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.
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