last days
This is something promised a while back, an essay on Last Days by Gus Van Sant, which got delayed because it was part of my MA submission (see previous posts). However since that's now failed and I won't reapply it's possible to post now.
Last Days
A lot of things are 'known' and have been written about Gus Van Sant's Last Days. While interesting in their own way not all of these facts illuminate the film as a piece of art in any meaningful way. Before going any further we'd better get these 'knowns' out of the way. Three are wholly immaterial to this review: that the film is third in a trilogy about premature death, that it's based on the last days of Kurt Cobain, and that no drug-taking or moment of suicide is shown. Three other 'knowns' will play a part (however minor) in what follows: that the film is semi-improvised, that there is no conventional narrative arc, and that at least one of the characters, the Yellow Pages salesperson, is exactly that. He turned up during pre-production, and was asked to take part in a scene.
In this review I want to look at six scenes or groups of scenes that for me sum up important themes in the film. These are the opening, the Yellow Pages salesman, Blake running away, skinny young men, repeated scenes, and the greenhouse. Along the way I'll briefly touch on the semi-improvised nature of the film and the lack of conventional narrative. I'll look in greater detail at performance, particularly Michael Pitt as the central character Blake, and at the cinematography.
Yellow Pages
To subvert the order of things set out above, I think the best starting point is with the Yellow Pages salesman. In an almost wholly negative review in Sight & Sound Stephen Dalton describes this section as 'inconsequential', which I think betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the film's accomplishment. As already stated and widely publicised, Thadeus A Thomas a genuine Yellow Pages salesman, turned up at a pre-production wardrobe session and was given a role. This kind of Improvisation and adaptability is not unknown even in films with larger budgets and more prescriptive structures. In a lower budget piece where the cast were encouraged to improvise their lines it can almost be expected. But far from being unnecessary or inconsequential the inclusion of Mr Thomas provides one of the longest scenes of dialogue in the movie.
Blake, the shuffling, mumbling, Kurt Cobain-esque figure at the heart of the movie answers the door to one of his mansion's many visitors. It's the man selling Yellow Pages ad-space, and he's invited in. As Blake sits nodding off in front of him wearing a slip and overcoat the man runs through his sales pitch, first enquiring whether the previous edition's listing was successful. Like everyone else who visits the house the salesman has an agenda. Unlike the others his agenda is absolutely transparent, and has no personal component - he's simply doing. Despite this, and again unlike the majority of other characters in the film, the salesman seems to radiate a genuine human warmth toward Blake. And that warmth is not derived from a knowledge of Blake or his status, the man doesn't recognise him. It makes this the most humane and affecting scene of human contact in the movie even if it serves no narrative purpose.
An instructive contrast with this scene can be found in one of the movie's less successful sequences. This is where Kim Gordon from the band Sonic Youth, who had contact with Kurt Cobain, the model for Blake, playing a record company executive tries to persuade Blake/Cobain to leave the house for a scheduled tour. I don't know, but I suspect the dialogue was largely improvised, as throughout the scene there appears to be an uncomfortable personal agenda. Gordon seems to be saying things she might have wanted to say to Cobain in the aftermath of his death had the opportunity been there. Blake asks her what he should do, and she says he should say sorry, among other things "...for being a rock n' roll cliché." There's no doubt this is heartfelt, and in the right context very affecting, but it's heavy-handed and inappropriate here. A clue that it might be personal is that it echoes remarks made by Cobain's mother, "I told him not to join that stupid club [of rock stars who died at 27]", and his widow Courtney Love, here reading and commenting on his suicide note for fans in the immediate aftermath, "And don't remember this because this is a fucking lie: 'It's better to burn out, than fade away.' God, you asshole!" This finality, a sense of something that's already happened, in Gordon's dialogue, and her pause at the door on leaving, seem awkwardly determinist in the context of this film.
This contrast of tones, and the viewer's discomfort at the more prescriptive sense of narrative in the Kim Gordon scene, shows how successfully Van Sant foregrounds the human elements of storytelling, whilst reducing the need for plot. We are made to care more about an individual than about the spurious destination that most film scripts aim for. We all know that narrative is inherently a falsification, and that resolution at the end of a story is the biggest distortion of all. Last Days highlights that, even though we know what the end of this story will be. Van Sant knows that the journey is more important than the destination.
