When I was 17, I remember being in my aunt and uncle’s house, when my uncle came in the door saying that the radio was going crazy about some musician who’d killed himself. I asked him who, but he said he had no idea and didn’t recognize the name. But I knew right away who it was. It’s sad to say that Kurt Cobain’s suicide was both shocking, but somehow not surprising. I think for my generation, everyone can tell you where they were when Cobain killed himself in the same way that everyone in a previous generation could tell you where they were when they heard about JFK’s assassination. It was, as I said, a shock, but I think there was also a sense that Nirvana was a meteor that had burned itself out and didn’t have much light left to give.
On the opposite end of that awful memory, I still remember very fondly the very first time I ever heard Nirvana. I was in the back seat of my older cousin’s car with some of his friends. He cranked it up. The opening riff of Smells Like Teen Spirit was electrifying. We were addicted and listened to the song over and over again. I was 14. It’s probably hard to understand just how new and refreshing Nirvana sounded in 1991. Hearing something that is truly new is a very rare and incredibly exciting feeling and this was one of them.
The film, Pushing up Orchids, directed by Maria Gomez, follows Zed Savage, the lead singer of the fictional grunge band The Orchids. His name is reminiscent of another famous musician who killed himself, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. But from his looks, Savage is clearly modelled on Cobain (although he actually bears a striking similarity to Beck). He’s got the stripy baggy sweater, and the red plaid jacket. We get a sense right from the beginning that we’re in the past from the VHS-style blue screen with the word ‘Play’ on it.
Savage wakes up in the woods. He doesn’t seem sure of where he is or what he’s doing there. There are deer and trees. It would be a peaceful scene, except that there are two demented clown paparazzi shouting at him and taking pictures from way too close. He stumbles and tries to escape. He runs through the woods and finds himself in an abandoned industrial building or school, covered with graffiti. There’s a striking image of a gaping dark abyss in the mouth of one graffiti creature. From this hole emerges another fixture of the 90s landscape: a black clad goth girl. She’s got the most amazing boots, festooned with crucifixes and wearing wings like the angel of death.
We soon figure out what’s going on here. This is some sort of dream. Or is it? In the background we hear a radio announcer talking about meteoric rise of The Orchids. They went from being nobodies to being extremely famous. This, of course, is said to be one of the reasons rock stars kill themselves: the pressure of instant fame is overwhelming for people who are often very young and inexperienced in the world. But unlike Cobain who shot himself in the head with a shotgun, Savage took the route of drugs and alcohol. He was, the announcer says, the voice of his generation. And slowly but surely, Savage remembers the hotel room, the pills, falling on the ground. He reacts like any rock star would, by smashing a guitar. Perhaps this is how he will spend eternity. He is horrified.
It’s profoundly troubling when the voice of your generation kills himself. A person gets a title like ‘voice of a generation’ because they are able to articulate what this generation is going through. Music from the 90s was often pretty dark. In addition to grunge, there was a lot of grim industrial music. The mood was bleak. There was what they called at the time a ‘slacker’ aesthetic. This seemed to embody the sense of pointlessness in much of life. And when someone you look up to like that blows his own head off, you can’t help but think that there isn’t a lot of hope for the future.
But in the final scene of the film, Gomez shows us Savage waking up. Was this all a dream? We’re not sure. But thinking that it might have been just a dream at least softens the blow.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.