What Drove Kurt Cobain’s Personality? Was It Shame?
[This is from my weekly column in the Metro papers. – AC]
“Shame. That’s what made Kurt into who he was.”
I was on the phone with a writer friend from Los Angeles discussing the new documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.
“He suffered from imposter syndrome, afraid that someone would call him out for being a fake. That came into conflict with the knowledge that he did have talent. And partly because he came from a broken home where his strong mother constantly berated his father — which explains why he was attracted to Courtney — he was never able to resolve this inner battle, even as he was being anointed the voice of a generation. Hence the shame.”
This is one of the many conclusions that might be drawn from the film’s two-and-a-quarter hours, which attempts to humanize the complicated Cobain from his birth to just before he took his own life in April 1994.