Performance
A word on performance. Michael Pitt as Blake/Cobain is on screen most of the time, but usually at a distance or obscured in some way. Barely more than a dozen words he says in the movie are intelligible and his face is usually hidden - turned away from camera, behind his hair or a large pair of shades, or under a hood. Yet it's a brilliantly expressive performance. It recalls the performances Werner Herzog managed to draw from Klaus Kinski. A particularly interesting comparison is with Kinski in Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God. For the entirety of that film the expressive and physical actor Kinski is still and says very little. He's mostly filmed from behind or from the side, his face often only quarter profile. All these restraints on his natural tendencies elicit an astonishing performance from Kinski. The similar obscuring in Last Days seems to have a similar effect. There is a major difference though, where Kinski's Aguirre is still, Pitt's Blake is peripatetic. A sickly and suicidal junkie the character may be, but for most of the film he's doing things or going places. It's almost a deliberate challenge to those who want to see only frailty and doom in the Blake/Cobain character.
The relative absence of plot, and allowing actors to improvise their dialogue frees the film from the tyranny of exposition, narrative arcs, and all the other paraphernalia of screenwriting. It means that characters can be allowed to breathe, and the film to seem more real. There are moments when this doesn't work. I already identified Kim Gordon's scenes, and where a narrative milestone has to crop up, for instance a call from someone we suppose is Blake's wife, the film loses its lightness of touch. And some of the dialogue feels self-indulgent, a little like the overly-aware and stilted speech of Quentin Tarantino's characters. But for the most part the performances are naturalistic and low-key, and unlike Tarantino's movies it never feels like the characters are trying to ingratiate themselves with us. As Van Sant is quoted as saying in a Sight & Sound feature, "The way real people talk is always better than even a brilliant script."
Opening
In cinematic terms the opening of Last Days is very 'un-American' in sensibility, and reminded me of any number of Japanese or Korean movies where nature plays a role. In particular the waterfall and river that Blake makes his way down to and swims in was reminiscent of the lake at the heart of Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring. A little later, as Blake walks through a field and an intrusively noisy train suddenly locates us in the present, Satyajit Rai's Pather Pachali and Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba are visually echoed. The only American director that immediately comes to mind as associated with similar images is Terrence Malick. In his films, especially Thin Red Line, his ecological awareness threatens to overwhelm everything else. That's not a risk here. While never being reduced to mere mise en scene, the natural world is primarily a stage, an unknowable and vast place, but secondary to the human drama.
In the opening, and whenever the grounds of the estate feature, the pathetic fallacy is avoided. The trees, lakes, grass don't represent any emotion state or symbolise anything. The pathetic fallacy is present in the film. Blake's mansion, labyrinthine and crumbling, is clearly an external manifestation of his decaying mental state. But this isn't overplayed, and the one space that is clearly Blake's unique possession is the greenhouse, which doesn't seem to be symbolic in the same way. Out in the woods the film almost plays against itself, providing the nearest thing it has to redemption. Here Blake is most incontestably alive, whether he's swimming, tramping through marshy ground or sat overlooking a lake. Perhaps there is an American sensibility here. A literary sensibility not often seen in movies, derived from Whitman and Thoreau perhaps. A sensitivity to the landscape that might make this film kin to that curious western by Jim Jarmusch, the haunting Dead Man. A film which also features a dying young man called Blake, in this case William Blake.
Running away
The third group of scenes I want to examine are those where Blake's running away from people. Like the opening these scenes play against the ostensible theme of the movie by being more about life than death. They do this in a different way though, they're actually kind of funny. There are other funny scenes in the film, but the scenes of Blake running away provide an obvious physical comedy. In one interior shot, and one exterior shot shown twice, Blake runs from friends who are trying to find him. His slow speed, absurd gait and furtive demeanour make the scenes indisputably comic. But at the same time they're underlaid by tragedy, Blake simply can't deal with these people any more. It calls to mind a tragicomic set of events in Kurt Cobain's life. In January 1993 Nirvana played two gigs in Brazil. Before the second gig in Rio the band were going to work on their next record, Charles R Cross, Cobain's biographer takes up the story, "...when they checked into their high rise hotel... Kurt, after an argument with Courtney, threatened to leap to his death... Finally [Jeff] Mason and Alex MacLeod took him to find another hotel. "We checked into hotel after hotel, but couldn't stay because we'd walk into a room and there would be a balcony, and he would be ready to jump," Mason explained." Superficially funny in an almost vaudevillian way, the motivation underneath is too apparent and too raw for sustained laughter.
