Sloane Dzhitenov

gallons of rubbing alcohol flow through the strip: the startling ingenuity behind gus van sant’s last days

written by sloane dzhitenov

THE FIRST THING that most

people notice about Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005) is that Kurt Cobain is on the poster.

The second thing that most people notice is that wait, no, that somehow isn’t actually Kurt Cobain - not that absurdly famous, yet even more absurdly alienated, ‘defining image of ‘90s teenage suicide’ Kurt Cobain, no. Instead, Van Sant has created his own fake, imitation-Cobain, some other

rock star whose life so perfectly shadows Cobain’s own. It’s far from a lighthearted allusion to be making, and yet Last Days does almost everything it can to imitate the rock star’s image, with a broad-chinned, blonde-haired Michael Pitt donning a black lace dress and cat-eye sunglasses, smoking cigarettes, and strumming his guitar while wailing out some startlingly Nirvana-esque melodies. Provided narrative details only strengthen the similarity between the two, bringing to the fore implied drug use, a wife and daughter, and even a detail-fordetail replica of Cobain’s own method of suicide. The only details separating these two persons, it seems, are their names - the subject of the film is named “Blake,” not “Kurt” - and a very, very desperate legal disclaimer in the end credits that assures us that “Although this film is inspired in part by the last days of Kurt Cobain, the film is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in the film are also fictional.”

Such a startling revelation is difficult to top. Indeed, the third thing that the typical audience notices is, for many, a bit of a let-down: this is a damn difficult movie to watch. Boasting a starkly minimalist, slow-cinema approach, the film devotes its 97-minute runtime to charting this strange, semi-fictional rock star’s final days before his planned suicide. Not only is the narrative relatively uneventful, it’s centered on that incredibly difficult subject matter, the depiction of which I have, in all honesty, spent many years questioning. Nowadays, I personally can’t help but view the depression movie as a nearly impossible task, requiring the filmmaker to convey the suffering inflicted by mental illness without slipping into paternalistic sympathy, selfdestructive dramatics, or pure inaccuracy, with little room for any misstep before the film becomes completely unpleasant. Adding a celebrity’s image to the mix, of course, only complicates things further, conjuring uncomfortable questions about privacy, accuracy, and respect.

No matter what, Last Days is by no means an easy pill to swallow. From its sensitive subject matter to its even more sensitive legal complexity, there are few conceivable versions of this film that actually work, and so many places where it could go wrong, slipping down the slope of insensitivity to become yet another callous, inauthentic portrait of a suicidal state of mind. Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out to be as delicate, biting, and real as it was. Van Sant’s first ingenuity is his portrayal of Blake’s state of mind

as a predetermined absolute: with a title that gives it all away before you can even hit the ‘play’ button (these are, after all, his “last days”), it couldn’t be any other way. From the very opening shot, the main character is doomed, and everyone - from the audience, to the director, to Blake himself - knows how the story will end. There is no question of his mental state and, as such, no hope for the dramatics that would come from a storyline of salvation or change of heart. The world around him has also accepted this, his interactions with other human beings by now long-relegated to chance encounters with clueless strangers and unfeeling conversations with his apathetic, resigned bandmates and producers, whose own emotional issues bar them from seeing much beyond the dollar value of Blake’s image.

Through the use of a forcedly distant and often voyeuristic narrative, the film takes great pains to establish this ‘absolute,’ the exact state of existence Blake has found himself in. He stumbles around on-screen, mumbling inaudible nonsense to himself as he goes from one empty action to another, whether it be making himself a miserable bowl of cereal or falling in and out of dissatisfied sleep while watching music videos on the television set. The everydayness of it is overwhelming: when a Yellow Pages representative asks him how his day is out of routine pleasantry, Blake kindly answers, “Pretty good... Not- no- no... Another day...” We know, of course, that all he’s accomplished that day is the aforementioned miserable bowl of cereal and a rather strange, morbid detour in which he played gruesome pretend with a shotgun in hand (the very one he has selected for a later, much less jovial purpose), stalking around the house and pointing it in the faces of his sleeping bandmates. As the slow-moving, unchanging plot continues, we realize that there’s nothing unusual about how miserable and sad it might all seem. It’s simply the given state of his life.

