"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."
The opera is "based on Gus Van Sant’s largely wordless and plot-free 2005 movie 'Last Days,' in which a Cobain-like character roams around a country house falling asleep, listening to music and trying to avoid his housemates, manager, a Yellow Pages salesman and two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
This is making me think about that Netflix movie "Blonde," which is about Marilyn Monroe (as envisioned by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates). I actually watched that movie. I've blogged about it a couple times, but not since actually seeing it. The words "could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points" resonated. When a work isn't trying to give a factual account of a famous person's life but to adopt the famous persona and present evocative scenes, you can either focus on the facts about the famous person or accept the work of art on its own terms. I thought "Blonde" was quite good at doing what it tried to do, but it's an immense pain to anybody obsessing over factual accuracy. It's like "Citizen Kane." Either get into that spirit or don't subject yourself to it.
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This is making me think about that Netflix movie "Blonde,"
Same here.
The next advance in the biopic will explore how artists treat biopics.
Cobain’s shotgun will be named Rosebud.
I recently read, and perhaps it was blogged about here, can’t remember for sure, an article by the guy who wrote the famous cobain bio from the 90’s. He was looking back on their relationship some many decades later and it revealed a lot of the real person behind the myth, and i was also struck by how it revealed cobain’s own role in his myth-making. Pretty fascinating stuff.
The opera is "based on Gus Van Sant’s largely wordless and plot-free 2005 movie 'Last Days,' in which a Cobain-like character roams around a country house falling asleep, listening to music and trying to avoid his housemates, manager, a Yellow Pages salesman and two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
It seemed bleak and empty to me, like Control the film about Ian Curtis, another suicidal musician. Movies about suicides, real or fictional, and their last days are an established subgenre. They are rarely uplifting and they don't usually have happy endings.
it sounds like these Opera makers have gone out of their way to avoid looking seriously Cobain's life.
no word about his horrible toxic wife and what it might mean that society presented her as a icon in her own right back in the day.
nothing about his out of control drug use, which included near death overdose experiences, and what it might mean that American society has so much destructive drug addiction in it, then and now.
and nothing about what lay beneath his drug use and self-destructive relationships. what was the famous root cause of his suicide? Chris Cornell from soundgarden, another Seattle band, killed himself and it turned out he had childhood sexual abuse in his past, Maybe the same for cobain? he comes across like an abuse victim a lot of the time. does anyone want to ask what it means for society that so many young men seem to suffer from this?
instead it's all about his interactions with Mormons and phone book salesman.
So the popular girl bully understood Agathe Rousselle better than Agathe Rousselle understood herself.
Note that all these famous folks mentioned by Agathe Rousselle who killed themselves were in to drugs long before they were famous.
"The show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing..."
So they're basically just re-telling the same joke as Weird Al's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" parody -- in which Al as Curt mumbles the lyrics so badly that eventually you can't even understand them. (In the fantastic video, some of words are subtitled, but the subtitlers themselves can't figure them out.) Cobain himself reportedly loved it.
Partial lyrics:
Now I'm mumblin', and I'm screamin'
And I don't know what I'm singin'
Crank the volume, ears are bleedin'
I still don't know what I'm singin'
We're so loud and incoherent
Boy, this oughta bug your parents
Yeah!
Blergh!
Haai!
It's unintelligible
I just can't get it through my skull
It's hard to bargle nawdle zouss
With all these marbles in my mouth....
Poor Frances
Two of my favorite albums are the last ones by David Bowie and Glen Campbell. Both men were diagnosed with a terminal illness, and both took their remaining time to create vulnerable, moving works of genius that reflected on death. I'm glad no one wants to make a movie about their last days -- the music is enough -- but these are much more interesting people to contemplate. I guess, they fulfilled their potential. The suicides/overdosers never did, which makes people want to resolve their stories.
When a work isn't trying to give a factual account of a famous person's life but to adopt the famous persona and present evocative scenes, you can either focus on the facts about the famous person or accept the work of art on its own terms. I thought "Blonde" was quite good at doing what it tried to do, but it's an immense pain to anybody obsessing over factual accuracy. It's like "Citizen Kane." Either get into that spirit or don't subject yourself to it.
I haven't seen Blonde yet.
The left is flipping out about it.
“ So they're basically just re-telling the same joke as Weird Al's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" parody”
Excellent point!
I guess, they fulfilled their potential. The suicides/overdosers never did, which makes people want to resolve their stories.
I think you're right about people's wanting resolution, but I imagine it's possible that the people who commit suicide or who overdose do so at least in part because they are afraid they have reached their potential. Or, alternatively stated, that they were adjudged to have much greater potential than they believed they actually did, and they couldn't cope with the shame.
Terminal imposter syndrome.
I do have sympathy for such people, but it's limited, because of the devastating effects on their survivors of their decision not to find another way to cope with the fact that we all inevitably disappoint ourselves, others, or both. I know "their decision" is a judgmental way to put it, and that for some people, the abuse that formed them made them unable to respond to life's challenges any other way. But the pain of those who love them and survive them needs to be in the balance too.
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