But back with the scenes I'm discussing, the interior shot, the first scene of Blake running away, is also the funniest. There are hints of farce, and a definite absurdity in his close proximity to the people he's trying to evade as he makes his dash. Again there's the glimmer of life. Not just in the comedy, but in the fact that Blake's an active agent, he does something. A lot of the time in the film when other people intrude on him Blake either hides, or more often sits there blankly, hiding behind his hair and a flat affect.
Skinny young men
Another cluster of scenes is that relating to skinny young men. This is no altogether surprising - the film is ostensibly about a rock star's last days, and rock's conventionally a predominantly young, and male preserve. And throughout his career homosexuality and homoeroticism have played a role in Van Sant's movies, from his feature debut Mala Noche, through Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, to the three most recent films. Here, however the element of sex isn't one of the sources of life. Instead there's almost a fatalistic, even a necrophiliac aspect to it.
Of the three key scenes to this cluster one is right at the beginning and one at the end. As they echo one another I'd like to take them together. At the opening, having wandered a little through the woods, Blake strips down to his boxers in order to swim in the lake. At the end of the movie his ghostly figure, perhaps representing his soul, rises naked from his corpse and begins to climb upward. Although uncomfortably skinny in the film, perhaps too much to be conventionally attractive, there's no doubt the camera loves Michael Pitt as Blake when he's naked. But at the same time, when he's naked, the camera seems to be objectifying him. He seems more pinned-down, more iconic. Perhaps it's because at these moments Pitt appears to be exposed and vulnerable, and that all the other iconic-seeming moments in the film are borrowed from existing photos and footage of Cobain, and already over-familiar. There are also visual echoes of Todd Haynes' much more homoerotic Velvet Goldmine, which examined the more sexually transgressive side of 1970's glam rock. This featured another young actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, playing another semi-fictional rock star, this time a David Bowie/Marc Bolan hybrid, with some near-iconic nude moments.
The other key scene is both more explicit, and far less sexual. Two of Blake's male friends retreat upstairs from a party and begin foreplay on a bed. There's a coldness to their encounter, perhaps because they've been established as fairly dislikable characters. There's more life in this near-sex scene than in the frozen but beautiful scenes of Blake naked that almost bookend the film, but far less eroticism.
Cinematography
I had a word about performance earlier. Now I'd like to look at the cinematography of Director of Photography Harris Savides. Much of the film is gloomy, shot in dim interiors, in shade, in half-light, and yet the images are never less than clear, the palette unified and attractive. The film never looks murky. I'm not sure why the film is lit the way it is, unless the decision was made to use mainly available light. However the choice was made it turned out well, and the film looks great. There are some gorgeous natural greens out in the woods. In the interior the predominant shades are browns and oranges. The flesh tones are also rendered beautifully.
This half-light is in contrast to the harsh, glaring light that's characteristic of both Gerry and Elephant, the previous two films in this 'death' trilogy. But in the overall aesthetic of the film it would be unthinkable for the light to be any different. It suits the tone of the movie, of a piece with the decision not to show us Blake taking drugs or killing himself, with the close mic-ing of sounds, and sometimes running them out of synch with the images. The film is a coherent unit, each part supporting each other.
Repeated scenes
As with the other films in the trilogy there's a device of revisiting the same scenes later from another perspective. Perhaps entering with another character and exiting at a different point. The device is used more sparingly than in Elephant. In an interview found online, but apparently sent out with the press pack for the movie, Van Sant explains, "Elephant [...]has the most extensive and successful circling of time, because of these characters being so separate. We were attempting that same thing in Last Days but then we realised that [...] Blake was so dominant that it was hard to go off with other characters for [...] long periods of time."
There are two scenes where this circling is especially successful. Firstly there's the sequence when some of Blake's friends turn up at the house to have a party. At a certain point one of them leaves the rest and wanders into a room in the distance. A short while later he re-emerges, and after a brief moment Blake fleetingly leans into the doorway to watch him walk away, then retreats. A little afterwards we see Blake making macaroni cheese in the kitchen. As he's doing so we hear the friends arriving and putting on the The Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs. In due course, while Blake's eating his friend appears and starts talking with him. Or rather talking at him. This friend makes a number of bogus excuses, then leans across and helps himself to some money from Blake's pocket. Blake continues eating, then leans over to look out the door. In some ways this is pretty obvious stuff, except that the invasion of privacy seems to be the greater betrayal than the theft.
