The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monster: Ed Gein

Horror is derived, ultimately, from the unknown. Ultimately, the core of fear is that something will somehow harm you. Harm may lead to death, which leads to the unknown--fear is possible because in the depths of our minds, we're all agnostics. God takes away the uncertainty behind death, and thus, the terror it inspires. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre succeeds at being the finest expression of horror on film because it takes the concept of uncertainty as the source of fear and suggests that if there were no uncertainty, we would still be horrified. It removes the comfort of an afterlife not by delving into the supernatural, but by peeling the veneer of normalcy off reality. 

The film is drenched in a post-Vietnam sense of irony and disillusionment, declaring itself a true story or revelation, which instantly crafts a sense of mythology around it. From the old man at the cemetery rasping that there's things they don't tell you about, things he's seen, to the radio broadcasts describing (an obvious series of lies) that the local sheriff has pinned the grave robberies on international jewel thieves, the film underlines the fact that the truth about the world is not only hidden but it's horrible. It also suggests, especially with its characterization of the unseen sheriff, that these lies are intentional and constructed to control the populace. The five youngsters' world is still holding on to Leave It to Beaver; their neighbors are still friendly and helpful. It has been suggested the film anticipated the death of the American Dream and the dissolution of the nuclear family.

These youngsters cannot conceive a world where Leatherface exists, no matter how grim the news reports. So Kirk, Pam, and Jerry, in the space of about 15 minutes, walk to their bloody dooms. Sally's terror is the terror of anyone faced with the dismantling of their illusions. The hypocrisy is shown casually when the cook says he can't take watching the cruelty, but when Grandpa tries it [sorta], he cheers it. Sally, as her horrorscope suggests, is awakened, and is thus able to react to the events before her, whereas her friends all died before they could process it. The only time the score and the sounds come together is to emphasize disorientation and terror, in the single greatest scene in horror movie history: the dinner table scene. Even if she survives, she will be scarred emotionally, mentally, and metaphysically. This is as much a metaphor for America as it is PTSD in its significant change. As dawn comes, it shifts from a misty white (like emerging from the clouds of the afterlife) to the summer gold flare as Leatherface does his infamous dance of frustration. 

This is Hooper's true masterpiece. From the moment Sally enters the dining room until she breaks free, everything is composed for the utmost agony. The characterization going on here is chaotic. The hitchhiker snarls and scorns the old man, who insists he doesn't like the cruelty. Leatherface has donned his 50s matronly garb, jarringly discordant with the idyllic domesticity it evokes. Grandpa rests there like a mummy, encased in hard human leather. Marilyn Burns gives one of the most intense performances in horror history, her eyes doing the work of a million lines of dialogue. Hooper zooms into them, lingering on the veins and irises, watching them twitch (and reinforcing his themes of seeing what's truly there), and Burns, drenched in sweat, writhes. It's here that hypocrisies are laid bare, where any vestige of mundanity is scored away by burning light, where the cow stops being meat and becomes a person, where the uncertain becomes certain, and that certainty is a godless, empty void of suffering.  Hooper's sense of irony and understanding of hypocrisy is crystal clear in that moment. —Review by Sally Jane Black. Source: letterboxd.com

Sally (Marilyn Burns) is the Final Girl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Within this horrific tale ("You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it") Sally is regarded as a hero and not simply as a heroine. Classically the heroine was saved by the male and the hero endured the hardships that follow in conventional horror films. Yet Sally is the only survivor of her group and has endured the hardships of a ruined society to literally laugh in the face of her iconic assailant. Carol Jeanne Clover (teacher of American Film at the University of California, Berkeley) states that even if often predominantly male, the audience is able to engage and identify with the Final Girl due to the fact that “the threat function and the victim function coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex.” 

Therefore it is for this reason that the audience, male or not, is able to sympathize with Sally and identify with her anguish and then to her rise to power. Linda Williams (“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”) similarly states that ‘Not only does this dinner scene provoke a visceral reaction from the audience but the viewer more intensely sympathizes with the femininity of the character. During multiple points within this scene, the audience is given the perspective of Sally who is strapped to a chair. 

