Kurt and Courtney

KURT & COURTNEY (1998)

I had friends who wanted to be famous. I may still have friends who want to be famous, but they're pretty good about not mentioning it around me. But for a while, I had friends who craved fame. They were eager to be famous, to be thought of fondly by strangers. It was a terribly real but inchoate thing that was very difficult to talk with them about. No, I tried telling them, you don't want to be famous. You don't know what it's like. It's a terrible thing. They never listened to me, probably because I wasn't famous. How would I know?

People will attach your image to things in which you don't believe... And this is one of the great paradoxes of our society: no one except celebrities really seem to have much of an idea of what it's like to be a celebrity. The main focus of most interviews with celebrities is: So, what's it like? And most celebrities can't really tell you. It's wonderful, they'll say. Or sometimes they'll say, it's really hard. But don't get me wrong, they'll usually add, I'm not complaining. But there's not really any details of what it's like because it sounds extraordinarily self-centered and strange. No celebrity that I can remember ever says, Being a celebrity is horrifying because it's like being a teenager forever, like being forever stuck in that horror zone of walking into a room and feeling like everyone is looking at you. Because when you're a celebrity, chances are pretty good that everyone is looking at you. Being a celebrity is weird because everyone gets to have an opinion about you, whether you want them to or not. You suddenly have adjectives used to describe you when people are usually too discreet to describe people to each other at all. Being a celebrity means that everyone remembers what you say, and sometimes what you say gets written down so that people can read what you've said back to you and go, "See? You said that. Well, it's written right here in print. Why would they print it if you didn't say it?" And of course, people can and will lie about you, for their own entertainment and enrichment or for the entertainment and enrichment of others. People will attach your image to things in which you don't believe, coerce you to endorse things that you don't, misunderstand what you want them to understand, fixate on the things you want them to forget. Only people who would like to be justified in their paranoia should become celebrities. Only people who are too stupid to live should become to celebrities. Only people who have no sense of self, or an overwhelming sense of greed, should become celebrities. The rest of us should avoid it.

For those people who read the above and still want to be famous, I point them to Nick Broomfield's documentary, Kurt & Courtney. In Kurt & Courtney, Broomfield explores briefly the life and death of Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain. Because Courtney Love does everything she can to shut down Broomfield's picture, from getting investors to pull out money, to refusing Broomfield rights to use Nirvana's music, to actually gettting Sundance to pull the movie from their schedule several years back, the movie becomes more and more about Courtney as well. Broomfield skeptically looks at the question of whether Courtney Love had Kurt Cobain killed, but the more intriguing question that emerges is "how happy could a guy who didn't want to be a celebrity and a woman who wanted to be a celebrity more than anything else actually be together?" By never getting to actually interview Kurt or Courtney, Broomfield builds his picture by interviewing relatives, friends, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, maids, drug-users, reporters and papparazzi.

Isn't really that interested in sex, but uses it in a way to get attention generally... Broomfield gives everyone room to talk for themselves, partially in the interest of fairness, partially because he knows what a freakshow he has on film. As someone who doesn't photograph well, I don't have Broomfield's apparent optimism that the opportunistic hucksters will easily sort themselves out from the sincere and well-meaning. Also, ambiguous behavior can have more than one explanation. For example, Broomfield is pretty incredulous that the man who was apparently Kurt's best friend knows nearly nothing about his private life, but it's obvious that in this case "best friend" is coded speak for "primary drug source and co-user." Our culture doesn't have words for things it doesn't discuss, and so the relationship of two guys who spend a lot of time shooting up together has no easy peg in which it fits, any more than young boys who get together and jack each other off, men who pay regular monthly money to the woman they sleep with twice a week, or what have ya, do. But Cobain's "friend" comes off as having no ground on which to base his opinions because of everything he can't say just as much because he is so obviously out of his head on smack every time he's on camera.

This world of secrecy and ambiguity is at least shown visually, as Broomfield ends up going to basements, windowless rooms, attics and dark sheltered spaces for many of his interviews. An interview with an ex-nanny who's either frightened, shy, drained from drug addiction, or some combination of all three, talks in the darkest dankest bedroom I have ever seen in my life. In hushed tones, she says that if Kurt was, if not killed, then badgered to the point of suicide. On the opposite end of the spectrum are obvious opportunists like Courtney's father, Hank Harrison, and corpulent shock-rocker El Duce, who claim with various degrees of intensity that they know the truth. Filmed outside, they jovially make various claims of murder, manipulation and avarice. (Although Courtney Love never does seem to live down to the way these men are willing to paint her, I did come away from this movie with my crush on her severely bruised. Since this crush on Courtney was always with her as the ultimate white-trash crazy chick turned self-sufficient artist anyway, I thought I would be safe. But along the way, an ex-boyfriend suggests that she actually isn't really that interested in sex, but uses it as a way to get attention generally or to snare the (famous) man she's interested in. This suggestion somehow to resonate with me in a way that felt true, sad, and boner-harshing to me.)

By the time everyone was through using the name of a dead man to justify their actions, I wasn't quite depressed enough to miss how Broomfield uses some old footage of Kurt as a teenager. Sitting by himself, Kurt barely acknowledges the laughing children playing in the sun around him, preferring instead to sit in the shade and stare at dark waters. I think I see what Broomfield is saying by using this image; I think he's pointing to what he believes about Cobain's death; that Cobain was a depressive who never could see the joy in life, and it's not hard to imagine a someone like that going on to commit suicide. It's a good point but I wish that it wasn't made the way everyone else seems to justify their actions; by using a dead man who will never have the chance to refute whatever he is being used to espouse.

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