last days paper final

8/6/2019 Last Days Paper Final

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LAST DAYS by Gus Van SantIn Hindsight, This is Pretty Good Cinema

3095 words

Submitted by:

Felix RebolledoStudent ID # 1376349

In partial fulfillment for the completion of:

Film AestheticsFMST 212 Summer 2006Professor: Randolph Jordan/Peter Rist

Concordia UniversityAugust 14, 2006


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LAST DAYS by Gus Van Sant

In Hindsight, This is Pretty Good Cinema.

Although at first glance, Gus Van Sants film Last Days presents itself as

an actionless, plodding, jumbled minimalist back-stage biographical musical, it

comes together at the wire as a significant revision of Kurt Cobains persona and

a powerful moral statement by the filmmaker. At the end of the movie, Van Sant

presents three things which force the viewer to re-read and rethink the movie as

a whole: the resuscitation scene, or more appropriately, the ascension scene;

Gus Van Sant's Last Days writing and directing stand-alone card in the credits;

and the disclaimer which states that Although this film is inspired in part by the

last days of Kurt Cobain, the film is a work of fiction.

Individually, these three "things" appear to be inconsequential but each

has a specifically significant role to play in the re-reading of the film. The

ascension scene provides a mystical/mythical dimension to the story which the

on-screen plot did not have to that point. Van Sants credit, cut in during the last

scene of the film, affirms his ownership of the text as his appropriation, his take

on those last days. The disclaimer opens up the story even more by redirecting

the mystical reading to make the association with the last days of Kurt Cobains

life while distancing us from a strict biographical reading of the movie and invites

the spectator to interpret the movie formalistically, at face value for deeper

significance.

Rebolledo/Last Days page 1


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Reading of the film without the ascension scene:

For a casual viewer watching this film from the confines of the codified

expectations of a classical Hollywood cinema perspective, Last Days would

reveal itself as an unsatisfying experience and an exercise in frustration. As a

back-stage biographical musical in the spirit of Bob Fosses All That Jazz, Last

Days doesnt have much going for itfor the average mainstream viewer, this is

the antithesis of the genre. Its undramatic backstage settings and low-key show-

business plot set in the world of grunge music do not provide the expected

titillation usually provided by a full-blown Hollywood mise-en-scene featuring

fantastic settings or locations, flashy costumes, stylized hair and make-up, a

great looking cast of thousands, and big-production staging and lighting. What

the average viewer gets instead is a low-budget feature set in a decrepit, beat up

mansion with a (sickly) greenish colour palette, a cast where the principals are

virtually unknown to mass audiences, look like they dress at the neighbourhood

thrift store, drive rusted out junkers, and can barely keep warmhardly the

elements of what dreams are made of.

From a classic Hollywood narrative standpoint, Last Days is repetitive,

plodding and lacking coherence: the film is spatially and temporally

discontinuous. Reading the film as a linear narrative, it is difficult to follow and

keep track of the actual course of events or to coherently define the spaces as

characters move from one room to another. Like in Resnais L'anne dernire

Marienbad, what plot there is seems inconclusive, directionless and fraught with



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inconsistency and ambiguity. Characters come and go without reason and

situations are set up which do not move the story forward (the Yellow Pages

salesman) or feel devoid of causality and purpose (the detective telling us about

the Chinese magician). Numerous scenes frustrate the forward movement of the

narrative and the temporal progression of the plot is difficult to ascertain (when

Scott, Luke, Asia and Nicole leave in the car and cross paths with the detective

and Donovan, whos coming and whos going?). Why does the filmmaker insist

on repeating shots and framings (characters caught between floors on the

stairs)? Or providing lengthened versions of shots as part of circular narrative

sequences (Asia discovering Blake passed out in the TV room or Luke with Blake

in the music room)?

The films sound design is as frustrating and inconclusive as the visuals.

The film is bookended with medieval musichardly the first choice of the

Nirvana-philic grunge crowd. In fact, for a rock n roll film, there is very little

music. Apart from the Boys II Men On Bended Knee and Venus in Furs by Lou

Reed, the sound track is marked by a lack of big time commercial artists. The

films music cues are works by the film actors themselves, Michael Pitt or Lukas

Haas, or by small time alternative artists such as Rodrigo Lopresti a.k.a. The

Hermitt and tenlons fort, not what the average viewer would expect.

Soundscapes accompanying the visuals are often as disorienting and non-

sensical as the visuals: in the opening scenes with Blake and interspersed

throughout the film, we hear bells, doors creaking open and shutting, a church

service, a mopedsound elements which make no sense with the environments



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presented on screen. Rather than engage us, the audio makes the viewer

question his interest in what is being presented.

Even if on a cursory viewing we guess or surmise that Blake is sitting in

for Kurt Cobain, the traditional biopic read is totally unsatisfying. Where's the

glam? The groupies? The limos? The night-life? The big rock concert stage

shows? The meetings with the high-power deal-makers? Without Courtney or the

daughter, theres no grist for the gossip mill. We dont even get the thrill (?) of

seeing Blake cook heroin or shoot up with morphine. Instead of a genius and

icon of the counterculture or the most important musician of the last ten years,

we are served up a broken-down, mumbling, stumble-bum in a grimy t-shirt and

torn jeans.