The fact that she escapes her assailants and laughs in the wounded face of Leatherface demonstrates her new found empowerment and reaffirms her sexuality.' The Final Girl must subvert the patriarchal Texan society which is represented by the all male family that is impotent, perverse and gender confused.' Power is for this reason ushered away from the family and given to Sally. Therefore, the film allows the audience to identify with the Final Girl and celebrate her triumph over the killer. As much as “Psycho” or “The Exorcist,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” created a mythology of horror, one that feels even more resonant today than it did 50 years ago. 

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” channeled the descent of the American spirit that we can now feel all around us. In the end, what the film revels in with such disturbing atmosphere, and what makes it more indelible and haunting than any other horror film, is its image of madness as the driving energy of the world: Leatherface, swinging his chain saw around in front of the rising sun, his crazed dance of death not just a ritual but a warning—that the center will not hold. That something incredibly wicked will come soon. Source: variety.com

Co-created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, The Ed Gein Story picks up in 1950s rural Wisconsin, and follows the titular monster — known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul — and tells the tale of his perverse crimes, which would go on to inspire the onscreen horrors seen in Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Hunnam previously admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he doesn't "really like the horror genre or dark, bleak stories," and so the role was always "kind of a strange choice" for him. So much so that he was "truly gobsmacked" when Murphy asked him to play Gein during a two-hour dinner conversation. Of the episodes, Hunnam said, "I never felt like we were sensationalizing it. I never felt on set that we did anything gratuitous or for shock impact. It was all in order to try to tell this story as honestly as we could."

And, he hopes that means viewers are left looking inward after watching. “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?” he told the outlet. "Is Ed Gein the monster of this show, or is Hitchcock the monster of the show? Or are we the monster of the show because we’re watching it?” Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann

Red Sheet by James Ellroy (2026): "It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The U.S. prevailed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from domestic Communist Party members embedded in L.A. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job. Freddy Otash is named lead investigator. He encounters commie malfeasance at every turn. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It links to ex-VP and gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and possibly two homicides eight years back. Now Freddy is working double duty: he’s commanding the probe and is hired to keep Nixon out of trouble. Meanwhile, integrationist fever is sweeping L.A. and the police department comes under its fire. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for city council and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride. And the long-forgotten but still-stunning folk singer Judy Henske is on a collision course with the love of her life, the freewheeling Freddy O." Source: amazon.com

Mystery writer Megan Abbott has already proclaimed Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) the best book she has read on the Black Dahlia case, evidently not pausing to consider just how low the bar is on this subject, given the dismal quality of the aforementioned books, plus John Gilmore’s Severed (1994), Janice Knowlton’s Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer (1995) and Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files (2006), a work so fraudulent that it earned the author a lifetime ban by the district attorney’s office. Mining the well-traversed district attorney’s files in the Black Dahlia case, augmented with FBI reports, news accounts, public records, and occasional interviews with less-informed descendants of the main figures, Mann has amassed the ponderous resources for what could have been a strong book. Mann sets out with two laudable goals: To strip away the numerous myths surrounding Elizabeth Short, and to eschew any attempt to solve the case, which he views as hubris. Mann’s depiction of Elizabeth Short plunked down in Hollywood as Tom Sawyer in ankle-strap shoes brings us no closer to her. The book speculates wildly on one of the usual suspects in a far-fetched solution, then attempts to recant with a “never mind.” Elizabeth Short, the enigmatic victim of the murder, crossed paths with hundreds of random people during her brief time in Hollywood in the summer and fall of 1946. Instead of being the Black Dahlia, who went on hundreds of dates, Elizabeth Short was the woman who went on one date hundreds of times, a carefully scripted encounter with a parade of presentable men who were a safe escort. All but one, apparently. Source: ladailymirror.com

