The Truth About The Last Days, Antichrist, The Rapture, More.

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The Truth About The Last Days, Antichrist, The Rapture, More.
http://www.teachingfaith.com/content.cfm?id=304
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Since the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994, thousands of fans have argued and speculated about
certain elements of the musician's life. Journalists, music snobs and fans of alternative music all
feel that they have to weight in on the Cobain debate to even call themselves knowledgeable
about music history. For years, film students and general lovers of cinema abstained courteously
from this debate, because, they probably felt that if they were not fans of Nirvana or music in
general, their opinion had no place in an arena where Cobain enthusiasts were willing to bleed for
their beliefs. This all immediately changed when director Gus Van Sant made a movie about Kurt
Cobain's death that was both factual and artistic.
In 2005, director Gus Van Sant created a movie about the last living days of a tortured musician
named Blake before he commits suicide. The film is simply called "Last Days". Van Sant, known
for his obscure references, nebulous plots and long, drawn out cinematography clearly intended
for Blake to be Kurt Cobain since the conception of his idea. Michael Pitt, the actor that portrays
Blake, has an uncanny likeness to Cobain and acts in an identical fashion. Everything about the
film parallels Cobain's life, from the Pacific Northwest setting to the circle of enabling wannabees
that leech off the rockstar's money and talent. Van Sant's unique directing style tends to spins the
lines of atmosphere, reality and feeling into a web of organized confusion, thus creating an
expertly crafted, layered film. Gus Van Sant chose to interweave reality and fiction all while
creating a new mythos around Cobain's death by exploring the notions of the classic story telling
techniques, sujet and fabula.
In the beginning scenes of the movie Blake mumbles through the forest. He camps overnight,
lights a fire and sings songs until morning breaks. He then returns to his current place of living
where his freeloading friends are asleep. While they're sleeping, Blake unearths a box of goodies
in the front yard, brings them inside and makes Cocoa Crispies. Asia Argento's character, hiply
named "Asia", rises from sleep, walks around the house without pants then opens a door where
she finds an unconscious Blake slumped against the doorway wearing a dress. They rest of the
"day" in the film plays out in the typical fashion of how Cobain probably spent one of his last days:
full of mumbling, drugs, shuffling and interactions with people that are so devoid of sincerity that
their conversations border on painful trivial delirium. The aforementioned series of events is an
example of the fabula of the film. Fabula means the actual order of events that transpired either in
real life or in the vision of the fictional story. In the case of "Last Days", the fabula is a little of both
fact and fiction. The fabula of the rest of the film follows a similar droll until Blake commits suicide.
The audience would probably get tired of watching grungy teenage junkie artist cliches meander
around all day then sleep with each other at night. Van Sant saturates this film with peculiar
coincidences that occur during and only during the twisted time frame that he so intricately wove
into the fabula to keep it from faltering into tedium. This technique can be explored easier when
the sujit of the film is understood.

2. The sujit of the film manifest when the director; in this case, Van Sant, arranges the actual events
of the film to bring light to the underlying meaning that he intentionally injected into the plot. The
sujet of the film can be understood while viewing a few key
scenes.
Towards the beginning of the film, around the second scene, Asia Argento awakes, walks
downstairs, and opens a door to be knocked in the shins by an unconscious Blake. Shortly after
this scene, Blake wanders around in a following scene wearing a black dress on; he then sits
down in one of the house's main rooms. His stomach bothers him and he falls against the
doorway. Asia then opens the door and Blake falls on her. Now, doubting that this sequence of
events happened twice, the audience is inclined to believe that some sort of significance is placed
on this event because it occurred twice. When the audience views the rest of the film, they will see
that sequences like the one above happen frequently, so trusting their judgment, they now know
that the repetition of events from other characters' perspectives helps the underlying meaning or
theme of the story manifest into a noticeable entity thus placing importance on every scene that
builds up to the big picture. That is how the sujit of this particular film works.
It shows that Blake lives in his own world, completely separate from the rest of his crew and the
rest of civilization. There are many moments in the movie where Blake's friends talk to the
disaffected rockstar for many grueling minutes and all he grants them is a weak grunt. His life has
become such a drugged and depressed tedium that he leaves conversations when his friends are
in midsentence and only plays music when no one can listen. He even blatantly ignores a
maternal figure in his life, Kim Gordon, when she pleads that he leaves the hellish house with her
immediately in a car she has waiting outside. The characters in this film could only be devices set
in place to propel the sujit because they have no identity of their own and not a single character is
likeable enough to illicit any sort of emotional response from an audience if they were to change
from the beginning of the film to the end. They are animated stand-ins for important figures in Kurt
Cobain's life. Van Sant must have showed Cobain's nameless meat puppet friends only to erect a
maze of cold distant behavior for the Blake character to navigate until his eventual death. Not even
the protagonist Blake holds any sort of importance because if the audience didn't know that every
minuscule element of the film was based on the last days of Kurt Cobain's life, then would have
probably not seen the movie in the first the place and if they were sitting down to see the picture,
unaware of the hype, they would soon be uninterested shortly into the film. This is not a criticism of
poor filmmaking or characters, it is a slap on the back and a "great job" to Van Sant for creating a
film that galvanizes fabula and sujit together in a mighty combination by using the events that
occurred in reality and the fictional depictions of events to amaze the audience because they're
seeing the film with some prior knowledge about the story and the overall life of Cobain. Van Sant
does not insult his viewers by hammering them over the head with his decisions to portray the last
days in Cobain's life as he did on screen. Instead, he compliments them by not being explicit with
his choices so those in the audience that pick up on his devices feel intelligent and well versed,
thus raising their overall opinion of the director.
Gus Van Sant's unique depiction of sujit and fabula allows "Last Days" to shine as both a creative
depiction of Kurt Cobain's last living days and as a piece of masterfully crafted artwork that
includes its audience in such a clever way that it connects with the audience with each additional
viewing.

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The Truth About The Last Days, Antichrist, The Rapture, More.
http://www.teachingfaith.com/content.cfm?id=304
==== ====