Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Tank
in the General's Rank Dept.: I did not expect to emerge
from Kurt & Courtney, Nick
Broomfield's tale of rock's former first couple,
the death of one and the imbroglio of the other,
with anything resembling sympathy for the Devil.
It just happened that way.
When I speak of
the Devil I do not speak of the antichrist, who
might well be Richard Mellon Scaife, a bow-tied
billionaire hardly anyone ever sees; nor the
False Prophet, who looks enough like the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon to take his place at a high-school
reunion; nor do I mean the human incarnation of a
certain pure and simple wish for the Obliteration
Of All Life Wherever Found--you'll find that
staring back at you, with the solid diode
confidence to implement that wish, from the cover
of Robert Fripp's album Exposure. No,
the Devil's affection for the world is a child's
affection for its playground, its household pets,
so you're less likely to find its True Voice
implanted in Anton LaVey or anyone named Manson
than in quieter, more insistent and ubiquitous
voices such as that fast-moving monotone that
slides through my radio several times a day:
"Want to
look better naked? Here's how. FatAssassin
removes fat fast, without the unhealthy
strain of exercise, leaving you with a toned,
sexy body. It's quick and easy."
Did you hear it?
That smile from the dark promising you all ends
for the paltry price of ignoring all means? A
solid sales pitch, but one which requires from
time to time a physical manifestation, a tangible
FatAssassin as living proof that the product
works as advertised. As an example to all who
might become the throng, riot their way to the
snake oil tent, Courtney Love fits America's
Pre-Millennial bill right down to the Stars &
Straps she sometimes straps on for photo shoots.
Kurt &
Courtney isn't all about the Devil, though;
it's about humans with their compartmentalized
emotions and motivations, meaning you can watch
it without ever believing that Courtney killed
Kurt, that Courtney's a saint, or indeed anything
I put in my first three paragraphs. I do wish it
were more about a dead boy and the family and
friends who miss him. The dribble of waterfront
interview footage is everything we expected from
him, as he trips over his words explaining how
much more fun it was digging for hidden thrift
shop treasures than "having a thousand
dollars and being able to buy the whole
store." Kurt's Aunt Mary puts on some tapes
the family made; Kurt's two-year-old voice spills
out of a reverb as he starts "Hey Jude"
with someone singing along, then pipes "I'll
do it myself now!" All this while two
black-and-white snapshots of a toddler clowning
with a guitar on a picnic blanket hang on either
side of a framed full-body shot of the Artist in
all his 1994 glory. We can glean no bridge
between these disjointments, no map from the here
to the there; the toddler even grabs the picnic
guitar right-handed, opposite his trademark
southpaw grip as an adult.
I don't know Nick
Broomfield's work well, but for a man who's made
documentaries since 1979 and chased down everyone
from Margaret Thatcher to Aileen Wuornos to a
quintet of New York dominatrices, he's courteous,
and reserved in the grand British tradition, but
curious and egalitarian to an ostentatious fault.
His visual motif is the journey to the house or
business of the interview subject du jour--wheeling
off the highway into Aberdeen, for example,
summarized BBC travelogue-style as "A small
logging town in upstate Washington that has
become run down"--and indeed he approaches
the film much like a motorist who's unsatisfied
until each hitchhiker out on the road is not only
inside his car, but behind the driver's seat
accepting the proffered keys. This bespeaks a
nervy, yet passive, concept of creation, but for
the first thirty minutes, he's awfully lucky
regarding passengers.
The art teacher in
Aberdeen accepts Broomfield's modest greeting of
"I'm here making the same film everyone
wants to make," and goes over the month that
Kurt spent in his family home ("My son asked
me could Kurt spend the night, the night
stretched into a second night, second night
stretched into a month") and ended up
offhandedly, successfully, added to the rotating
roster of chores. Kurt's parents never bothered
to call. His old girlfriend, Tracy, tours through
her few souvenirs: a harrowing, skeletal
self-portrait straight from Charles Keeping, and
a floating fetus canvas. "I think he was
sort of fascinated by things that were
gross," she offers affectlessly, recalling a
now-lost collage of diseased vagina
photos--appropriated from a doctor's
office--interspersed with various cuts of meat.
