Alex Ross Perry, 2018
#8, 2019 Skandies
Here’s a movie that probably felt like a period piece to some viewers, as it is set in the 1990s, but I didn’t even notice until I saw a calendar on the wall, because to a great extent I am also set in the 1990s. It’s about the frontwoman for a band called Something She, a wildly successful all-female power trio. Power trios—a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer, with no separate vocalist and no distinction between lead and rhythm guitar—have been among the biggest bands in rock history, from the Police to Nirvana, but even though I also made an all-female power trio a popular band in the world of Ready, Okay!, there’s not much historical precedent for this. Has there been a more successful example than, I dunno, Babes in Toyland? I guess Sleater-Kinney got a lot of critical acclaim back in the day, but they didn’t have a bassist so I don’t know whether they really count. In any case, the closing credits of Her Smell, with their gallery of CD covers, make it clear that the primary inspiration for Something She was none of these bands but rather Hole—as if the main character’s resemblance to Courtney Love weren’t convincing enough on this count. The thing is, Hole was a quartet, and Eric Erlandson was responsible for a lot of the band’s signature sound. So why is Fake Hole a power trio? I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that, despite the lack of real-world examples, the all-female power trio somehow became a cultural archetype, as evidenced by the fact that we see it in… cartoons! Josie and the Pussycats were a power trio. So were the Powerpuff Girls. And the other reason is that the movie culminates in a sort of “sisterhood circle”, which wouldn’t really work with a male guitarist hanging around. So how do you use Hole and keep this scene? Excising Eric from Fake Hole and reducing the band to a power trio seems to have been the filmmaker’s attempt to square that circle. Or triangle it, I guess.
Anyway, the movie. We see early on that Something She has done well enough for itself that it’s made the cover of Spin; apparently this is a clue that we’re in the past, since Spin hasn’t published a print edition since 2012, but I didn’t know that. The band seems to be on a downward trajectory, though, as we see the end of a show at a small club rather than at the arenas we hear the band used to play. On top of that, the frontwoman seems kind of blotchy and bloated, and is clearly in the grips of some combination of mental illness, drugs, and woo. She travels with a purported shaman who does voodoo rituals with her, and speaks incessantly of her past lives. She behaves erratically, collapses while holding her infant daughter, and concludes her night in a puddle of vomit while those around her see to the baby. And everything she says and does speaks to a malignant narcissism, determined as she is to keep all eyes on her through sheer volume of manic speech and histrionics. The film consists of five acts, each one covering a different stage in her deterioration and attempted recovery, with months or years passing in between; for the most part, it’s shot camcorder-style, to mimic the sort of backstage footage familiar from band documentaries or MTV News, back when MTV News was a thing. That footage usually didn’t show the sorts of meltdowns we see in Her Smell, but I’ve certainly read about them. A lot of what we see in Her Smell could be drawn from contemporaneous accounts of Hole’s tours supporting Live Through This (1994), when Courtney Love was drugged to the gills, launching into interminable rambling monologues between songs and punching out rival singers, and Celebrity Skin (1998), when the band was shedding members and tour dates left and right. Not that this sort of thing is unique to Courtney Love. Her husband’s personality was implosive rather than explosive, but in a lot of ways the effect was the same: from the very beginning of Nirvana’s rise to superstardom, I read accounts suggesting that he wasn’t in ideal condition to be making music. He’d derail concerts by threatening to jump to his death from a speaker tower, or torpedo a photo session by showing up with pinprick pupils from heroin use and then nodding off during the shoot. The liner notes of a Wipers tribute CD I picked up thanked Kurt “for pulling it together with Barret Jones at Laundry Room Studios despite the difficulties”, an anodyne way of suggesting the sort of scene we see in the second act of this film.