Even using the words ‘miserable and sad’ seems incorrect, actually; the camera charts this all with such a calm and patience that, even if someone could be compelled to feel sorry for Blake, Van Sant’s presentation discourages it. In fact, in the obstinately uncaring social world that surrounds Blake, who does not receive any meaningful human contact whatsoever, the camera is one of the few entities to pay any proper attention to him at all. It may be a distant, detached camera, but it is also loyal, and patient, and quite kind. There’s a care to the various layers of apathy that surround Blake’s narrative

- because without those layers of apathy, it could all become just a little too brutal - as well a tenderness to the way in which the camera then pierces through that apathy. With a faithful, attentive loyalty, it lays Blake’s life bare, pausing to take in his scattered thoughts, his forced loneliness, and even a full-length, acoustic rendition of Pitt’s own song, “Death to Birth,” that is absolutely shattering in its raw emotional power. Blake’s state of mind is both a miserable given and shrouded in empathy, preventing the film from devolving into a melodramatic tragedy or any other form of tonally callous mess.

This happens for quite a while. Like all slow cinema, for many the choice of such a measured tempo, reducing the film to two hours of a depressed guy doing little else than actively being depressed, will understandably be a dealbreaker. Sitting through its runtime, though, and watching the cinematic (last) days go by has its own merit as well. How else, after all, could Van Sant convey the deadening mundanity of Blake’s experience, sinking the viewer into an understanding of what it means to live his life? How else could the camera stay far back enough to depict, without condescension, that experience and how else, too, could it prove its unceasing devotion, its attention to every detail of his every day?

Now, all of the above simply read Last Days as a base narrative of

mental illness, without particular attention to what is truly intriguing about this film - the not-actuallytechnically-legal theft of Cobain’s image. The first clever trick that the Cobain allusion performs is one of pure narrative convenience, stemming from the fact that almost everyone (at least, almost everyone from the largely English-speaking, Western, 2000s audience for this film) has at least some inkling of who Cobain is. Van Sant doesn’t need to waste time or effort on background exposition or character development, instead simply diving right into his hefty exploration of Blake’s mental state. Furthermore, not only can Van Sant skip the clumsy, hemmed-in introductions that often accompany depression features and biopics alike, he also doesn’t have to waste time on convincing us to care about this pseudo-Kurt Cobain: his very existence is already intriguing enough. Just the very fact that the audience is presented with this almost-familiar rock star, and all of the multi-layered controversiality of his posthumous image, makes us want to turn to the screen.

In truth, what was Cobain’s death in the realm of ‘90s pop culture? It was both a kind of apotheosis, sealing the rock star into his own special brand of ‘27 Club’ membership, and a sobering end to the skyrocketing popularity of Nirvana’s grunge

sound. With families tuned into the MTV channel on their home television screens across the nation, he had been both a mentalillness bogeyman for America’s straight-laced suburbia and a victim of the music industry’s ceaseless ability to market anything it could get its hands on, even the supposedly unmarketable counterculture of the 1990s. When it all came to a violent end, his image only fractured further, presenting him as rock icon, bad influence, victim, medical statistic or, perhaps, simply a genuine, real human being, all depending on who you ask. His suicide both sobered the monster of popular culture and fed it further: it was the kind of cultural shock whose ripples eventually fed back, in opposition with themselves, to create deepseated, contradicting tensions in the American consciousness. In short, from a cultural-analysis standpoint, it was a real goddamn mess.

This places his biography into a strange arena of sentimentality, because his story is both a narrative of immense personal suffering and a cultural moment of fascinating national proportions. Even on the national stage, it both acted to further commercialize images of mental strife and to bring greater empathy to our conceptions of mental illness and addiction: somehow, it is both the most and the least personal story in the world.

