Kurt and Courtney and Nick
Film review, 2/17/99
Kurt and Courtney
(1998, dir. Nick Broomfield)
Hype!
(1995, dir. Doug Pray)
Nirvana: Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
(1994, various directors)
By my calendar watch, we’re only seven weeks from what’s sure to be another exercise in media excess–the fifth anniversary of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain’s suicide.
No, I don’t think Cobain was really murdered. The various conspiracy theories are too pat, too dependent on ignoring facts of the case that don’t fit the theorists’ neat little conceptions.
Besides, nobody had anything to gain from Cobain’s death, except the conspiracy theorists. Even if he were planning to quit music and leave the admitted publicity-addict Courtney Love, she would’ve gotten as much (and possibly more useful) ink as Cobain’s ex as she did as his widow.
Yet the theories continue to find an audience, among Cobain fans who still don’t want to believe their troubled idol could possibly have wanted to die.
Yet the clues are everywhere in his songs and performances. He really was a sensitive soul who sought to acquire the virtual invincability of a rocker (NOT of a “rock star”–while his music was some of the most accessible U.S. punk ever made, he never wanted what he considered the corrupt rock-star lifestyle).
But the assorted stresses of suddenly becoming a generation’s icon (and the locus of a multimillion dollar business) proved too much for him.
What survives are his music, his haunting image, and the many hangers-on and media vultures still trying to cash in, literally or figuratively, on his story.
One of the latter, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, was thwarted in his attempt to make a movie about the Cobain tragedy; neither Love nor the surviving Nirvana members would talk to him or permit the use of Nirvana’s music or video footage. Instead, Kurt and Courtney is the personal story of Broomfield’s failure to make the film he’d wanted to make. He travels around Seattle, Aberdeen, Portland, and L.A. He interviews a few of the couple’s friends and relatives, none of whom had anything bad to say about the self-deprecating Kurt or anything good to say about the monomaniacally ambitious Courtney.
A large bulk of the film’s time is spent on the professional Courtney-bashers who’ve shown up regularly in magazine stories, talk shows, and Internet newsgroups–Courtney’s very estranged father Hank Harrison, conspiracy theorist Tom Grant, and washed-up early Seattle punker Eldon “El Duce” Hoke. Hoke, whose career (such as it was) was predicated on calculated noteriety, claimed Love had offered to pay him to kill Cobain but he’d turned down the offer. Hoke died days after Broomfield filmed him; he was hit by a train while stoned out of his gourd. (He reportedly told friends he’d made up the hit-man story in a scheme to get his own name back in infamy.)
Broomfield clearly wants to contrast the ill fate of the tender, ulcerous Cobain with Love’s final re-creation of herself as a total Hollywood celebrity. But I couldn’t help seeing a more telling comparison between Cobain and Hoke. Both were self-styled bad boys; both eventually died indirectly from their drug addictions. But Hoke, bereft of much talent or imagination, sought merely to push the offensiveness envelope, and ended up a long term burnout case, living out his existence on L.A.’s far outskirts. Cobain beautifully married punk noise and pop immediacy, art and entertainment, and (as can be seen in the compilation video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!) burned out much more quickly.
Meanwhile, the definitive videocassette document of Nirvana’s era remains Doug Pray’s Hype! It contains very little Nirvana material, but puts the band in the context of its time and place better than star-obsessed folks like Broomfield ever could.
