Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a fictionalized account of the last days of Kurt Cobain, is a gorgeous downer of a movie. The whole film, — like its protagonist Blake (Michael Pitt), the Cobain analogue: beuatiful, androgynous, and at once impassive and vulnerable, hardened and fragile, just like Kurt himself seemed to be, and like Nirvana’s music actually was, in its expression — has a blankness that haunts you afterwards. The film is composed almost entirely of long shots; the camera stays at a distance as Blake shuffles through the woods, mumbling to himself; or carefully pours himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen (and then puts the cereal box, instead of the milk, into the refrigerator); or nods out in his enormous living room while the TV plays a Boyz II Men video; or ducks out the back door of his mansion as somebody he doesn’t want to see comes in the front; or (the one time he shows any energy) plays his guitar. There’s one scene where the camera views him from outside, through the windows of the mansion, as he plays first one guitar, then another, then drums… and even though he continually drops one instrument for another, the dropped instruments continue to play on the soundtrack, until we hear the sound of an entire band. There are all sorts of odd sounds on the soundtrack: not just non-diegetic music (religious music, mostly) but also seemingly ambient, diegetic sounds — like loud nature sounds (a stream, the wind, etc) — that don’t rightly correspond to the scene we are watching. Time becomes flexible, as well: there are repetitions, jumps in continuity, returns to scenes that had passed earlier, even an entire sequence that happens a second time, with the camera located elsewhere than it was the first… We don’t see Blake shoot up, and we don’t see him die; everything is suspended, before and after, the center (the events themselves) missing. It’s easy to say that the cinematography is in this way providing a mimesis of Blake’s largely absent mental state; but that is an oversimplification, because we are also getting other people’s POVs: a bunch of people who are somehow staying in Blake’s house, although they don’t seem to know him very well; a private investigator who has been hired to find him (but doesn’t); even the gardener who discovers his corpse, and sees his soul ascending to heaven. So in this way the film isn’t psychological (or mimetic of a single consciousness) at all, though it is affective, and powerfully so: we get, not the central character’s absence of affect or negative affect, but precisely the (strong) affectivity of that absence, that blankness. Which means, of course, impersonal affect, affect that isn’t the property of a self at all, that’s floating and impalpable and acausal (is that the right word? I mean that can’t be tied down in terms of psychological cause and effect: it operates on a level that is apart from things like motives and consequences. This is how (and why) Last Days doesn’t explain anything, and how it is thereby absolutely unjudgmental about Blake’s (or for that matter Kurt’s) drug use, detachment from others, and suicide. We are in a place, or at a level, where “responsibility” (or its opposite) simply isn’t a relevant category any longer. Which means that Last Days is entirely aesthetic in attitude, rather than ethical. And I see this aestheticism as subversive: in our “late capitalist” world where absolutely everything is aestheticized, where aestheticization and commodification are always the same thing, where even the production of basic necessities is part of the “culture industry,” — something gets shaken up, a hole or a rupture appears, when aestheticism is pushed to an impossible extreme, when it reaches this absurd, impersonal, purely affective point. It’s a tear in the fabric of our consumerist reality; a tear that is immediately repaired, or covered over, but that nonetheless suggests, for a moment, a different “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciere) and especially of the general and the particular, the universal and the singular. (In the preceding sentence, I wrote “tear” in the sense of ripping; but it strikes me now that “tear” in the sense of weeping would be equally appropriate). Of course, Last Days is still a commodity (even as Nirvana was and is, on a much higher level of commercial success); but its blankness, its hyperbolic affect, its refusal of presence still haunts and lingers.
Last Days
Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a fictionalized account of the last days of Kurt Cobain, is a gorgeous downer of a movie. The whole film, — like its protagonist Blake (Michael Pitt), the Cobain analogue: beuatiful, androgynous, and at once impassive and vulnerable, hardened and fragile, just like Kurt himself seemed to be, and like Nirvana’s music actually was, in its expression — has a blankness that haunts you afterwards. The film is composed almost entirely of long shots; the camera stays at a distance as Blake shuffles through the woods, mumbling to himself; or carefully pours himself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen (and then puts the cereal box, instead of the milk, into the refrigerator); or nods out in his enormous living room while the TV plays a Boyz II Men video; or ducks out the back door of his mansion as somebody he doesn’t want to see comes in the front; or (the one time he shows any energy) plays his guitar. There’s one scene where the camera views him from outside, through the windows of the mansion, as he plays first one guitar, then another, then drums… and even though he continually drops one instrument for another, the dropped instruments continue to play on the soundtrack, until we hear the sound of an entire band. There are all sorts of odd sounds on the soundtrack: not just non-diegetic music (religious music, mostly) but also seemingly ambient, diegetic sounds — like loud nature sounds (a stream, the wind, etc) — that don’t rightly correspond to the scene we are watching. Time becomes flexible, as well: there are repetitions, jumps in continuity, returns to scenes that had passed earlier, even an entire sequence that happens a second time, with the camera located elsewhere than it was the first… We don’t see Blake shoot up, and we don’t see him die; everything is suspended, before and after, the center (the events themselves) missing. It’s easy to say that the cinematography is in this way providing a mimesis of Blake’s largely absent mental state; but that is an oversimplification, because we are also getting other people’s POVs: a bunch of people who are somehow staying in Blake’s house, although they don’t seem to know him very well; a private investigator who has been hired to find him (but doesn’t); even the gardener who discovers his corpse, and sees his soul ascending to heaven. So in this way the film isn’t psychological (or mimetic of a single consciousness) at all, though it is affective, and powerfully so: we get, not the central character’s absence of affect or negative affect, but precisely the (strong) affectivity of that absence, that blankness. Which means, of course, impersonal affect, affect that isn’t the property of a self at all, that’s floating and impalpable and acausal (is that the right word? I mean that can’t be tied down in terms of psychological cause and effect: it operates on a level that is apart from things like motives and consequences. This is how (and why) Last Days doesn’t explain anything, and how it is thereby absolutely unjudgmental about Blake’s (or for that matter Kurt’s) drug use, detachment from others, and suicide. We are in a place, or at a level, where “responsibility” (or its opposite) simply isn’t a relevant category any longer. Which means that Last Days is entirely aesthetic in attitude, rather than ethical. And I see this aestheticism as subversive: in our “late capitalist” world where absolutely everything is aestheticized, where aestheticization and commodification are always the same thing, where even the production of basic necessities is part of the “culture industry,” — something gets shaken up, a hole or a rupture appears, when aestheticism is pushed to an impossible extreme, when it reaches this absurd, impersonal, purely affective point. It’s a tear in the fabric of our consumerist reality; a tear that is immediately repaired, or covered over, but that nonetheless suggests, for a moment, a different “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciere) and especially of the general and the particular, the universal and the singular. (In the preceding sentence, I wrote “tear” in the sense of ripping; but it strikes me now that “tear” in the sense of weeping would be equally appropriate). Of course, Last Days is still a commodity (even as Nirvana was and is, on a much higher level of commercial success); but its blankness, its hyperbolic affect, its refusal of presence still haunts and lingers.