The second successful time-circling scene is much more low-key and less apparently significant. Blake in a slip enters one of the rooms of his mansion and closes the doors. One of the female friends comes downstairs having thought she's heard him moving about. She opens one of the doors he closed earlier, and an unconscious Blake falls down at her feet. Later we see Blake inside the room crawl slowly and painfully to sit leaning against the doors where he nods out. In a short while one of the doors is opened and Blake slides to the floor. After a hesitation his friend crouches to check that he still has a pulse, then she sits him back up and close the door again.
One more note on the circling. Unlike Elephant there's no clear sequence for the various scenes. The circling of certain scenes makes chronology very uncertain and gives us some sense of the flat, interminable present that Blake seems to be experiencing. One day is much like another, is indistinguishable from the night-time.
The greenhouse
And so, finally, to the greenhouse. In a review of the film in Sight & Sound Amy Taubin described Blake's shotgun as a 'transitional object' - in effect a kind of security blanket. The greenhouse is another distinct possession of Blake's. It could be regarded as another transitional object, but I see it more as an interstitial space. It stands, most obviously, between the indoor world of the house, and the outdoor world of the woods around. It also comes to be a space where life and death meet, and in the last scene where the private, personal world meets the public and official worlds. This interstitial status is appropriate for the possession of a man who appears to be a ghost in his own life.
As a possession, the greenhouse is Blake's own space and refuge. It's the one place noone visits or even seems to see. He can sit there watching and be invisible, which is not so different from his normal status, but with the advantage that he doesn't have to engage with anyone. But ironically it's this invisibility, and Blake's relative ease in this space, that enables the greenhouse to be the place he kills himself. It's the one place he can guarantee not to be disturbed.
And it remains an unknown space to us. There are some shots from the interior, but the camera's never allowed to occupy the space as it does the house. By the end it is as unfamiliar as it was when we first saw it. Over the closing credits we have the additional distancing of a static, news media-ish view of the greenhouse. In bright daylight, with doors open at either end, police and ambulance crew move about, Blake's corpse only part-visible, in a position familiar from the snatched photo of Cobain's body. It's the full-stop we know is coming from before the movie starts, and the point at which the fiction collides with reality. Van Sant's skill is to make us care less about this than the inconsequential details of Blake's last days which precede it.
Last Days
A lot of things are 'known' and have been written about Gus Van Sant's Last Days. While interesting in their own way not all of these facts illuminate the film as a piece of art in any meaningful way. Before going any further we'd better get these 'knowns' out of the way. Three are wholly immaterial to this review: that the film is third in a trilogy about premature death, that it's based on the last days of Kurt Cobain, and that no drug-taking or moment of suicide is shown. Three other 'knowns' will play a part (however minor) in what follows: that the film is semi-improvised, that there is no conventional narrative arc, and that at least one of the characters, the Yellow Pages salesperson, is exactly that. He turned up during pre-production, and was asked to take part in a scene.
In this review I want to look at six scenes or groups of scenes that for me sum up important themes in the film. These are the opening, the Yellow Pages salesman, Blake running away, skinny young men, repeated scenes, and the greenhouse. Along the way I'll briefly touch on the semi-improvised nature of the film and the lack of conventional narrative. I'll look in greater detail at performance, particularly Michael Pitt as the central character Blake, and at the cinematography.
Yellow Pages
To subvert the order of things set out above, I think the best starting point is with the Yellow Pages salesman. In an almost wholly negative review in Sight & Sound Stephen Dalton describes this section as 'inconsequential', which I think betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the film's accomplishment. As already stated and widely publicised, Thadeus A Thomas a genuine Yellow Pages salesman, turned up at a pre-production wardrobe session and was given a role. This kind of Improvisation and adaptability is not unknown even in films with larger budgets and more prescriptive structures. In a lower budget piece where the cast were encouraged to improvise their lines it can almost be expected. But far from being unnecessary or inconsequential the inclusion of Mr Thomas provides one of the longest scenes of dialogue in the movie.
Blake, the shuffling, mumbling, Kurt Cobain-esque figure at the heart of the movie answers the door to one of his mansion's many visitors. It's the man selling Yellow Pages ad-space, and he's invited in. As Blake sits nodding off in front of him wearing a slip and overcoat the man runs through his sales pitch, first enquiring whether the previous edition's listing was successful. Like everyone else who visits the house the salesman has an agenda. Unlike the others his agenda is absolutely transparent, and has no personal component - he's simply doing. Despite this, and again unlike the majority of other characters in the film, the salesman seems to radiate a genuine human warmth toward Blake. And that warmth is not derived from a knowledge of Blake or his status, the man doesn't recognise him. It makes this the most humane and affecting scene of human contact in the movie even if it serves no narrative purpose.