Jon Hamm (Your Friends & Neighbors-Neo Noir), Dick Powell (Pitfall-Classic Noir)

"Your Friends and Neighbors" is a 2025 Apple TV+ series, categorized as a neo-noir drama, starring Jon Hamm as a disgraced hedge fund manager who resorts to robbing his wealthy neighbors in the affluent Vestment Village. He discovers that the secrets hidden within these seemingly perfect lives are more dangerous than he anticipated. The show features a cool noir aesthetic, with a jaded voiceover that provides commentary on the unfolding events. The series adopts a noir aesthetic, drawing inspiration from classic 1940s noir films, complete with a detached and cynical voiceover, according to the show's creator, Jonathan Tropper. In the prologue, Coop trips and stumbles into a pool (referencing Sunset Boulevard), saying: "I know what you're thinking: the pool is a metaphor. I wasn't the kind of guy who woke up on the floor of someone else's house covering the dead guy's blood before falling into the pool, but here we are. And at that moment, I couldn't help but catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eyes of the swirling hot mess of my life, and wonder how the hell everything could go so wrong so fast." Source: movieweb.com

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband. In "Pitfall" Powell reinvents his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. De Toth said: “Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody here who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.” Miss Scott burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact. 

It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her film career. Lizabeth Scott had very positive recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was so gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. People asks me who is the greatest talent in Hollywood. And I say Dick Powell! I love him. He's just like a big, woolly bear. And June Allyson is very nice. I think of them as the perfect family. I met them in a Hedda Hopper's party, and Dick Powell complained to Hedda "it doesn't matter how many times I tell June I love her, it's never enough!" 

When Lizabett Scott was loaned for Pitfall (1948), she was guaranteed a minimum of $75,000. Although Pitfall now ranks as classic noir (Bertrand Tavernier considers it one of the genre's masterpieces), producer Hal B. Wallis could not have known that in 1948; he simply believed that Lizabeth appearing opposite Dick Powell, who showed his macho side in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Cornered (1945), was right for a story about a woman who ensnares a respectable married man in a web of deception and murder, from which he emerges repentant but not exactly on the best of terms with his sexless wife (Jane Wyatt). Pitfall (1948), directed by Andre de Toth, is a caustic examination of the American dream, chiefly because its subject is the post-war nuclear family, amidst factories such as Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. —"Lizabeth Scott: Noir's Quicksilver Anti-Heroine" by Anastasia Lin (2010)

Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Bikini Kill & Kathleen Hanna)

Sara Marcus: Three days before the appointed Sunday in April 1994, Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered in a greenhouse in Seattle. I remembered that Newsweek had referred to Courtney Love, now Cobain’s widow, as the riot grrrls’ “patron saint,” but I’d never cared about Nirvana or about Love’s band, Hole. Fearing that a grief-filled meeting would separate me from the other girls right off the bat, I nearly stayed home. Still, I went, and when I finally stepped over the threshold of Positive Force House into its first-floor living room, I found that nobody else at the meeting cared about Nirvana or Hole either. We talked about sexual harassment from classmates and teachers, crushes on boys and girls, our favorite kinds of tampons and ice cream, and our outrage over the sexist stories and images we saw in the newspapers and on television. These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. I was going to be one of them. A friend of a friend at school gave me a Bikini Kill tape—I knew that the band was somehow linked to Riot Grrrl—and for a while no other music mattered, just that breastbone-shaking bass line and Kathleen Hanna’s voice singing with all the concentrated fury of a firehose, “Dare you to do what you want! Dare you to be who you will!” 

Jessica Hopper FedExed a reporter a big package of zines, Hit It or Quit It as well as others. And she went on record in an hour-long phone interview. On the day the November 23, 1992, issue of Newsweek hit the streets, a regular Wednesday night Riot Grrrl meeting took place at the Emma Center. Jessica arrived late; she had stopped off at a newsstand to buy the magazine. The other girls had already picked up a copy of the issue—and although Jessica had warned them of an article—they were aghast at what they saw. “Revolution, Girl Style” occupied a two-page spread in the Lifestyle section, complete with a photograph of Jessica (the caption dubbed her a “prototypical Riot Grrrl”), a portrait Alice Wheeler had taken of Angie Hart and a photo of Courtney Love, whom Jessica had described as “Riot Grrrl’s patron saint.” 

