Documenting Kurt Cobain, Part 3: The Review

When I started writing this series of four posts on the new Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, I made a mental note that beginning such an effort without yet having seen the film itself could be risky.  I had always intended to include a standard review as one of the four posts, and then to conclude with another more “scholarly” commentary after having seen what the director, Brett Morgen, had actually produced.  Though the two-week delay in resuming these final posts is simply a matter of logistics—I didn’t have time to sit down and watch the entire film—it turns out that my fear of the riskiness in not waiting to comment were well-founded.  I have some reservations about how the movie actually produced measures up to the movie described in the press coverage and, more than that, concerns that it actually perpetuates the hyperbolic biography it was meant to debunk.

First, the high points:

• Much of the movie is composed of animations—of Cobain himself engaged in activities, of the words in his notebooks writing themselves and building visually and rhetorically in intensity, of his drawings coming to life.  In many cases, these are genuinely lovely and novel; they’re a clever way to bring to life material that is not precisely calibrated for film as a medium.
• Morgen matches recordings of Cobain speaking to animations that match the sentiment of those words, and this goes even further toward building the illusion that this film is the “true” portrait of Cobain.

In an earlier post, I characterized Morgen’s role as one of a tactician necessary for identifying symbolism within the cache of evidence the film purports to explore—for creating a credible biographical narrative.  It seems to me, with a subject like Cobain, there is something to be said for cultivating a meaningful tension between ambiguity and closure in creating a narrative that mirrors the rawness of the music and art produced.  However, Morgen’s film deliberately acts to remove ambiguity by the extent to which he emphasizes thematic statements within the interviews, especially humiliation as a recurring motivation for Cobain’s depressive and destructive acts.  Morgen’s narrative strategy resembles a Law and Order defense attorney’s—by giving us example after example of specific humiliations leading to negative responses and therefore posing a credible alternative “theory of the crime,” if you will, it’s as if he poses a cure-all cause for Cobain’s various ailments.

Where my first post considered biography, my second considered intimacy and what it means to strive for that as a defining characteristic of a portrait.  From the initial press coverage of Montage of Heck, it became clear that intimacy meant removing the veneer of legend/genius/rock star that has always been attached to Cobain and replacing it with a “humanized” interpretation of his presence as a man.  The film seems to act on this purpose primarily through showing what are, frankly, upsetting home videos of Cobain while he is clearly affected by drugs and by allowing Courtney Love, his widow, to speak freely and perhaps exasperatedly about her perspective on their marriage.  This highlights how negativity can seem to streamline the process of exposure; if someone conspiratorially whispers damaging opinions, they seem truer as the result of the care taken to cover them up. 

But can negativity actually heighten intimacy?  I would argue that it does not, at least not in this case.  Morgen’s film seeks to counter the extreme romanticism of myth with an extreme abjectness of suffering, and perhaps this successfully undercuts the angsty dreams of casual fans.  However, there are probably Nirvana super fans somewhere in between those two extremes (I prefer to count myself here) that understand Cobain’s evolution as a performer in more meaningful shades of grey that don’t come through in the dazzle of the animations and sound montages and the wry regret of the interview fragments included.  The move toward intimacy and unorthodox methods of constructing biography in Montage of Heck may have been undertaken in an effort to avoid overlaying another’s words on Cobain’s materials, but there’s little context to firmly position these materials outside the realm of psychobiography. 

In assessing what Morgan has or has not included, many have noticed the absence of Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer, who has become a documentary filmmaker in his own right with Sound City and Sonic Highways providing careful portraits of, respectively, a recording studio and eight urban music scenes.  I don’t mean to allude to his absence as a failing, though it may be.  Instead, I want to point to Grohl’s forays into documentary, which deal with material just as legendary and narratives just as tragic (see the Sonic Highways episode that spotlights Austin and discusses the struggles of the 13th Floor Elevators’ frontman, Roky Erickson).  Where Grohl often skillfully skirts the line between sweet nostalgia and difficult truth, his role as compassionate interviewer abets the humanization of his subjects—it seems like they’re telling him things they’ve long kept secret.  This is where Montage of Heck faltered for me—in adopting the visual and symbolic language of the legend to illuminate the extremes of his actions, it misses the comfortable middle ground where nostalgia, pain, and truth can mingle to illuminate how myth and man can exist in one iconic cultural figure.

