The post-grunge gen-xers whatevered their way to the art cinema to commune with Nick Broomfield's "Kurt and Courtney." And I could hear Kurt singing, Rape me my friend, rape me again... Yes, British documentarians will feed their reputation and wallet with Kurt's death-art-life- hole-hell as well.
You think you've got girl trouble, try marrying Courtney I'm-gonna-get-what-I-want-and-I'll-crush-you-if-you-get-in-my-fucking-way Love. I'd be suspicious of anyone with the last name Love (I once had a dentist with that name). Courtney taking the last name Love is like the IRS calling themselves The Great Benefactors of Humanity. But Kurt got swindled by her big lips and baby blues spouting fairy tale platitudes of how they would live in a castle of "Love" as the King and Queen of cozy flannel grunge. And I'm-from-blue-collar-face-value-Aberdeen Kurt swallowed it hole (sic). Poor, gullible, angelic Kurt.
And that's Broomfield's spin on the Kurt and Courtney romance. Rueful Kurt: being a rock star made him a suicidal junkie and Courtney drove him to pull the trigger (or paid someone to pull it for him / her). Society and Courtney are to blame for the death of this innocent fool who wouldn't hurt a cockroach. Nevermind that Kurt was a defenseless little baby looking for mamma to protect him from his own stardom...and all the big, bad wolves that hunt in that domain. Nevermind that he could have taken off his junk colored glasses and seen (for miles and miles) that Courtney was a giant slug oozing her way towards him and devouring everything in her path. And that surely she would swallow him, too. Did Kurt expect the scorpion to change her nature when she climbed on the back of the frog to cross the Puget Sound? Except in this fable, the scorpion had a twenty-million dollar lifeboat handy in the form of Cobain's estate. Maybe if Kurt had stayed in re-hab for more than a day or two instead of hopping over the fence and running home to his dealers in Seattle, he'd still be with us today... doing stripped-down solo albums ala John Lennon and playing a gig every once in awhile when he felt like it, maybe for free.
But noooooooooooooooooooooooo. It's all that evil bitch's fault that he's dead. Whether he pulled the trigger, or Courtney's hit man pulled it, or Kurt's dealers pulled it, Kurt had no hand in his own death. One of the promises of being a junky is you wind up dead before your time William S. Burroughs (who obviously had some pact with a literary devil) aside. And Kurt fulfilled his promise. Kurt bonded with Courtney over drugs always a sane starting point and picked a mouthpiece control freak to ride shotgun against the cruel world and change his diapers.
Kurt and Courtney are the classic example of the analytical, control, left-brained person shackled to the right-brained, out-of-control, creative, promoting person. For the latter, joy always seems to slip through their fingers; they barely taste it. And for the former, they simply crush all the life out of joy with their need to control and analyze.
In the end, they both got what they wanted from each other. Courtney managed to express and promote her creativity with Hole's Live Through This, released a week after Kurt died; plus she got to play the junky wife, Althea, in The People vs. Larry Flynt. And Kurt expressed the ultimate act of control by taking his own life. Yes, it's a godawful fucking tragedy. And Cobain was the last corporate rock artist whose music I gave a shit about. But the bottom line is: If Cobain had taken the needle out of his golden arm, we'd all be barking about a different story.
K&C Fried Chicken Award: Best moment in the movie occurs near the end when balls-to-the-wall Broomfield takes the stage at an ACLU benefit and accuses special guest star Courtney and the smarmy, PC liberal ACLU of being hypocrites. Reason being: Courtney's well-documented death threats to journalists who wrote things that she didn't like. And the ACLU dragging Broomfield off the stage! Yeah, free speech so long as it's the speech we agree with.