FILM... & MUSIC: Kurt Cobain - Montage of Heck

Kurt Cobain is the 90s rock idol.  If you want to make people think ‘The 1990’s’, a picture of Kurt Cobain will do nicely.  (The Gallagher brothers?  Are you serious?)

Montage Of Heck is a documentary that attempts to make the last of the great dead rock icons a human being.  As well as concert footage of Kurt Cobain being a live rock icon, we see home footage of him messing about with his wife and baby and hear him doing mundane things like answering the phone. 

It is definitely a documentary about Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana is covered as the most famous and successful way Kurt Cobain chose to express himself.  Equal importance is given to his journals and to a lesser extent his artwork.  Kris Novoselic is interviewed, but significantly as Kurt’s best friend, not the bass player of Nirvana.  Dave Grohl only appears in archive footage, and forget the previous drummers, personnel, etc.  If you want to learn about the history of the band this isn’t that story – a lot of it just happens to overlap.  It is expected of you as a viewer that you’ll know at least the famous hits already, as most of the songs in the film are represented either by demos, live footage or ‘reworkings’ (a nursery-mobile version of ‘All Apologies’ soundtracks baby films of Kurt, and a 'Carmina Burana'-style choir version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ plays over the original video).  All of this is very obviously in danger of drifting into alienating, Just For The Fans territory, but is also a way of making the point that this is not a rock doc.  In fact, taking away the familiar music serves as a way of taking it back from the audience and making it about Kurt again.

Of course the film fails in demythologising Cobain (the trailer reiterates the icon, let alone the film).  It doesn't really bother trying, because let's face it - the man is a cultural icon and that's a fact, like it or not.  I mean, why would we want to watch home videos of someone who wasn’t famous?  The fact that someone has gone to the trouble of putting animation to a tape of him answering the phone is instead testament to the fact that he is still entirely culturally significant.  More than 20 years after his death, it’s not uncommon to see people wearing Nirvana t-shirts and hoodies… In Utero got the Super Duper The Money Will Roll Right In Deluxe Edition treatment just last year and I’m sure it did very well…  The fame that ruined him has stayed almost as strong, long after the man has died.  It’s unlikely he will fade into obscurity, even if the music does.

What Montage Of Heck does achieve is creating a celebration of the man and explain who Kurt Cobain was when the media wasn’t around.  It's about putting some flesh and soul on the cult cardboard cutout Dead Rock Star (registered trademark, patent applied for).  He was someone who thought being a rock star was ‘the answer’.  He then unexpectedly became the biggest rockstar in the world, and maybe hadn’t realised in advance how much privacy and freedom he would lose in return.  He looks much, much happier in his home videos, dicking around with the wife he obviously loved, than the footage of interviews where his face says ‘not another, another fucking interview’.  Quite often he’s hiding his face so you can’t even tell that much. The quotes from his journals have to be taken with a pinch of salt, because everyone self-dramatizes in their diaries.  But bearing that in mind, they are still bitter about the same themes – fame and its related problems, heroin addiction and the stomach pains he seems to have almost constantly felt.

The fact is, he was a funny, talented, troubled guy who and frankly didn’t need all the shit that fame brought him – his life becoming a story consumed by the media, who sold it to us (and we bought it willingly), the easily gotten heroin and all the rest of it.  The film ends with a caption saying that Kurt took his own life one month later.  At the time, my reaction was that it was abrupt, and disappointment that they weren’t going to analyse his suicide in more depth.  And then, the other day I realised why I was slightly disturbed by my reaction – almost disgusted.  In a film which shows a man’s personal home videos and recordings, including those of him as a child, I still wanted more…  I literally wanted blood.  The whole film is scattered with things never intended to be seen by anyone outside of the the Cobains’ circle of family and friends; Kurt’s journals were a highly personal stream of consciousness which for all we know he would have been embarrassed about anyone else reading.  And I’m there consuming his private life as entertainment, and wanting more even after so much has been given. 

Intentionally or not, this film reminds the audience of the part they played in his death.  He gave as much as he could, and his audience always wanted more.  And he felt he couldn’t give anything anymore.  So he stopped.

BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.