(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
“Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.”
Last Days is a religious film. A loosely fictional account of the days leading up to the suicide of the lead singer of an internationally famous grunge band, it is an extended meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain. It is a passion play in the truest sense of the term, each scene the stop on a walk through the “stages of the cross” that traces the last days of this musician named Blake. Perhaps we can even sense hints of Veronica in a scene where a young woman helps him lean back up against a wall, the Garden of Gethsemane in a haunting acoustic performance offered like a plaintive prayer, or the paralyzing fear of the disciples after the death of Christ as the only friends around Blake in the film scatter at the end. Whether or not these parallels exist, the film is unashamed hagiography, this character Blake standing in for Kurt Cobain.
It opens on Blake wandering in the woods, a noble savage, with no explanation offered until we are allowed to see the hospital bracelet on his wrist. He eventually makes his way through these woods to a ramshackle mansion that is either owned by him or a group of hipster musician friends currently occupying it. For a while he wanders through this house mumbling discursively to himself, frequently changing outfits, and even setting up another year’s worth of advertisements in the Yellow Pages with a representative that stops by.
Eventually we learn that Blake has escaped from a rehab facility in the last few days before the deal for a world tour was supposed to be signed. At some point he takes a conference call from band mates about this contract to which he mumbles a few times and then hangs up. There are two moments in the film where Van Sant portrays Blake as someone being used by those around him, this phone call and a later scene where one of his friends asks for money and then actually reaches into his pocket and grabs some. Blake is far too weak or coherent to care about either. These scenes are fairly blatant criticisms of Blake’s companions and band mates, as if his celebrity and influence extended to those around him and their desire to maintain this connection contributed to his collapse. If so, this is a hefty commentary on Cobain’s following as a whole and a point at which all comparisons to the passion story of Jesus fall apart.
Other than these scenes, Van Sant includes little narrative detail. A private eye has been hired to track him down following his escape from rehab. He does little other than add a story about Billy Robinson, a vaudeville performer who switched his persona to that of a Chinese magician because they were so popular at the time. His signature act was catching a bullet in his teeth, which made him very famous until one killed him. In his report, the coroner actually called this “death by misadventure,” but conspiracy theorists have often wondered whether it was really a suicide. The analogy here is frighteningly obvious. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon makes an appearance in a kindly attempt at tough love. She asks him if he talks to his daughter, and if so, “Do you say I’m sorry that I’m a rock and roll cliché?” He turns down her invitation to take him back to rehab. One can sense both her concern and disgust at this wasted genius. Unlike others in the film, for her it isn’t about “the scene” as much as it is about reality. Towards the end of the film Blake wanders down to town where he meets an admirer played by Harmony Korine at a club. Blake’s non-responsiveness is complete, as if he has already left the world, and he stumbles back up the long hill to the mansion and to his death.
For most of the film we just follow Blake around as he eludes those who are looking for him. Most of what he says we can’t understand, and most of what he does is unpredictable to the point of being parabolic. In this sense Van Sant seems to be channeling another passion film in that Dreyer’s The Passion of the Joan of Arc isn’t as much about history as it is about a person. Overlaid by the bare facts of the circumstances of her death, Dreyer’s close scrutiny of Joan’s face is an emotional exercise. In the same way Van Sant gives birth to the hopelessness and despair of Blake’s demise, the only difference being that we never really get a glimpse of his face. Dreyer affords us uninhibited access to Joan by means of well-placed close-up shots; Van Sant effectively hides Blake from us.
Perhaps it is Van Sant’s odd focus of on a Boyz II Men video that provides another center to the film. In one room of the house Blake turns on the TV while their video “On Bended Knee” is playing. It is not just that this video is so embarrassingly plastic that it contrasts the humanity of Blake’s plight, or that its cheesiness points to the MTV consumerism that also contributed to Blake’s suicide. Later in the film Van Sant plays almost the entirety of Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs,” which eventually contains the same lyric, “on bended knee.” (Severin, severin, speak so slightly/Severin, down on your bended knee/Taste the whip, in love not given lightly/Taste the whip, now plead for me/I am tired, I am weary/I could sleep for a thousand years/A thousand dreams that would awake me/Different colors made of tears). There is a grinding intertextuality at play here, one that highlights both the schlock of the Boyz II Men song and the mock emotionalism of the Lou Reed lyric. The artificiality inherent to both reflects on the nature of Blake’s career and may clue us into a vague sense of his self-perception.
Any thoughts about the film as a passion narrative are inspired by a final scene. Blake’s body is found the next morning by an observant gardener, and while he is peering through the window at his body Blake’s soul steps out of it and begins climb upwards, using the window as a ladder. This scene comes as a surprisingly abstract end to a film that has been so realist in tone up to this point. It also comes as a surprisingly religious conclusion to a loosely fictional film about one of America’s favorite icons of middle-class nihilism. This ascension isn’t an afterthought to Blake’s “last days,” it is the conclusion. Van Sant also doesn’t allow us to accept this startling image as a metaphor for the platitude that “his spirit will live on.” After his body is discovered, the other people staying at the mansion realize they could be charged with complicity in the tragedy. As they flee, one questions whether issues of legacy in this case are even feasible. This image of ascension signifies Blake’s worth as a person over and against his worth as a cultural icon. It is not a theological image as is its passion narrative parallel, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. It is an utterly human image, an iconography of pathos that robs Cobain’s death of its purely cultural overtones and recasts it in the dignity of anonymous suffering.