Olaug Nilssen’s novel Få Meg På, For Faen, (“Turn Me On, Dammit”) is about three frustrated women of different ages who dream of better things for themselves, beyond their lonely small-town lives. Alma, the heroine of the movie, is the protagonist of the book’s second story, and the one that gave the novel the most notoriety. “The book is about people who want to be visible to the people around them, to be acknowledged,” says writer/director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen. “Their stories might seem small-scale, but everything that happens is very important to them. The characters seemed very real to me and I liked the sense of humor in the writing. The narrative also jumps a lot in time and space and between reality and fantasy; you never really know where you are. All these things made me want to turn it into a film.”
While Nilssen herself has incorporated all three stories into a theatrical multiplot version (a critic wrote that Alma was “the horniest girl seen in the theatre since Rebecca West in Henrik Ibsen’s 1886 Rosmersholm”), Systad Jacobsen decided to focus on Alma: “Alma’s story was so powerful that it was screaming for attention, so I finally decided: ‘let her be the Queen.’” (The other characters in the book were Sara and Ingrid’s big sister Maria and their mother, who was reduced to the off-screen voice of Olaug Nilssen.) Making Alma the central character gave Systad Jacobsen the freedom to expand on characters like Sara and phone sex operator Stig (who only existed in the novel as an item on a phone bill), and invent new ones, like Sara’s boyfriend Kjartan, and the nosy next door neighbor Magda. There were certain things that were in the book that were impossible to film or too intense to dramatize. “The book is more explicit because we’re inside Alma’s head all the time,” Systad Jacobsen says.
Certainly what makes TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! unique is its portrayal of a young woman’s sexuality, a topic that has never previously been ventured on film in such a frank way, either by a male or a female director, in puritanical America or even in supposedly sexually uninhibited Europe. While there are umpteen cinematic tales of frustrated boys desperate to shed their virginity, and pop culture is awash in highly sexualized images of very young girls, the frank depiction of an ordinary 15-year-old girl’s lust is one of our greatest societal taboos. Gazing at a blossoming teenage girl’s exterior is a lot less problematic than contemplating her inner life, and the sensual thoughts that might be teeming there.
“It’s a difficult matter to go into,” says Systad Jacobsen. “Probably people don’t know how to do it because the world is so confused and screwed up about it. I think it’s quite complex and distorted by pop culture and the way women are projecting their sexuality—teasing to sell records, music, advertising and fashion. You should offer your body to the world, but you should also want to be treated like the Virgin Mary. By making this film I wanted to say, ‘This is how it is, this is normal.’” Despite the squeamishness about the topic, the film has been anything but controversial, and has received a favorable response internationally from people of all ages. “Many people seem sort of thankful for it,” says Systad Jacobsen, “some young people feel like it’s a coded message for them, that it’s only for them and their generation: and older people have this motherly feeling towards Alma and wish that something like this had existed when they were young.”
Systad Jacobsen didn’t experience anything like Alma’s precocious sexuality directly—“I was more of a late bloomer!”—but her identification with the character was very strong. “I remember very well what it was like to be a teenager,” she says, “how important everything seemed, all the emotions and experiences I had for the first time, how powerful they were, and how I wanted and needed everything to happen immediately. It’s a very tempestuous time, when things that may seem minor to older people can feel like a matter of life and death for a teenager. People are often nostalgic about their youth, but it can be very overwhelming to go through, and I think that this setting creates an opportunity for a lot of drama as well as comedy.”
While she was writing the script, Systad Jacobsen was working on a feature documentary, SCENES FROM A FRIENDSHIP, about two buddies who had known each since they were teenagers and were figuring out how to still stay friends while growing up and changing. “The really cool thing about that film for me was studying how people communicate with each other, what they say and don’t say, and while you’re observing them you are understanding something that isn’t being said. I tried to use many of these things while writing the dialogue for TURN ME ON, DAMMIT!
Getting back to its original source in the book, an argument can be made that Alma’s real problem isn’t that she can’t have sex, but a more general frustration with being perceived as different in a narrow-minded provincial town. While Artur’s poke is the literal catalyst to her story, the real issue is that there is something awry about Alma that everyone can sense. “She gets the feeling everybody in that town has to be alike and like the same things,” says Bergsholm. “Don’t be weird. There’s no room for being weird.” Says Systad Jacobsen: “I think you should be allowed to be different,” says Systad Jacobsen. “You should always stand up for who you are and not let anyone else tell you who you should be.”
Perhaps the heart of the movie is that it isn’t so much about who Alma is but about where Alma is. All she needs to shed her aching loneliness and confusion is to get to a big city, find a hug and hear the words “there’s nothing wrong with you.” Seen from that perspective, the title TURN ME ON, DAMMIT! isn’t Alma’s demand for sexual stimulation, but rather her cry to be rescued from the constricted place that is squeezing the life out of her. “There’s a big world out there beyond the beautiful but boring fjords and mountains,” says Systad Jacobsen, “and one day, Alma is going to get on with her adult life and explore it.”
