest dance tune.

The entire thing has now been debunked and everyone involved in the making has stated that it was a “mockumentary.” Although it’s fairly convincing, early on in conversation with a friend who wanted very badly for it to be a real documentary I mentioned that this was obviously a ruse because no videos of Inspector Norse exist before the release of the track and no other videos of Johansen exist to back up the narrative.

The amazing thing about it though is that real or not, it’s still terribly, beautifully, heartbreaking tragicomic brilliance and is an expression of Terje’s particularly odd sense of humor. The driving concept of “Whateverest” is THE Whateverest itself, this notion that Johansen introduces at the beginning of the film which is the mountain of mournful regret and existential angst we all experience when we contemplate all the things we did and didn’t do. And by extension the way in which dancing is perhaps our only and greatest recourse in the face of the Whateverests of our lives.

WHATEVEREST from Kristoffer Borgli on Vimeo.