That designation stemmed only from the fact that Love had passed out copies of Hit It or Quit It at Hole shows in England. Love actually had an odd antipathy for Riot Grrrl and especially for anybody associated with it who had been close with Cobain before she had met him, namely Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail. Love had recently left a long, rambling answering-machine message for a girl named Nina Cunzio, who was trying to get a Riot Grrrl group started in LA: “We should totally have meetings at my house, I’d love that a lot,” Love had said, sounding to Nina like somebody on drugs. “But you gotta lose this Kathleen Hanna bullshit.” Nina never called back. In just a few months, Love would write a vicious column in Melody Maker, blasting Bikini Kill. How could Jessica Hopper have done such a thing—spoken for the entire movement, to a national magazine, without even consulting with the rest of them? It felt like a gargantuan betrayal of trust, like Jessica had just been using all of them to gain more exposure for her own projects, no matter who else got hurt along the way. 

Another malignant rumors about Kathleen spread by Courtney Love: One thing that immediately comes to mind about what Kathleen Hanna's MO is when Mike Watt (from the Minutemen) asked her to be a guest on his first solo album and she wanted to prove a point that she didn't want to be in the company of bros so her contribution was to leave a message on Watt's answering machine with a fake story about how someone who was on the album had raped a girl. Really distasteful stuff. She called it her anti-contribution. To honor this offer, Watt put it on the album. She's just someone who seems to rotate around her own gravity. She's straight up falsely accusing someone of raping a 13 year old girl and calling it art. That's very distasteful at any level. Also she laughs it off as it just being during one of her lying phases, which is ridiculous. Did you see her interview with V magazine? She admitted as a child she would steal her dad's credit card and buy silk blouses. She sounds like a scammer and then she married to a guy who'd bragged about “fag-bashing.” Source:  www.hootpage.com 

But, unlike Courtney Love, Bikini Kill were always surrounded by controversy just because they were an outwardly and aggressively feminist band. They were very much needed in the 1990s punk scene and respected by all from that scene and Adam Horovitz changed his views considerably since his days in the Beastie Boys. Bikini Kill were one of the best bands of the grunge era, and way more important politically than Hole. Aside from their aesthetic and political differences, I think the motivation of Love to punch Hanna at Lollapalooza festival was mainly jealousy of Hanna's close relationship with Kurt Cobain. Although Cobain ended up dating Tobi Vail, it's between the lines that his main attraction was towards Kathleen, but she allegedly only agreed to a friendship because she was scared of Cobain's substance abuse and wary of his obsessive claim to fame. 

Kathleen Hanna: Bikini Kill and The Nation of Ulysses (I was dating Tim Green at that time) all drove back back to Olympia in late August to play K Records’ one-time-only convention, called the International Pop Underground (IPU). “Defeat the Corporate Ogre” was their slogan, and the repetitive mentions of being “anti–corporate rock” seemed pointed at Nirvana, since they’d just signed to a major label (Geffen) and had left Olympia. It felt like a line was being drawn in the sand: Nirvana was no longer welcome in K’s indie purist clubhouse. Kurt had been nothing but supportive of the Olympia scene (he even got a K Records tattoo) and it felt gross that they were publicly slamming him that way. Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie vs major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on to me. 

