Brett Morgen’s ‘Montage of Heck’ was on HBO last night and everybody is talking about it today… it’s amazing what a movie can do to your legacy! Every single music blog, website, magazine is praising the film, and this Morgen guy is about everywhere, talking to everyone. ‘Montage of Heck’ may restore Courtney Love’s legacy tweeted Tyler Coates, author of this article on Decider. Really? We are so easy to fool? Love just had to do an interview at the end of a movie showing concert footage and a lot of Cobain-inspired cartoons and all is forgiven? Does it even matter if she is telling the truth or not? Oh I forgot, Morgen is not interested by this kind of information, truth, he just cares about the ‘emotional truth’, an expression that he has apparently repeated at each interview.
I have huge problems with this movie, I already wrote about this, and if I didn’t expect Rolling Stone or major magazines to point out all these problems because they are Morgen’s bedfellows, but I was not expecting this ‘best rock & roll documentary’ consensus from everybody. I have problems with the lack of information, the director’s intention to plant the idea of suicide in the spectator’s brain since the beginning — whereas the first suicide attempt on the train tracks was just adapted from a journal entry and not confirmed by anyone — and I have problems with the lack of chronology and its misleading effect.
Let me give an example, we get to see the concert footage when Cobain says on stage ‘Courtney we love you’, but we don’t get the date (1992). However, we never see this February 1994 concert footage, showing Kurt and Krist joking on stage. Krist says, ‘I’m Billy Pumpkin!!” (referring to Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins), and Kurt replies: ‘Oh no you are not! You’re Meatloaf!’ And why is this important? As this article by Bobby Barns rightly points out, this moment is very interesting, because with all the talk about Courtney cheating on Kurt with Billy Corgan (they were an item before her marriage with Kurt) and her saying in the movie that Kurt committed suicide because he couldn’t handle the thought of her cheating on him, this does not make any sense… Do you think he would have joked as he did about his wife’s (ex)-lover, just 2 months before committing suicide for this same reason?
In any case, the movie has major problems and Morgen got apparently on the defense mode for some interviews, like this one he gave to The Pulse of Radio. Morgen is not happy with people criticizing his movie, which he believes are conspiracy theorists who think that Cobain was murdered, and this is what he said:
‘Prior to anyone seeing this film, the ‘Holocaust deniers,’ as I like to refer to them, started writing conspiracy theories about my movie,’ he said. ‘Now this is before anyone’s seen a frame. These are people who supposedly like Kurt, I would think, and here’s a movie I’m making in which we’re gonna share with the world all this material about Kurt, and in fact we’re not even going into the last month of his life. And so why would they then start writing conspiracy theories about my movie? And that tells you everything you need to know.’
This is very cheap talk from Morgen’s part for several reasons, first of all, calling people who question the Seattle police’s investigation ‘Holocaust deniers’ is beyond ridiculous. What has the holocaust to do with the death of one unique person who died in weird circumstances? By all accounts, I don’t know what happened but I have read enough facts (a word very foreign to Morgen) to ask questions too. An investigation has nothing to do with the Holocaust and if you are interested with facts you may spend a few hours on these sites: The Cobain Case and Justice for Kurt and you will judge who are the real deniers, the events around Kurt’s death are full of contradictions and lies and ‘Montage of Heck’ is just another proof of this.
Furthermore, there is something that Morgen ignores completely, not all people who dislike his movie are ‘conspiracy theorists’ as he likes to consider them. I talked to Alice Wheeler, who was friends with Kurt and the first person who got to photograph Nirvana, and she greatly disliked the movie, for about all the same reasons than I did. Still, she believes Kurt committed suicide, so what does this tell you about ‘Montage of Heck’?