An instructive contrast with this scene can be found in one of the movie's less successful sequences. This is where Kim Gordon from the band Sonic Youth, who had contact with Kurt Cobain, the model for Blake, playing a record company executive tries to persuade Blake/Cobain to leave the house for a scheduled tour. I don't know, but I suspect the dialogue was largely improvised, as throughout the scene there appears to be an uncomfortable personal agenda. Gordon seems to be saying things she might have wanted to say to Cobain in the aftermath of his death had the opportunity been there. Blake asks her what he should do, and she says he should say sorry, among other things "...for being a rock n' roll cliché." There's no doubt this is heartfelt, and in the right context very affecting, but it's heavy-handed and inappropriate here. A clue that it might be personal is that it echoes remarks made by Cobain's mother, "I told him not to join that stupid club [of rock stars who died at 27]", and his widow Courtney Love, here reading and commenting on his suicide note for fans in the immediate aftermath, "And don't remember this because this is a fucking lie: 'It's better to burn out, than fade away.' God, you asshole!" This finality, a sense of something that's already happened, in Gordon's dialogue, and her pause at the door on leaving, seem awkwardly determinist in the context of this film.
This contrast of tones, and the viewer's discomfort at the more prescriptive sense of narrative in the Kim Gordon scene, shows how successfully Van Sant foregrounds the human elements of storytelling, whilst reducing the need for plot. We are made to care more about an individual than about the spurious destination that most film scripts aim for. We all know that narrative is inherently a falsification, and that resolution at the end of a story is the biggest distortion of all. Last Days highlights that, even though we know what the end of this story will be. Van Sant knows that the journey is more important than the destination.
Performance
A word on performance. Michael Pitt as Blake/Cobain is on screen most of the time, but usually at a distance or obscured in some way. Barely more than a dozen words he says in the movie are intelligible and his face is usually hidden - turned away from camera, behind his hair or a large pair of shades, or under a hood. Yet it's a brilliantly expressive performance. It recalls the performances Werner Herzog managed to draw from Klaus Kinski. A particularly interesting comparison is with Kinski in Herzog's Aguirre: Wrath of God. For the entirety of that film the expressive and physical actor Kinski is still and says very little. He's mostly filmed from behind or from the side, his face often only quarter profile. All these restraints on his natural tendencies elicit an astonishing performance from Kinski. The similar obscuring in Last Days seems to have a similar effect. There is a major difference though, where Kinski's Aguirre is still, Pitt's Blake is peripatetic. A sickly and suicidal junkie the character may be, but for most of the film he's doing things or going places. It's almost a deliberate challenge to those who want to see only frailty and doom in the Blake/Cobain character.
The relative absence of plot, and allowing actors to improvise their dialogue frees the film from the tyranny of exposition, narrative arcs, and all the other paraphernalia of screenwriting. It means that characters can be allowed to breathe, and the film to seem more real. There are moments when this doesn't work. I already identified Kim Gordon's scenes, and where a narrative milestone has to crop up, for instance a call from someone we suppose is Blake's wife, the film loses its lightness of touch. And some of the dialogue feels self-indulgent, a little like the overly-aware and stilted speech of Quentin Tarantino's characters. But for the most part the performances are naturalistic and low-key, and unlike Tarantino's movies it never feels like the characters are trying to ingratiate themselves with us. As Van Sant is quoted as saying in a Sight & Sound feature, "The way real people talk is always better than even a brilliant script."
Opening
In cinematic terms the opening of Last Days is very 'un-American' in sensibility, and reminded me of any number of Japanese or Korean movies where nature plays a role. In particular the waterfall and river that Blake makes his way down to and swims in was reminiscent of the lake at the heart of Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring. A little later, as Blake walks through a field and an intrusively noisy train suddenly locates us in the present, Satyajit Rai's Pather Pachali and Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba are visually echoed. The only American director that immediately comes to mind as associated with similar images is Terrence Malick. In his films, especially Thin Red Line, his ecological awareness threatens to overwhelm everything else. That's not a risk here. While never being reduced to mere mise en scene, the natural world is primarily a stage, an unknowable and vast place, but secondary to the human drama.