Sara Marcus: Ian MacKaye had introduced Jett to Bikini Kill, and she was instantly impressed by both the music and the zines. She was particularly heartened that a rock ‘n’ roll feminism was catching on; she could have used some of that in the late ‘70s, when she was a teenage guitarist playing in the Runaways. “The Runaways had nobody,” she said. “I felt like a feminist, but I felt completely dissed by other feminists, ‘cause they were like, ‘Well, you can’t dress sexy.’ Number one, I’m not dressing sexy—even though I did have my pants open from time to time. But what do you mean? You don’t tell me that girls don’t get horny and don’t wanna fuck! You know why they say that girls ‘can’t play guitar’ and ‘can’t play rock ‘n’ roll’? Because rock ‘n’ roll is sex. So meeting people like Kathleen and all those girls, it was really incredible, because I felt like maybe people were starting to get it.” 

Bikini Kill had recorded a full-length album that past October, titled Pussy Whipped, but it wasn’t due out till the following fall, and they had already written new songs to record with Jett—glammy, triumphal anthems that explored pleasure and play. And for the introduction to “Demirep,” Kathleen and Jett sat cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, and played a hand-clapping game they’d both learned when they were little girls: “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black.“ These two songs, along with a new version of “Rebel Girl,” would be released on a 7” in September 1993, a month before Pussy Whipped. Five nights later, the band played a sold-out Rock for Choice benefit to an audience of four thousand at the Hollywood Palladium. Stone Temple Pilots, King Missile, and Kim Gordon’s project Free Kitten were also on the bill, but the biggest buzz was around Bikini Kill. 

Kathleen performed in a dress with the words KILL ME printed on her chest, and some men shouted boos at the band. The Los Angeles Times ran a review noting that “while much of the audience seemed unsure of just what to make of this Olympia band, there was a contingent of female fans that seemed wholly enthralled—as if they had found that music really mattered.” Working with Joan Jett had been Kathleen’s first major-label experience, but now the big guys were starting to come calling for Bikini Kill. “Kathleen had a hot band,” Jett’s manager, Kenny Laguna, recounted. “Every label in the business wanted them! Warner Brothers, Capitol, Interscope: everyone.” Kathleen Hanna: Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so Kathi, Bill and me met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. To show us how edgy Interscope was, Jimmy Iovine showed us a Marilyn Manson video that hadn’t come out yet. “You guys could do an edgy video like that!” he said. “Could I hang you from a meat hook?” I asked. Iovine pretended he hadn’t heard me and continued his spiel about how great his label was. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.”

At the time, probably influenced by his abrasive wife Courtney Love, Kurt Cobain hinted to various press outlets that he didn't understand why "those riot grrrl groups took themselves so seriously." Kathleen didn’t think Bikini Kill should abandon Kill Rock Stars, but she was curious about getting wider distribution for her music and ideas. Plus, she explained later, “I wanted to say to myself, ‘I looked into it and it wasn’t the right thing,’ as opposed to just assuming things.” Tobi didn’t even want to look into it, though; she saw what Nirvana’s success had done to them. “I was very saddened to see that that success did not make them happy,” she said. “I knew that things were really really bad: Kurt was on drugs and the band was falling apart.” —Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (2010) by Sara Marcus 

Ione Skye, Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, Grunge

At 18, Ione Skye met “the first great love of my life”: Adam Horovitz, a man she describes as “a sweetie pie.” They soon moved in together and, for a while, life was “one long daydream”. The pair tied the knot when Skye was 21 when they married in 1992, just as the Beastie Boys’ star was rising, pulling Horovitz away on months-long tours. Alone in LA, she began joyfully exploring her bisexuality, first with the British model Alice Temple, then with two of Madonna’s exes, Ingrid Casares and Jenny Shimizu. Skye’s infidelities became more indiscreet. One day Horovitz arrived home from a tour to find her in flagrante. "With Adam Horovitz I felt completely safe for the first time," Ione Skye wrote. "I didn't know how to be happy unless we were together." But the union wasn't meant to be. Skye described herself as "a serial cheater," and the pair divorced in 1999. Her anguish at hurting Horovitz is still apparent three decades on. “I secretly hope reading my memoir helps him and his family but I kind of know their personalities and I almost think it might be doing the opposite,” she says. Source: theguardian.com