In a way, this is partly just an exaggeration of the statements I made above, an exacerbation of the existing contradiction that lies behind depression narratives as a whole. These dual possibilities for insensitivity and over-generalization could surely destroy the film; instead, however, they actually allow for a strange, beautiful kind of synchronicity, with these two narratives - that of mental illness and that of stardom - interlacing and upholding each other at every crucial moment. Consider only how Cobain’s celebrity can universalize and add symbolic power to the film while Van Sant’s presentation lends humanity to his commodified image, how the base humanity of Blake’s state is intertwined with these evocations of iconic stardom. When any element would get too close to being exploitative, the distance given by Cobain’s celebrity pulls it back; vice versa, if the rockstar allusion ever seems too cold, the heartbreaking reality of the narrative keeps it grounded.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Van Sant is careful to acknowledge the biting reality of Cobain’s stolen image: in one spell-binding shot, the camera closely revolves

around a smoking Michael Pitt, cat-eye shades resting on the bridge of his nose, and he becomes such an image of pure, effortless ‘90s cool, you could swear you were watching a press junket for Cobain himself. If it were not for this acknowledgement, the film would too easily lean into a crude, invasive imitation of one very real man’s final moments. However with it - and others like it - included, the film manages to employ just enough self-reflexive irony to keep itself from becoming absolutely, needlessly miserable. In fact the entire work, with its off-beat popculture allusions, monotone color palette, and clinical distance, feels like an imitation of the bitter cynicism and irony that defined the ‘90s. One aspect of Blake’s trapped nature, it seems, is his inability to escape the echoes of that classic 1990s coldness.

This self-reflexive, ironic style is further strengthened by the actual contents of the film. I alluded earlier to Blake’s interactions with his profit-seeking bandmates and producers, all of whom become the faces of a ruthlessly corporate music industry, reacting to conversation only so long as it relates to Blake’s next moneymaking opportunity. Uncaring and maladjusted, it’s not as if

they are much happier than Blake himself: in fact, watching Blake’s bandmates blearily mumble, in a drugged-out haze, along with “Venus in Furs” halfway through the film is a surely depressing sight. It only made me feel as if they may be even worse off than the doomed protagonist himself, if only because they do not seem to be capable of acknowledging their own misery like he is. The film’s austerity is predicated on this unhappy and unfeeling social milieu that Blake has found himself in, his surroundings as much an expression of 1990s sentiment as they are an assertion of the music industry’s oppressive, commodifying coldness. Van Sant’s patiently adoring camera, then, both identifies and opposes this relationship, presenting itself as a better alternative to the wellknown, over-marketed image of Cobain. In a media story that has been repeated in every-which-way, only now does Cobain’s suicidal nature gain a rare, straightforward, and sentimental acknowledgement.

As a result, Last Days manages not only to be a realistic yet empathetic look at an incredibly sensitive subject, but it also provides an incisive commentary on other pop culture interpretations of mental illness. It’s astounding that a work so minimalist can secretly be so meta-analytical, but that simplicity

only furthers Van Sant’s cause. No choice is wasted, and every single understated element of the film is weaponized, creating layer after tense layer of compelling truths about mental illness, suicide, and celebrityhood.

Just this, however, is not enough. Through the film’s title and premise, the entire work is implicitly oriented towards the promised finality of the ending, a coup-degrace that is expected to bring violent shock and resolution in equal measure. In a (somewhat surprisingly) un-defeatist turn, Van Sant doesn’t cut the film off at the sound of a gunshot, as so many creators would; for that matter, he doesn’t even include the suicide on film, a commendable act in and of itself. Instead, he creates a moment of strange transcendence, filming Blake before the act, capturing an odd meditation through an unusually close shot, and after, when he depicts his spirit exiting his body. This spirit-Blake calmly sits up, slowly clambers upwards, and disappears out of frame, all while the score unfolds into a fit of avantgarde melodies. It’s as haunting a scene as it is a significant culmination for the film, a pinnacle for every complicated relationship I’ve discussed prior. The preceding runtime, all bitter ‘90s nihilism and self-effacing irony, is absolved in the calm holiness of this moment, leaving Blake to find his peace. It’s beautiful, yes, but it is also a very literal evocation of the rock-star apotheosis I discussed above, Blake’s image transcending the physical confines of his body as well as the limitations of the camera’s frame. In this one transcendence is contained every single other difficult relationship of the film, with Blake breaking free of his rock stardom, his depressive state, the bitter and minimalist 1990s coldness, the commodification of his mental health, and the ceaseless portrayal of his own image. At long last, with every single aspect of the film neatly resolved, Blake is left to find his own peace somewhere else, distantly off-screen and well outside of our intrusive view.