Her apartment is much like the ones my friends
kept while in college or otherwise broke;
agreeably disheveled, lots of bare plaster, a
Beastie Boys poster in the hallway and Bettie
Page on the bedroom wall. Tracy clearly has no
tell-all paperback contract in the works. She
indicates how Kurt used to fire a pellet gun at
the Washington State Lottery building across the
street; Broomfield trots over to ask if the
Lottery people recall this and promptly gets
thrown out. It isn't the first time I'll wince on
behalf of both sides of the camera.
With four
well-intentioned words, "But did fame change
anything?", the filmmaker picks up bad
company and takes a dismal joyride through
terrain untouched by fame or change. Where the
teacher, Tracy, and Aunt Mary seemed as
matter-of-fact in their regretfulness as you
could wish for, the ensuing barely-believable
gaggle of wanna-be never-coulds, leaping blindly
at the tin ring with that Devil's voice in their
ear, inspires all the derision of the Lone Gunmen
without their redeeming pathos. And yes, I hope
that scares you. Broomfield unaccountably passes
over Richard "Kurt Was Murdered" Lee, a
well-known obsessive still replaying his
brainsplatter footage on Seattle's Channel 29,
but comes up with some other valuable cash
prizes. Jack and Al are self-described Los
Angeles "stalkerNazis" and I never
figured out which is which, but one looks like a
midget mariachi singer while the other peers out
from beneath a bad baseball cap, a worse wig,
sunglasses, and what appears to be a Hulk-sized
jockstrap over his lower face. Their task is to
penetrate Courtney's rehearsal studio with
Broomfield in tow; after much huffing and puffing
about procedure, they make it as far at the
lobby. "Here's Jack buying soda pop, trying
to pluck his courage up," our Nick reports
breathlessly.
Al and Jack lead
the filmmaker to Divine Brown's pimp who leads
them to El Duce, a graduate of Seattle's
Roosevelt High School, who began life as Eldon
Hoke, and insisted toward the movie's end that
Courtney offered him $50,000 to "whack Kurt
and make it look like a suicide." Why even a
soul so bedraggled as Courtney's would place life
and liberty in the hands of this grizzled figure
who emerges swishing a flyswatter and bellowing
"ARRRRRRRGH! Where's the booze!?!"
remains to this day a most mind-resistant koan.
"Some people think you're not...the most
reliable witness," Broomfield manages.
"That's too bad," the one-time porn
rock poster boy spits back, "You may not be
the most reliable witness yourself!" Later
we learn he got drunk and was hit by a train.
Finally,
Courtney's own father, Hank Harrison, a onetime
Grateful Dead chum who lately turns out books on
his daughter's possible involvement in his
son-in-law's murder. In close-up I can see Hank's
face is the same one Courtney used to have, which
silently shed new light on her ongoing surgical
addiction. Deferential as ever, Broomfield
inquires, "Is it true that Courtney was
disciplined with rottweilers as a child?"
"No. Pit
bulls."
Harrison rambles a
good deal after that, but to me that comment and
one other, in response to being asked why he's so
combative against his daughter--"Why isn't
our feud as interesting as the Hatfields and the
McCoys"--gave me the picture of where Hank
thinks he should be in the world. "I know
how you think, Courtney, I'll kick your
ass every time"--I beheld what image of
life, what image of the desirable, would
necessarily imprint itself on a young child under
this man's charge.
There's more, of
course. Courtney presents the Torture Freedom
Award at an ACLU banquet before which Nick and
Jack and Al get a short face-to-face with her
followed by a much longer shouting match as to
who really chickened out on the hard
questions--remember, Broomfield, director of
sixteen films, is ceding one-third total control
to a man disguised with a gargantuan athletic
supporter--and then Broomfield strides onstage to
ask why a person who uses threats and violence to
control her public image is giving out an award
honoring free speech, a fair question delivered
with quiet but obstinate passion, and the camera
shakes in Jack or Al's hands as the camera's
owner is yanked smoothly offstage by a cadre
including, I am told, the ACLU's president.
But for just a
moment about ten minutes earlier, in the hot
flash of her father's face, I began to feel
sympathy for the Devil. Beheld her, just for a
split-second, in a human light. In the zap of
that flash I felt sympathy for Jack and Al and
Eldon and even Hank, for what they must have
felt, for the frightened children they must have
once been. And that left me assiduously knitting
the cleaves of a certain sundered almighty
righteousness as I stumbled through the Roosevelt
Avenue crosswalk for home.
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