Kim Gordon: Being a woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. Women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. She didn’t care either way. The term "girl power" was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. I was four months pregnant but somehow I managed to wiggle into a skirt and T-shirt for our “Bull in the Heather” video. Bikini Kill and other Riot Grrl bands were still enforcing their media blackout, and asking Kathleen to appear in our video came from my perverse desire to have her infiltrate the mainstream. That way, people could see her also as the playful, intelligent, charismatic girl she is—a woman who controlled the action by dancing around us as we stood stationary in a rock stance, playing the song. It was courageous of Kathleen to appear in a mainstream MTV video and risk criticism from the alternative community she’d created in Olympia.

I’m not sure why, but I felt an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, one of those mutual "I can tell you are a super sensitive and emotional person too" sorts of connections. Thurston didn’t have the same thing going with Kurt; he’d be the first to say Kurt and I had some sort of good, inexplicable connection. We weren’t close the way he was to his friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, or Tobi Vail, who was his girlfriend, or any of his male friends that he grew up with. I didn’t know Kurt all that well, but our friendship was unusual. Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from the depths of his gravelly stream of vocal sound. It wasn’t screaming, or shrieking, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. Kurt seemed always to be working against himself one way or the other.

Courtney Love was utterly self-absorbed; Kurt probably did spend more time with Frances than Courtney did. Looking back, I can’t imagine what life was like in the chaos of their drug-fueled life, and it’s hard for me to remember that they were together for only a couple of years. It took so little time to forge a life, or in this case, a brand. Riot Grrl, the underground feminist punk rock movement that got under way in the early nineties, maintained a media blackout, and for good reason. Bikini Kill and other female bands didn’t want to be co-opted and turned into products they couldn’t control by a corporate, white male world. Later on, Courtney Love would take up the role that the press was always fishing for—a punk princess, thrilling and dark. No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula L.A. glamour—sociopathy, narcissism—because it’s good entertainment! 

From the beginning, I had a feeling that Courtney, who was cunning, smart, and ambitious, asked me along only because she wanted my name associated with the record. Courtney was the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing her look for the camera. Some people are just born that way, and in the studio I felt she was performing for us. She was always sweet to Don Fleming and me because we were going to take her somewhere new and better, she hoped, but she yelled and screamed at everybody in her band. At one point during the recording, Courtney told me she thought Kurt Cobain was hot, which made me cringe inside and hope the two of them would never meet. We all said to ourselves, “Uh-oh, train wreck coming.” That Courtney was attracted to Billy Corgan came as a surprise, as she was clearly punk rock. But she was also very ambitious and manipulative, as Don and I learned well during the recording process, and knowing she could turn on me at any moment, I always kept her at arm’s length. There had been an incident in Rome, where Kurt had OD’d, but the details were never clear. 

Obviously, though, Kurt was headed down an even darker path, and after he hooked up with Courtney, it was only a matter of time before he completely self-destructed. But I was shattered and feeling as if I were moving slow-motion inside some strange dream. The words fell far short in conveying the feeling of loss that everyone, not just me, was feeling. The night after Kurt’s death, during a candlelight memorial service for the public, a recording of Courtney reading aloud Kurt’s suicide note was played. As the vigil continued, Courtney started handing out some of Kurt’s clothes to fans. It was as if she were stepping out into her destiny—a platform of celebrity and infamy. A week after Kurt died, Hole released their major-label debut, Live Through This, which elevated Courtney to a new kind of perverse stardom. The timing couldn’t have been better. If Courtney wanted something from you, she would use 100 percent of her charm and persuasion to get it. Back then Courtney had a ragged scar across her nose. In an otherwise charismatic face, it was hard not to notice. Years later, at Lollapalooza she described to me all the plastic surgery she planned to get. She said, “You probably didn’t know this, but I had a nose job once.” I think by then she’d had a couple more before.