If the casual viewer wishes to understand the film on its most superficial

levels for referential or explicit meanings, the impulse is frustrated because the

narrative of the film is not structured as a cause-effect chain and the film maker

does not really come out (show) and make a nicely packaged moral statement.

We either take the film at face value and drop it or scratch the surface and look

for clues which will yield other interpretations.

Reading of the film with the ascension scene

The ascension scene is pivotal to coming to terms with Last Days. It

requires that the viewer watch the film again in a different light and re-read it in a

mystical or mythical way: the superimposition of a naked Blake onto his corpse,



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sitting up and climbing up an invisible ladder (a new cover of Stairway to

Heaven?) and out of the frame is too reminiscent of the Ascension of Christ to

not look within Last Days for symbolism which could point to the "Last Days of

Christ." And if this is so, the ascension scene would beg the question of reading

the film as hagiography or a messianic text.

Given Blake's presentation as an incoherent and rambling protagonist, it is

difficult to see him as a Messiah even if from the earliest scenes we are invited to

make parallels: we see Blake in the wilderness (through which civilization passes

through it in the form of a train) battling his demons; bathing in the river (Jordan)

in which he urinates; mastering his fears and doubt in the night (by singing Home

On the Range, a pun on focus on deranged?). The castle or mansion where

Blake lives can be seen as the Promised Land, where Blake can forget the cares

of this world in order to devote himself to finding Truth. The angels God has sent

to minister upon him (Scott, Luke, Asia and Nicole) are far from angelic, theyre

more like the dogs chasing the stag in the image hanging in the living room.

Their drunkenness, sexual licence, excesses of all kinds and occasional

travestism, always correspond to a call to chaos.1 And macaroni and cheese as

the Last Supper is not what one would expect for our latter day Messiah.

Though Van Sant presents the theme of wilderness as a recurring motif

throughout the movie, both outdoors (the forest, the swamp, the river, the lake)

and indoors (through wall art depicting wilderness), as the figurative setting for

Last Days, Christs and Blakes wilderness experiences produce totally different

results. When Jesus, the sinless one, comes to the Jordan, it isnt to be washed



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free from sin, but to be bathed in our sinfulness, to take on all the dark, dirty

mess that is human life. Jesus is immersed in humanity. 2 Blake emerges from

the river and tells the world to piss off. For Christ the wilderness is the ultimate

place of solitude, silence, emptiness, purification, truth and openness, the place

to be with God alone, free of all distractions, the place where we can discover the

compassion, love and non-violence of God.3 For Blake, the wilderness is

understood as disorientation, failure of purpose and total loss of identification.

The wilderness is the moment in which we either throw ourselves into Gods

arms or give in to the temptation of despair.

4

In the shot of the split in the road,

Van Sant shows Blake wilfully opting for the latter; he chooses the left, the

beaten track. It is at this moment that we see that Blake is unwilling to take on

the role of the Messiah. And it is through his drug-addled, rambling existence

(underscored throughout the film by the soundscape composition The Doors of

Perception by Hildegaard Westerkamp) that we really sense Blakes lack of

purpose. Though opiates have been commonly used for artistic or reflective

purposes to bring clarity and increased focus,5 too much of a good thing will kill

you. And if heroin was his key to the locks of the doors perception, Blake's

ceaseless consumption (which we never see him do) become his own private

Golgothaa slow, tottering march to his demise in the garden shed. The

premonitory, recurring ringing bell motif (from The Doors of Perception

soundscape, the doorbell, or the phone ringing) is reminiscent of John Donnes

For Whom the Bell Tolls and its opening stanza, Perchance he for whom this

bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may



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think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see

my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. 6

In looking at the film from a religious point of view, we come to understand

that the events depicted by the plot is a Via Dolorosa of demeaned

representations of passages from the last days of Christ or a loose interpretation

of the Jesus in the wilderness story. Van Sant systematically undermines the

Blake character to bring him down literally and figuratively to the level of (abject)

humanityimplicitly, the film would have us understand that Blake, as a latter

day prophet, is a failed Messiah.

The Significance of the Gus Van Sant Credit and the Disclaimer

If the ascension scene forces us to re-interpret the films visual symbols

then the Gus Van Sant writing and directing stand-alone card asks us to accept

Last Days as a filmic statement for which he takes responsibility. The fact that

the credit is placed within a scene in the film, as a cut-away from the action and

serving as an elision in the plot, calls attention to Van Sants involvement in

shaping the form of the film, to the way the film works as a film and the devices

he calls upon to make its statement. The key credits and the Kurt Cobain

disclaimer (usually found at the very end of the credits) appear to form part of this

way of thinkingthey can be read as part of the formal narrative strategy of the

film, like framing, camera movement, etc, rather than as appendages. The credits

call attention to themselves as signposts pointing at demystifying the process of



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production and for the viewer to pay particular attention at how these key

production personnel have shaped or affected the way the plot has been

presented. They encourage a more formalistic approach to interpreting the film.

