Homogenization in Celluloid

With the news of a new Kurt Cobain biopic (produced by Courtney Love) in the works, we’re getting that often harsh reminder that nothing good ever happens when Hollywood decides to make a movie about a musician.

Cobain has been the subject of a biopic before, though it technically was fiction. “Last Days,” an art film by Gus Van Sandt, is essentially a poorly fictionalized account of the last days of the Nirvana front man. The main character, a rock star named “Blake” (who looks and acts exactly like Cobain, played by actor Michael Pitt) wanders through his surroundings ignoring his parasitic friends, record label executives and everyone else for what feels like eighteen hours before taking his own life in the green house of his mansion. Van Sandt did the film as a fictional account for fear of being sued by Courtney Love; he basically slandered her husband’s name. This is funny in retrospect... he could have waited a couple of years and done it with her blessing when she ran out of money. But foresight is a bitch and, say what you will about Courtney Love (and I can think of nothing good), she would have been justified to file a suit had Van Sandt admitted his pretentious, bloated art film was of a thinly disguised Cobain.

Van Sandt mashed the Cobain character into a one-dimensional hologram; an almost Wikipedia-ed presentation of basic facts without attempting to portray a deeper, more complex character. We see a depressed “Blake” with long messy hair and torn jeans abusing heroin with the eventual cut to suicide. This is an acceptable plot if the character was 100% fiction, but when it is drawing on a real human being it’s sort of cheap to take an entire personality and life and illustrate but one, albeit sensational, aspect of it.

Van Sandt‘s film is not the only one to commit this travesty of injustice. For some oddly transcendent reason, Hollywood cannot get it right when doing a movie about a rock star. Maybe it’s the profession, maybe it is an unhipness inherent with the directors and studios, but every time a movie comes out about a musician, it ends up taking a diverse human being and turning them into a one-dimensional caricature with the requisite overdone actor in the bad wig at the forefront.

Take the Doors movie: released in 1991 to cinemas everywhere with the promise and potential to tell a good story about one of music’s more prominent bands. Oliver Stone directed it, with considerable help from the surviving band members. All of this should have resulted in a great, wide sweeping story that showcased many nuances of Jim Morrison. Instead, what we got was the asinine “shaman” story (Morrison as a child witnessed a brutal car crash that led to many Native Americans dying on the road. One of them supposedly entered into young Morrison’s soul.) Val Kilmer’s performance appeared to be a cross between Stevie Nick’s dancing style and Dean Martin’s mannerisms, pouting ever so slightly while holding his arms out in a fey Christ pose.

And this is the real problem; since the movie came out in 1991, a good fraction of the people who enjoyed it and took it at face value weren’t even alive when the Doors were making records. From this movie alone, the human Jim Morrison comes off as this weird, spacey guy who drank too much and may or may not have exposed himself on stage in Miami. Now, is this a fair representation of who Jim Morrison was; does it intimate his legacy? It certainly contained elements of truth; one cannot have such a notorious reputation without a few disreputable incidents. Though The Doors were before my time, I have to figure that the guy was a little more multifaceted than that. But, as usual, the truth has no room in a Hollywood biography.

The best part of this theory is that a whole generation of people would have never figured it out if it weren’t for the deaths of Cobain, 2-Pac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. When icons are manufactured, they transcend time and, as time goes on, their souls and being and impact are shrunk and reduced for public consumption. With Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin for instance, we had books, box sets and movies to reveal who the person was behind the music. Except for true cynics, we had no choice but to take what was said for gospel; beyond the fact that say, Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek is a corpse-promoting, desperate whore who is trying to co-opt the Door’s legacy and brand name.

I don’t want to give the impression that this can’t be done right. 2-Pac: Resurrection is one example of a well done musician biopic. The movie delivered a real, compelling portrait of a rapper who was equal parts defiant, intelligent, human and talented. The success of this movie is due, I believe, to the wise decision not to cast the newest, hottest black actor to play Shakur Instead, it was done documentary style, with interviews, footage and cinematography. In short, it contained depth.

The limited release of “About a Son,” another documentary about Cobain (whose life story is getting faded out like a third generation copy) takes interviews done with him by writer Michael Azzerad and lays it over scenes of the Pacific Northwest, with moody music accompanying it.

Where there is overproduction there is also honesty. There will come a time when the musicians with whom we grew up, who shaped the culture of our youth become the subjects of books/movies/box sets. I guess this is a measure of our society; in our everlasting efforts to make normal people into gods (and demons), we end up squashing the normal people in our grasp. At the end of the day, one fact remains: while people can create and achieve amazing success, we shouldn’t stare too hard at it, for reflecting light upon something so intensely will at one point set it ablaze.