In the opening, and whenever the grounds of the estate feature, the pathetic fallacy is avoided. The trees, lakes, grass don't represent any emotion state or symbolise anything. The pathetic fallacy is present in the film. Blake's mansion, labyrinthine and crumbling, is clearly an external manifestation of his decaying mental state. But this isn't overplayed, and the one space that is clearly Blake's unique possession is the greenhouse, which doesn't seem to be symbolic in the same way. Out in the woods the film almost plays against itself, providing the nearest thing it has to redemption. Here Blake is most incontestably alive, whether he's swimming, tramping through marshy ground or sat overlooking a lake. Perhaps there is an American sensibility here. A literary sensibility not often seen in movies, derived from Whitman and Thoreau perhaps. A sensitivity to the landscape that might make this film kin to that curious western by Jim Jarmusch, the haunting Dead Man. A film which also features a dying young man called Blake, in this case William Blake.
Running away
The third group of scenes I want to examine are those where Blake's running away from people. Like the opening these scenes play against the ostensible theme of the movie by being more about life than death. They do this in a different way though, they're actually kind of funny. There are other funny scenes in the film, but the scenes of Blake running away provide an obvious physical comedy. In one interior shot, and one exterior shot shown twice, Blake runs from friends who are trying to find him. His slow speed, absurd gait and furtive demeanour make the scenes indisputably comic. But at the same time they're underlaid by tragedy, Blake simply can't deal with these people any more. It calls to mind a tragicomic set of events in Kurt Cobain's life. In January 1993 Nirvana played two gigs in Brazil. Before the second gig in Rio the band were going to work on their next record, Charles R Cross, Cobain's biographer takes up the story, "...when they checked into their high rise hotel... Kurt, after an argument with Courtney, threatened to leap to his death... Finally [Jeff] Mason and Alex MacLeod took him to find another hotel. "We checked into hotel after hotel, but couldn't stay because we'd walk into a room and there would be a balcony, and he would be ready to jump," Mason explained." Superficially funny in an almost vaudevillian way, the motivation underneath is too apparent and too raw for sustained laughter.
But back with the scenes I'm discussing, the interior shot, the first scene of Blake running away, is also the funniest. There are hints of farce, and a definite absurdity in his close proximity to the people he's trying to evade as he makes his dash. Again there's the glimmer of life. Not just in the comedy, but in the fact that Blake's an active agent, he does something. A lot of the time in the film when other people intrude on him Blake either hides, or more often sits there blankly, hiding behind his hair and a flat affect.
Skinny young men
Another cluster of scenes is that relating to skinny young men. This is no altogether surprising - the film is ostensibly about a rock star's last days, and rock's conventionally a predominantly young, and male preserve. And throughout his career homosexuality and homoeroticism have played a role in Van Sant's movies, from his feature debut Mala Noche, through Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, to the three most recent films. Here, however the element of sex isn't one of the sources of life. Instead there's almost a fatalistic, even a necrophiliac aspect to it.
Of the three key scenes to this cluster one is right at the beginning and one at the end. As they echo one another I'd like to take them together. At the opening, having wandered a little through the woods, Blake strips down to his boxers in order to swim in the lake. At the end of the movie his ghostly figure, perhaps representing his soul, rises naked from his corpse and begins to climb upward. Although uncomfortably skinny in the film, perhaps too much to be conventionally attractive, there's no doubt the camera loves Michael Pitt as Blake when he's naked. But at the same time, when he's naked, the camera seems to be objectifying him. He seems more pinned-down, more iconic. Perhaps it's because at these moments Pitt appears to be exposed and vulnerable, and that all the other iconic-seeming moments in the film are borrowed from existing photos and footage of Cobain, and already over-familiar. There are also visual echoes of Todd Haynes' much more homoerotic Velvet Goldmine, which examined the more sexually transgressive side of 1970's glam rock. This featured another young actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, playing another semi-fictional rock star, this time a David Bowie/Marc Bolan hybrid, with some near-iconic nude moments.
The other key scene is both more explicit, and far less sexual. Two of Blake's male friends retreat upstairs from a party and begin foreplay on a bed. There's a coldness to their encounter, perhaps because they've been established as fairly dislikable characters. There's more life in this near-sex scene than in the frozen but beautiful scenes of Blake naked that almost bookend the film, but far less eroticism.
