The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

Kurt Cobain strained to be understood on a frequency barely audible to most, and as enthusiasts and journalists superimposed their private impressions onto the official transcript of the nineties icon, the faint transmission of the self-proclaimed homesick Martian passed largely without notice. He died alone just as he lived, surrounded but isolated, listened to but rarely heard. To me, Kurt was not a messiah nor even a musical genius (the craftsmanship and historical relevance feels beside the point), what made Kurt remarkable was the depth of his existential hyper-acuity. He lived with both body and mind on fire, able to stand outside the social mores of the unconscious and at least for a short while co-exist. The clinical term is depression but this does not seem to fit what Kurt appeared to be going through, the fierce incapacity to modulate his thoughts mixed with a body in revolt held him in a fixed state of dissociation that as an artist he was able to channel into his music. In the Herzogian sense, Kurt Cobain embodied an ecstatic truth by his presence on the world stage. He meant something even if most of us were incapable of recognizing it: the frail body, disinterested demeanor, lumbering guitar, splintering howls, crunching beats, and the reverb of ‘a denial’.

That said it was a relief to finally find a documentary that went beyond the peripheral importance of the man, and focused on this self-proclaimed unremarkable person. In A.J. Schnack’s intimate portrait, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, interviews conducted sporadically in 1992 and 1993 (within a year of his Kurt’s suicide) elicit Kurt’s reminisces of his life from working-class childhood to bittersweet success as lead singer of Nirvana. His voice carries the film as the visuals take on an almost ontological quality, every so often projecting in stills and flashes and fades the sort of mental images Kurt may have had whilst recounting his life. The documentary operates conscious of the memento mori significance of its content, starting with a God’s eye view of Kurt’s childhood town, Aberdeen, before eventually settling in to a more terrestrial encounter with the people and places his story interacts with. Occasionally his narration breaks to include musical segue ways consisting of songs or artists that had a particular influence on Kurt during these times. The result is an ambient flow of images and music and personal testaments that seems to admirably encapsulate the fragile headspace of its subject. Restricted from the use of any of Nirvana’s music directly for the film, director Schnack used this obstruction to his advantage which, along with the deliberate withholding of any clear images of Kurt onscreen until the final minutes of the film, helped intensify the sense of experiencing Kurt from the inside out.

Whether deliberately selected or not, there is a palpable difference to Kurt’s candor between the interview content that focuses on his early years prior to the signing with Geffen records and that period of success thereafter. When speaking of this early period Kurt sounds happier and unguarded, jumping seamlessly from from one memory to the next. Here we learn of his sense of the possibilities available to him, of his hours of guitar practice each day before it became a job, of the simple America that existed before his parent’s divorce (an event that deeply disillusioned him and which carried over in his music). In the later interviews there is something indecisive and inconsistent, here he becomes audibly combative about the issues confronting his life on the precipice between self-destructive drug-addict and reformed family man. Time and again Kurt over-emphasizes the importance of Courtney Love, as a wife, a mother, a musician. As we do not hear the questions that are posed to Kurt it is hard to tell what prompts these continual addresses to her importance, but as it is framed in the documentary the responses seem too pronounced. Animosity pervades his talk of his day-to-day life, snide asides about revenge and being bullied (replacing the high school jocks now with journalists) all unevenly set alongside his glowing affection for his wife and child.

In one of his tangents, Kurt muses over the significance of his generation; one that he feels marks the end of a kind of innocence. The early nineties did in fact precede the rise of the Internet age, and much of what Kurt comments on with regards to the corporate acceleration of culture is prescient. He suggests that 20 years from then rock music will be nothing more than a fashion statement, a tool used as background fodder for virtual reality machines, pessimism I admit to sharing. I cannot help but get caught up in his lament not only of music but also of art en masse, I feel the same sense of alien disconnect to this trend of consumer apathy. Where it appeared to cripple our generation the new generation seems hardwired for the transition.

His misanthropy too hit home. What he called a monkish attitude and pervasive loathing of the stupidity of people is truly the fixed point through which the Pagan Agenda operates. I have since aspired to control my misanthropy with far more success than had been achieved during my bout of depression, but it is almost impossible for me to not on a daily basis feel weary from the ignorance in the world. By this I mean not of some rote content in the academic sense, but an ignorance of the willingness or ability to even begin to learn. It is the lack of motivation and resolve for understanding itself that pains me, which inevitably leads to inherited or ill-conceived ideologies of convenience, creating ideologues and fanatics, the people that fill the streets, the schools, the political offices, endlessly in denial. I probably would not care enough to be irritated by them were it not for the fact that the saturation of such mediocrity feels like a direct threat to my well-being. It feels like a Herculean task to have the presence of mind to think through an idea, or experience an artwork, with the barrage of distractions modern society affords. The misanthropy that I feel and suppose Kurt felt had a lot to do with a fear of vulnerability, a fear of becoming ‘easily amused’. In the documentary, Kurt lashes out at both the popular and sub-cultural circles, all of their agendas leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

My impression of Kurt from these interviews is of a genuine, gentle, sensitive, ‘special geek’, damaged by the harassment of high school bullies, and the loneliness of not being understood for so long, until Courtney entered his life. It was unfortunate that he chose to use hard drugs as pain medication to soften his chronic stomach pain, as it appears to me that this not only became a physical crutch but an emotional one, and stunted his chance to work out his issues with himself and the people around him. He never learned how to cope with people without this dependency, and was not able to breakthrough on his own terms. His acute pain made for great art, and I appreciate it on that level, but listening to these interviews I cannot help but feel for the person that had to be sacrificed for it.