(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes.)

A loosely fictional account of the days leading up to the suicide of the lead singer of a famous grunge band, Last Days is an extended meditation on the death of a thinly veiled stand-in for 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. Van Sant’s methodical pacing follows Blake in a series of dramatically lengthy tracking shots set in and around a ramshackle mansion owned by him and overrun by a group of hipster musician friends currently sponging off Blake’s celebrity. But sown throughout, there are hints of Veronica, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the paralyzing fear of the disciples after the death of Christ. At the end of the film, Blake commits suicide precisely like Kurt Cobain, and in the one non-realist image of the film, his wispy soul can be scene leaving his body and climbing a window frame into heaven.


In previous films, Van Sant has explored the narrative quality of prime-time media images and CCTV footage. The epilogue of Last Days, which grafts the famous MTV coverage of Cobain’s suicide over Blake’s death, links this theoretical tendency in Van Sant to the references to Jesus’ life made throughout the film. The point of comparison between Blake and Jesus is the hagiography that has developed for both in the wake of their death. Van Sant films Blake within the narrative framework of Jesus passion and resurrection not because he wants to impose a redemptive significance on Kurt Cobain’s life, but because just as our readings of Jesus as a man get lost in the shuffle of the Christology inherent to the resurrection, so has did the media fail to see Cobain as a suffering person. 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. And of course, this is all very early Albert Schweitzer. And here we see a different iconography of Jesus developed, in which he is co-opted as a first century media figure that presages fallen media figures of our age. Thus it is only Van Sant’s oblique reliance on the canonical tradition that lifts his film out of the potential absurdity of its details and conclusions.