‘Montage of Heck’, the new documentary about Kurt Cobain, is making the blogosphere very excited… A trailer has surfaced yesterday, and this has made people talk… a lot. Me? I feel highly disturbed about it for many reasons…
The film was directed by Brett Morgen, who first got approached by Courtney Love in 2007, and right there, I cringe. How did Kurt’s widow get involved with the project? This is how she approached Morgen, according to an interview he gave to Rolling Stone:
‘I have all this art of Kurt’s and some videos and stuff, and I saw what you were able to do with The Kid Stays in the Picture. Would you be interested in doing this?’
Morgen was given full access to the entirety of Cobain’s personal and family archives and, according to the trailer, the movie will sure include intimate moments from Cobain’s life and home movies showing him playing with his daughter. So basically, she sold him all these intimate footages and this is where the problem is: Kurt was a very private person. According to NME he was already profoundly affected by a 1992 Vanity Fair piece, which had asserted that Courtney Love had done heroin while being pregnant… Kurt put the journalist at the top of his of his enemies list. If it is true, it shows how much he didn’t want things about his private life to be revealed, but now that he is dead, everything is allowed, right?
This is obviously pure exploitation, fans are very hungry for this kind of documentary and corpse cannibalism is a game that Courtney Love excels at. Frances Bean Cobain was enrolled into it, probably manipulated by her mother once again, otherwise how could you explain these pictures of the two cuddling up at the Sundance premiere of the movie? Why are we back to this loving relationship, after a restraining order was issued prohibiting Love to have any contact with her daughter in 2009? Of course Courtney had to make peace with her daughter since she had lost the publicity rights to the name and image of Kurt Cobain a few years ago… If this woman has any talent she is very skilled at manipulating people, and she had to use a lot of manipulation to make peace with Frances Bean because only two years ago, many sources were saying that their relationship was extraordinarily strained. I don’t understand why people can see this woman for what she is, but then, even Kurt didn’t see it!
So I want to know what kind of input Courtney love has had on the movie, because the more involved she was, the further from the truth ‘Montage of Heck’ is gonna be. You can make any old footage look more tragic than they really were, and when I watch this trailer, I see a very angry Kurt, a very intense Kurt, a very fucked up Kurt… No matter if you believe or not the ‘conspiracy theories’ behind his death, there are enough evidence to know that Courtney Love has lied many times about her late husband and has worked very hard at building this image of the suicidal, depressed drug addict… I am afraid this movie will reinforce every single stereotype about Kurt Cobain, I am afraid this movie will continue to build the myth that Courtney want us to swallow. I don’t know who the real Cobain was, but it’s certainly not Love who can bring a truthful answer.
Let’s take an example. According to Billboard, we learn in the movie that ‘Courtney Love attributes Cobain’s overdose in Rome to her contemplating having an affair. She says she never cheated on him.’ regarding the cheating part, who knows? If you read all the rumors circulating on the internet (her father has affirmed she was cheating on Kurt with Billy Corgan) she is obviously lying, but this is not the worst part of this statement. This overdose in Rome has been discussed to death, and P.I. Tom Grant’s page, gives you a totally different account. First of all, Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson said that ‘Kurt said it was just an accident’ and the narration about the event has strangely evolved since: ‘Keep in mind, the incident in Rome was never called a suicide attempt, by anyone, until AFTER Kurt died in Seattle,’ writes Grant. ‘The doctor in Rome even said he believed the overdose was an accident. Dr. Galleta says, “The last image I have of him, which in light of the tragedy now seems pathetic, is of a young man playing with the little girl. He did not seem like a young man who wanted to end it all. In a recently released book “COBAIN” by the editors of Rolling Stone, Neil Strauss writes regarding the Rome event, “Gold Mountain, [Nirvana’s management company], still denies that a suicide attempt was made. A note was found, says a company spokesman, but Kurt insisted it wasn’t a suicide note. He just took all of his and Courtney’s money and was going to run away and disappear.’
Of course, Courtney has kept the note, and never made it public, and she has even pretended to have burnt it… Will we ever learn about this in ‘Montage of Heck’? Of course not! Will they even say he injected himself three times the lethal dose of heroin before shooting his head off?Of course not because everyone knows the facts around his death are very sketchy to say the least.
‘I feel like I’m being evaluated 24 hours a day, I feel violated,’ wrote Kurt in his personal journals, also used in the movie… More than ever it is gonna be the case with ‘Montage of Heck’, it will give people what they want, the portrait of a tortured artist who died for our sins.
The documentary will premiere on May 4th on HBO, I may watch it, but I will also wait for ‘Soaked in Bleach’.