Applying this line of thinking to the ascension scene, we can see it as

emblematic of the artifice of cinema. The superimposition of Blakes naked figure

on the foreshortened prostrate body of Blake (reminiscent of Mantegnas

foreshortened depiction of Christ) calls out to cinemas inherent powers to

surpass paintings ability to put anything on a canvas/screen and make it

believablethe simple superimposition (a technologically souped-up version of

Magrittes surrealism) harkens to the earliest effects of cinemas illusionism at the

hands of Georges Mlis and films subsequent development into a seamless,

invisible narrative art form which would have viewers swallow hook, line and

sinker its exploitative ersatz reality.

The Kurt Cobain disclaimer unabashedly links the film with the last days of

Kurt Cobains life. It acknowledges the easy association while distancing us from

a strict biographical reading and excusing the film from having to present a

forensic recreation of the events. Attaching the movie to Kurt Cobain can be seen

as motivation for a unit-shifter marketing strategy or a politically motivated bait-

and-switch exercise in consciousness raising, but what it does do is give Van

Sant free rein to deconstruct the Kurt Cobain myth and couple it to a

decommodification of the narrative feature film. Van Sant rages against The

Machine by refusing to get on the posthumous deification and idol worship

bandwagon and by sabotaging the films narrative drives through the systematic



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the musician going at his music: instead of heightening the suspense or the

emotional impact of the scene, the camera movement dampens the drama.

Last Days depicts Blakes physical and emotional constrains and the

stultifying effects of the environment, by presenting shots as bastardized tryptichs

(often in doorways) where the frame is divided into three zones in which only the

central portion presents any action. These doorways illustrate Blakes

constrained condition while reminding the viewer that the action is being framed

on purpose. The frame motif is also picked up and repeated as window frames,

picture frames, mirrors, television sets, etc to the point that this motif is more

present than not and revealing of Blakes cooped-up mindset. For example, in

depicting the doors of the garden shed, the meaning of the frame motif (as

presented by the window panes on the French doors) is widened to include

captivity or psychological fragmentation only after Blakes suicide are the

French doors left open.

The film makes the viewer work hard to piece together the chronological

order of the plot and make sense of the visual spaces. The scene where Blake

passes out in the TV room is illustrative of many of the techniques used by Van

Sant to keep the viewer working overtime. Not only is this scene shown

repeatedly, but it serves as a hub for simultaneous narratives. The music of Boys

II Men from the video On Bended Knee (the TV as a repetition of the frame motif

and as a representation of a fake, idealized reality) serves as the anchor for the

scene even though The Doors of Perception drifts in an out to illustrate Blake's

coming and goings from cogent consciousness. The music provides the linkage



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(as does the red chair) between the cuts or angles which bring the space

together (distancing Kuleshov effect instead of a master shot and breakdown).

The altered repetition of on-screen events serves to foreground the ability of the

filmmaker to select and mold the narrative to provide multiple (possibly

ambiguous) versions or interpretations of the same event and get the viewer to

question the reliability of the narrative and the intent of the filmmaker. The fact

that these strategies recur throughout Last Days encourage the viewer to take a

skeptical stance towards the character, the film itself, the Kurt Cobain icon, and

by extension, Hollywood, the media and life in general. In the words of the real

Blake, If the Doors of Perception were cleansed, everything would appear to

man as it is: infinite.7 But to look at this film through William Blakes poetry would

cause one to start brushing off imaginary flies.

In Last Days, Gus Van Sant refuses to ride the Kurt Cobain myth and is

(ambivalently) reluctant to cash in on the Kurt Cobain name. He strips the film of

any possible mythification of the Blake persona by dwelling on his constant drug

use and by setting up from the earliest scenes his shirking of all responsibility or

obligation as an alternative cultural leader to his fans. Van Sant is essentially

telling us that notwithstanding his musical genius, Kurt Cobain was a mere

mortal, a junkie with serious health problems and psychological issues. And in

combination with the stylistic and formal elements of the film, Gus Van Sant

seems to be stating that Kurt Cobains posthumous iconic persona is as fictional

a fabrication as any run-of-the-mill Hollywood fiction feature film.



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1 Cirlot, J.E., A Dictionary of Symbols. Translated from the Spanish by Jack Sage. Entry on Orgy, p.244.(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967-1981)2 Rider, Anne. Facing into the Wilderness, A sermon preached the first Sunday in Lent 20033 (http://www.johndear.org/sermons_homilies/spirit_drove_jesus.html)4 Ibid.5 http://www.datejesus.com/sermons/cobain/6 Donne, John, For Whom the Bell Tolls7 Blake, William, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, (1790-1792)
http://www.johndear.org/sermons_homilies/spirit_drove_jesus.htmlhttp://www.johndear.org/sermons_homilies/spirit_drove_jesus.html

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