Documenting Kurt Cobain, Part 2: Intimacy

(This is the second part of a series of four posts presented in anticipation of the premiere of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck on HBO on May 4.  The press coverage surrounding the film’s recent theatrical premiere has raised numerous thematic questions about how documentarians, writers, and/or scholars treat issues of biography, intimacy, and self-fashioning that I will pursue in this series posts over the next two weeks.)

The first post in my series on Kurt Cobain and the new documentary Montage of Heck focused on challenges that biographers face in trying to assemble portraits of their subjects.  Often, the goal is transparency—to know as much as possible, while coming to terms with what can never be known.  Biographers seek a level of intimacy in the narratives they expose, and the director of Montage of Heck, Brett Morgen, seems to have succeeded in this respect.  Among the review quotes that flash onto the screen during the film’s trailer, Rolling Stone’s jumps out: “THE MOST INTIMATE ROCK DOC EVER.”

I wrote previously how significant it was to the production of this documentary that Morgen was granted access to the storage facility that housed the remaining examples of Cobain’s art, his experimental recordings, and his diaries; many of these items had never been seen before by anyone beside the artist himself.  In this sense, intimacy is part of the process of creation, or, as the philosopher Julia Kristeva wrote, it is the process where an individual assesses his or her feelings and attempts to form those feelings into literary or artistic expression.  Rather than being a static mentality or condition of being, intimacy can seem active and territorial.  The literary scholar Lauren Berlant has written that intimacy “creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relations.”

So what conditions beget the creation of intimacy?  Often, people conflate intimacy with privacy and private acts.  For example, people who keep diaries or journals often keep them for themselves for the purpose of protecting their most private thoughts from people who may misconstrue their meanings.  Of course, for public figures like Cobain, even those journals may be transformed from a private chronicle of intimate feelings to a public document, reproduced en masse and marketed to fans seeking to understand more clearly how the author gained access to the angst that fueled his fame.  Sometimes the revelations of these documents help by facilitating connections between the art and the actual biography, but more frequently, poetic documents help fuel mythologies that limit, as with Cobain, the potential for a subject to remain humanized.

The issue of misinterpreting or misunderstanding literature and art produced in intimacy is a particular challenge to people like Morgen, who assume the responsibility of constructing a documentary narrative that upholds that same intimacy for new audiences.  In reviewing Montage of Heck for Vulture, music critic Lindsay Zoladz commented, “it’s that very feeling of familiarity between film and subject that left me feeling a little uneasy. Something about Montage of Heck’s conjured, artfully crafted intimacy tricks us into thinking we know Cobain better than we actually do — which tricks us into thinking we can finally make some kind of neat, cause-and-effect sense of his death.”  Achieving intimacy can be positive when it raises new questions, but what Zoladz suggests is something else entirely.

If the intimacy in Montage of Heck tricks viewers into thinking they have closure in regard to Cobain’s suicide, it has transformed the spectacular and unusual into the mundane and ordinary.  In a sense, this is exactly the mission that Cobain’s daughter requested as a condition of allowing the film to continue production—that her famous father be seen as a son, as a man, as a husband and father, roles that resonate with fans and which regular people have access to in their daily lives.  However, research conducted with the intent to reveal intimate knowledge about a person should, by focusing on distinctive details, be able to retain the divide between exceptional and human.  When I watch Montage of Heck next week, Morgen’s approach to cultivating intimacy will remain foremost in my assessment.