Cinematography
I had a word about performance earlier. Now I'd like to look at the cinematography of Director of Photography Harris Savides. Much of the film is gloomy, shot in dim interiors, in shade, in half-light, and yet the images are never less than clear, the palette unified and attractive. The film never looks murky. I'm not sure why the film is lit the way it is, unless the decision was made to use mainly available light. However the choice was made it turned out well, and the film looks great. There are some gorgeous natural greens out in the woods. In the interior the predominant shades are browns and oranges. The flesh tones are also rendered beautifully.
This half-light is in contrast to the harsh, glaring light that's characteristic of both Gerry and Elephant, the previous two films in this 'death' trilogy. But in the overall aesthetic of the film it would be unthinkable for the light to be any different. It suits the tone of the movie, of a piece with the decision not to show us Blake taking drugs or killing himself, with the close mic-ing of sounds, and sometimes running them out of synch with the images. The film is a coherent unit, each part supporting each other.
Repeated scenes
As with the other films in the trilogy there's a device of revisiting the same scenes later from another perspective. Perhaps entering with another character and exiting at a different point. The device is used more sparingly than in Elephant. In an interview found online, but apparently sent out with the press pack for the movie, Van Sant explains, "Elephant [...]has the most extensive and successful circling of time, because of these characters being so separate. We were attempting that same thing in Last Days but then we realised that [...] Blake was so dominant that it was hard to go off with other characters for [...] long periods of time."
There are two scenes where this circling is especially successful. Firstly there's the sequence when some of Blake's friends turn up at the house to have a party. At a certain point one of them leaves the rest and wanders into a room in the distance. A short while later he re-emerges, and after a brief moment Blake fleetingly leans into the doorway to watch him walk away, then retreats. A little afterwards we see Blake making macaroni cheese in the kitchen. As he's doing so we hear the friends arriving and putting on the The Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs. In due course, while Blake's eating his friend appears and starts talking with him. Or rather talking at him. This friend makes a number of bogus excuses, then leans across and helps himself to some money from Blake's pocket. Blake continues eating, then leans over to look out the door. In some ways this is pretty obvious stuff, except that the invasion of privacy seems to be the greater betrayal than the theft.
The second successful time-circling scene is much more low-key and less apparently significant. Blake in a slip enters one of the rooms of his mansion and closes the doors. One of the female friends comes downstairs having thought she's heard him moving about. She opens one of the doors he closed earlier, and an unconscious Blake falls down at her feet. Later we see Blake inside the room crawl slowly and painfully to sit leaning against the doors where he nods out. In a short while one of the doors is opened and Blake slides to the floor. After a hesitation his friend crouches to check that he still has a pulse, then she sits him back up and close the door again.
One more note on the circling. Unlike Elephant there's no clear sequence for the various scenes. The circling of certain scenes makes chronology very uncertain and gives us some sense of the flat, interminable present that Blake seems to be experiencing. One day is much like another, is indistinguishable from the night-time.
The greenhouse
And so, finally, to the greenhouse. In a review of the film in Sight & Sound Amy Taubin described Blake's shotgun as a 'transitional object' - in effect a kind of security blanket. The greenhouse is another distinct possession of Blake's. It could be regarded as another transitional object, but I see it more as an interstitial space. It stands, most obviously, between the indoor world of the house, and the outdoor world of the woods around. It also comes to be a space where life and death meet, and in the last scene where the private, personal world meets the public and official worlds. This interstitial status is appropriate for the possession of a man who appears to be a ghost in his own life.
As a possession, the greenhouse is Blake's own space and refuge. It's the one place noone visits or even seems to see. He can sit there watching and be invisible, which is not so different from his normal status, but with the advantage that he doesn't have to engage with anyone. But ironically it's this invisibility, and Blake's relative ease in this space, that enables the greenhouse to be the place he kills himself. It's the one place he can guarantee not to be disturbed.
And it remains an unknown space to us. There are some shots from the interior, but the camera's never allowed to occupy the space as it does the house. By the end it is as unfamiliar as it was when we first saw it. Over the closing credits we have the additional distancing of a static, news media-ish view of the greenhouse. In bright daylight, with doors open at either end, police and ambulance crew move about, Blake's corpse only part-visible, in a position familiar from the snatched photo of Cobain's body. It's the full-stop we know is coming from before the movie starts, and the point at which the fiction collides with reality. Van Sant's skill is to make us care less about this than the inconsequential details of Blake's last days which precede it.
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