1
JE: The film is about dealing with success.
Under what circumstances do you find your
own success depressing?
GVS: Sometimes I feel like, “Why can’t
things be done a different way?” I’m not sure
Kurt was the type of person that thought this
way but I imagine could have. I guess in the
end it’s a not-wanting-to-play-ball reaction.
JE: In making a movie about Cobain, did
you try to apply or contradict the aesthetics
of Nirvana’s music to the film?
GVS: In some ways we used it. Not in
obvious ways. I always heard Kurt say about
their second album that they were trying to
umentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11— what
do you think you are saying about your out­
look on life through these films?
GVS: Just through metaphors. If you
extend the feelings of politics of today to
some things that are particular to this movie,
there’s a lot of imagery that relates to, in
bleak and abstract ways, but in strong ways, to
something that might be winding down now
like the ends of the Industrial Revolution. An
Illinois railroad man built the house we were
shooting in. So it’s a symbol of affluence at
the turn of the 19th century by railroad
barons. [Blake] apparently sells locomotive
parts, meaning “heavy metal.” [Laughs] It’s this
From left, Pitt stars in Last Days with Lucas Haas and Nicole Vicius.
piss everyone off by making just exactly what
they wanted, yet what happened was everyone
loved it. They thought they were being experi­
mental, and maybe they were, and the public
just liked it. In that way this film might piss
people off. Who knows? We’re just trying to
make the film true to ourselves.
JE: You have taken your past three films
from news headlines and made them very
personal stories rather than address the larger
political spectrum surrounding them. In these
highly political, polemic, didactic times—doc­
overview of decay of Western civilization.
Like the last days of what might be a type of
culture. Maybe a dominant, heavy-metal,
bomb-throwing culture. It doesn’t really
address it specifically. I think energy-wise it
can extend to that. It’s a reaction to the times
that we live in, as is probably all art. Whether
you want it to or not. JH
JOHN E sther is a Los Angeles free-lance film
critic whose work has appeared in Cineaste,
Curve, Lesbian News and The Harvard
Gay & Lesbian Review.
REVIEW
Last Days
The latest from Gus Van Sant is a fictional-
ization of the final days of Kurt Cobain, but,
lovely as the film is, it is bound to disappoint
those expecting to see anything informatively
biographical or directly related to the music of
Nirvana and the more sensationalistic aspects
of Cobain’s tortured life and eventual suicide.
However, viewers who appreciated Van
Sant’s last feature, Elephant, will not feel misled
by the purported premise of Last Days: It’s
“about” Cobain’s untimely death in much the
same way that Elephant was “about” the
Columbine shootings. The same detached, dis­
tancing, matter-of-fact yet austerely beautiful
techniques Van Sant used in Elephant are
employed to even greater effect in Last Days as
real-time episodes of Cobain’s last lonely hours
play out before us.
The Cobain figure, Blake (Michael Pitt),
has isolated himself in a decaying, palatial
country home, and we witness him wandering,
mumbling to himself and possibly high,
through the wixxls and bathing in a stream;
opening the d<x>r to a Yellow Pages salesman;
receiving a concerned record company execu­
tive (Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon); and dealing
with his impassive hipster friends, who lend the
environs a sexually fluid, bohemian air.
In fact, the film follows a Warholian ethos
not only with its ascetic, unflappable tone and
pacing, but also with its nonchalant queemess
(an attitude, it’s worth noting, that Cobain also
used for his own exhilaratingly punkish purpos­
es). Blake slips into women’s bedtime lingerie
and dons eyeliner as if it were part of his usual
morning routine, and one narcissistic fellow
musician discusses his fling with a female
groupie before being beckoned out of rhe room
for a tryst with another male houseguest.
If Elephant’s flaw was an intermittent laxity
in adherence to its poker-faced, quasi -docu­
mentary aesthetic—too many hints, too many
“reasons" for the supposedly inexplicable vio­
lence—then Last Days fulfills Van Sant’s styl­
istically evidenced promise of near-total free­
dom from psychology, explanation or value
judgment. But its stoicism shouldn’t be mis­
taken for indifference: In refusing all falsely
noble sentimentalization and reductive excus­
es, it pays a singularly pure kind of tribute to
its subject.
—Christopher McQuom