Apparently some people didn’t make it to the second act of Her Smell, because the protagonist’s behavior in the first act is so off-putting. And, yeah, if you’re going to subject viewers to the antics of nightmare people, you’d better have a good answer to the question, why should anyone care? In the case of Kurt and Courtney, I cared enough to keep an eye on their doings in the ’90s because they were responsible for what was then my favorite music. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became my favorite song within a few days of its release back when I was seventeen, and stayed at #1 on my chart until I was forty. Nevermind’s stint as my favorite album, by contrast, only lasted a couple of years, but it was displaced by another Nirvana album, In Utero, which in turn ceded the crown to Hole’s Celebrity Skin. I fuckin’ loved, and still really enjoy, the music these nightmare people made: music is a low-level hack into our neural architecture, and a good song can induce a state of rapture like almost nothing else. So it stands to reason that I’d be at least a little interested in what Kurt and Courtney were up to, because it was all part of the process by which the powerful experience of listening to their records came to be. And Her Smell puts forward the same rationale: that, yes, the Courtney analogue is a human trash fire, but she’s still a net positive to the world because of the amazing music she’s brought into it. This is a risky move for any kind of story to make! To say that a character is a sublime artist means you have two choices. You can avoid actually showing the art—establishing its quality through audience reactions and whatnot—but this is pretty cowardly and almost never works. The alternative is to be brave, actually put forward some art, and hope the audience finds it sufficiently sublime to do the job. Her Smell tries to do a little bit of both, and it faceplants. The music comes nowhere close to the standard it would need to meet to make the narrative work. Let’s take a look:
The first musical sequence comes near the very beginning of the film, as Something She performs a cover of “Another Girl, Another Planet”, a 1978 single by the Only Ones, a British band that peaked at #37 in the U.K. and at “Who?” in the U.S. It wasn’t really a punk band, but occasionally got classed as punk just because the members were British and it was 1978. Which brings me to the first thing that’s off kilter here. The reviews of this movie call Something She a punk band. Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love both identified with punk rock, but ’90s punk was not ’70s punk. Though Her Smell is set in the ’90s, its characters have given themselves names like “Roxie Rotten” and “Dottie O.Z.” that can’t help but call to mind figures such as Johnny Rotten and Dottie Danger from the ’70s punk scene. But okay—do the members of Something She at least grunge up the ’70s power pop song they’re playing to make it more era- and genre-appropriate? They do not. They sound like… let’s see, I know I have some songs in my collection that sound like this… aha! Yes, they sound like Glister, and Manda and the Marbles, and Jale, and Moonpools & Caterpillars, and other peppy power pop bands that are worlds away from, say, “Teenage Whore”. I mean, this is the power of music: replace this bland performance of “Another Girl, Another Planet” with Real Courtney’s version of “Teenage Whore”, and this movie instantly becomes multiple orders of magnitude better. But let’s continue.
The second musical sequence is meant to suggest that Fake Courtney has lost it, as she sits alone in a studio, weakly warbling filler lyrics while strumming misfingered chords, while the other characters sit in the control booth and shake their heads. It sounds bad, but on purpose.
The third musical sequence is meant to give us a glimpse of why Fake Courtney became a star, as she gets into a groove and starts playing a cover of a song by, yes, another obscure British ’70s band, this one called Cock Sparrer. The characters in the control booth are blown away: “Fuck, man, she’s the queen!” one says. Problem: it sounds exactly like the second song! Without the character reactions, I would have had no idea that we weren’t supposed to consider it equally pathetic!
The fourth musical sequence is by a different all-female power trio whom Fake Courtney adopts as her protegées. It’s not terrible, but neither is it particularly memorable, and the performance is rough—deliberately so, this time, as the idea is that they’re just starting out and haven’t polished their sound yet. (The script suggests that it’s supposed to be better than what ended up on screen, though.)
The fifth musical sequence is very brief, as Fake Courtney does a poor cover of a few lines from a Charles Manson song. The sixth is just like the second. It’s supposed to be. It is also just like the third. It’s not supposed to be.
I’ll come back to the seventh.
The eighth musical sequence is meant to show that Fake Courtney has cleaned up her act. She plays guitar and sings a song that was apparently written for the movie by a musician who records under the name “Bully”. It does not sound like Hole. It sounds like a B-side by Moonpools & Caterpillars.
The ninth and final musical sequence is meant to be a triumphant performance on which every musician in the movie collaborates. “It’s so fucking awesome”, the script declares. “Glorious beyond all belief.” That’s quite a bar to clear! It sounds like the movie is going for something as legendary as Nirvana’s performance of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from MTV Unplugged. And instead we get… a pedestrian performance of a song that sounds like a Manda and the Marbles outtake? The thing is, the movie does end on a strong note: the final exchange of dialogue is probably the best moment in the film. But the music that precedes it doesn’t justify it, and it needs to for the movie to work.
Which brings me back to the seventh musical performance. It takes place in the fourth act. Years have passed since the third. Fake Courtney has sobered up, but has not kicked the woo and is hiding in her house talking about visions and past lives. Eventually we get to what is clearly meant as the apex of the film. Fake Courtney is trying to reconnect with a now school-aged daughter she barely even knows (Fake Frances?). The daughter requests that her mother play her a song. And Fake Courtney sits at the piano and launches into… “Heaven”, the power ballad by Bryan Adams. Bryan Adams! And she doesn’t even do a good job! Her vocals are mostly passable even if they miss their intended marks and provoke some gritted teeth from time to time, but the instrumentation consists of her haltingly jabbing at piano chords. And as I watched this, I wondered… what is the movie going for here? Is this supposed to be cringe comedy? Is it meant to be pathetic, like musical sequence number two? A little of both—like, she wants to connect with her daughter, but the best idea she can come up with is to croon a slice of mid-’80s cheese at her while delivering out of time pokes to an unfortunate piano? I was reminded of nothing so much as the Russian thief serenading the Jane Adams character in Todd Solondz’s Happiness with his rendition of “You Light Up My Life”. So imagine my surprise when I looked at the script and discovered that it slobbers over what an astounding, life-changing performance this is and arrogantly declares that “every viewer watching this scene is crying right now”. I assume that in his next script this guy will assert that he has moved the audience to unrestrained sobs as the main character comforts her dying child with a soulful ukulele rendition of Phil Collins’s “Sussudio”.
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