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Kurt Loder's thoughts on Soaked in Bleach


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Soaked in Bleach

Who killed Kurt Cobain? The official verdict is: he did. Sometime around April 5, 1994, the Nirvana leader injected himself with a massive overdose of heroin at his Seattle home and then used a shotgun to finish the job. Almost immediately after Cobains body was discovered, on April 8, Seattle police announced that he had committed suicide.

But 21 years later, a large and vocal contingent of Nirvana fans and true-crime aficionados continues to insist that Cobain was murdered, in a scheme overseen by his wife, Hole leader Courtney Love, who feared that her husband was about to divorce her and write her out of his will.

This version of events has already been probed by Nick Broomfield in his 1998 documentary Kurt & Courtney. Now, in the new film Soaked in Bleach, first-time director Benjamin Statler revisits the case, once again with ambiguous results. The story is still provocative, but Statler has nothing new to add to it.

Statler relies heavily on the assertions of Tom Grant, the private investigator Courtney hired to find Cobain after he disappeared from a Los Angeles rehab facility just days before his body was found. Grant, also featured in Broomfields documentary, is this films main talking head, as well as a character (played by actor Daniel Roebuck) in its many reenacted scenes. If the picture made any gesture in the direction of objectivity (not that theres any reason it should have to), these scenes would undermine it. Theyre clearly scripted, with the faux Grant and Courtney (Sarah Scott, in a diaphanous negligee) conversing at length in her bedroom. Since these conversations are undocumented, we have only Grants word that they happened the way he says they did. (Although when he claims that Courtney was either doing drugs or on drugs whenever he spoke to her, this is instantly believable.)

Grant taped all of his phone conversations with Love. Some of them rouse suspicions, and none of them stir any sympathy for her. (Brash and blowsy, she is, shall we say, a divisive music-scene figure.) However, when one tape is played twice so that we can hear Courtney saying, The people I had do this, I paid, we immediately realize that shes not talking about Cobains deaththe line has been hammered home to thicken the films atmosphere of dark treachery. Similarly, interviews with old friends of Cobain in his home town of Aberdeen, Washington, tell us very little. One of these friends says he never thought of Cobain as suicidal (He always seemed happy)but then that was long before he and his band were swamped by stardom.

With its rainy nightscapes and other film-noir flourishes, Statlers picture plays like a minor homage to Errol Morriss true-crime classic The Thin Blue Line. But that movie got a man off death row. Despite the torrent of innuendo directed at Love and one of Cobains friends and one employee, nothing is nailed down (which hasnt dissuaded Love from having cease-and-desist orders served on theatres planning to screen the film). The only direct hit the picture lands is on the Seattle Police Department, whichamong several thingstook a month to process Cobains shotgun for fingerprints, and never even developed four rolls of film used to photograph the crime scene. The SPD now says it did reexamine the evidence in the case last year, and it finally developed that film (although not all of the resulting photos have been made public). Conclusion: still suicide. When forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, best known for his assault on the Warren Commissions Kennedy-assassination report, weighs in here to call for a reinvestigation of Cobains deathand to urge that Seattle police play no part in itits hard not to see this as the best way to deal with the public doubts that still linger after all these years.

I must mention that I pop up in this film at a couple of points, in old MTV footage, exemplifying the feckless media that swallowed whole the suicide narrative retailed by Love and the SPD. Why did we not conduct our own investigations to reveal the ugly facts of Cobains death? Theres something to this: credulous journalists have often been led around by the nose by manipulative sources. That said, though, theres a difference between reporting on an event at the time it happens, relying on what little information may be known, and later launching a full-scale inquiry at great cost in time and money, which is usually unforthcoming. In any case, Cobains death has been investigatedby Grant, by Broomfield, and now by Statler, among others. And still, no conclusions have been reached. Like the Kennedy assassination, the Cobain case is unlikely ever to be explained to everyones satisfaction.

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Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. His third book, a collection of film reviews called The Good, the Bad and the Godawful, is now available.

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Kurt Loder just does movie reviews and shows up in documentaries about his previous life as a rock reporter. He and David Fricke started out together for a Long Island free magazine and would take the train into Manhattan to see punk rock shows in the 70s. Fricke's one of the head guys at Rolling Stone now. Unless Axl insisted that Kurt Loder do the interview or Axl's producing a movie,he has no reason to interview him and would probably just hang out. Loder's 70 years old...

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Kurt Loder just does movie reviews and shows up in documentaries about his previous life as a rock reporter. He and David Fricke started out together for a Long Island free magazine and would take the train into Manhattan to see punk rock shows in the 70s. Fricke's one of the head guys at Rolling Stone now. Unless Axl insisted that Kurt Loder do the interview or Axl's producing a movie,he has no reason to interview him and would probably just hang out. Loder's 70 years old...

Yeah I just saw that he is 70, i thought he would be 60 or 65 now

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