To me, Madonna just seemed joyful, celebrating her own body. Most fun of all was her plucky attitude. She didn’t have a perfect body. She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not as sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she flaunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body. I admired what she was doing, though I was also skeptical about where it would all eventually lead. In retrospect Madonna was riding a cultural wave that before the 1980s would have been a male’s idea of marketing and was reclaiming her image and power back. Even if one day dozens pass Madonna’s sales due to the dubious way they count streamings now, no one will ever have the hysteria, the phenomenon status, the organic saturation of our culture Madonna had. There has never been a female star with her reach—in the US or worldwide. Here’s the kicker: she never tried to be America’s Sweetheart. She did this by challenging the conventions, by having unpopular opinions, by daring to be seen in a negative light. 

No other pop star dared go there. Every other female wanted to be seen in the most positive light but Madonna did not. Yet, despite that, she continued to dominate the charts. Madonna was a pop star that carried herself like a rock star; it makes sense since she started out in rock bands. And that attitude carried over into her pop career. As a music critic wrote "Madonna's music was pop but her image was punk". That's true in a lot of ways. She wanted to be loved but also hated. That's why Madonna appeals to women across different genres, women from Tori Amos to Nikki Minaj love Madonna. Tori Amos has covered Frozen and Live to Tell. Courtney Love was always a subpar imitation of Madonna, but instead of joie de vivre, she brought dread and corrosive moods. —Girl in A Band: A Memoir (2016) by Kim Gordon

"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna

We opened for Nirvana on April Fools’ Day 1989. Even though it wasn’t billed as a “benefit show,” Nirvana let us keep the money they would’ve made, which kept us afloat for months. Kurt Cobain suggested we go grab a drink and let things cool off. We went to a bar in the back of a restaurant called the Chinatown. Kurt came to our rescue again in June. Tobi kept things local and specific, and she shared the stuff she was in love with (the Go-Go’s, the Pandoras, the Go-Betweens, the Raincoats, the Slits). She also made up words like “hypocrobrats” and “apokalipstick.” When I finally made it back to Olympia, I moved into the same apartment building as Tobi. Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it. When Bikini Kill formed, I was closer with Tobi, but I always saw Kathi as the gravity that kept us tethered to the ground. 

Tobi and I are both complete hotheads, though she is more subtle about it than I am. I can count the times I’ve seen Kathi angry on less than one hand. Darren was a tan mountain biker with a short GQ haircut who talked like a Valley girl, so everyone thought he was gay. He was a few years older than me and had a cute squishy baby nose that was the perfect counterpoint for his fitness-model physique. Darren was always exercising outdoors. He was a great cook and started inviting me to eat with him a few times a week. “It’s hard cooking for one, easier for two,” he’d say. He taught me how to make his potato leek soup, which was so good I could smell it a block away. Darren was super supportive of Bikini Kill. I don’t think he loved the music, but he loved the politics. He was a sounding board for me when everyone was calling us man haters and telling us feminism didn’t matter in the punk scene. He loaned me books about race, class, and gender that we’d talk about over the many meals we ate at his desk. He lived in apartment #5, which was a tiny studio. Darren may’ve looked like a square, but he did the brattiest punk shit I’d ever seen. 

I’d sneak out of the building and walk up Fourth Avenue to Slim Moon’s house. Kurt from Nirvana lived in the apartment behind Slim’s, so when Slim wasn’t around I started hanging out at Kurt’s place. Spending time with Kurt took my mind off the whole stupid drama with my ex-boyfriend Luke. We’d drink beer and write lyrics on legal pads, handing them back and forth, underlining the parts we liked, and discussing possible changes. When we listened to music together, Kurt was obsessive. He would take the needle off a Vaselines record and place it back like he was sampling it, to hear the perfect intro or the perfect verse over and over again. He studied songs like they were medical journals and he was a doctor, always looking for new techniques he could use at practice. 

Kurt asked me if I’d want to put some writing in the liner notes and maybe do the cover art for Nirvana’s upcoming album, so he came to my apartment one day to see my ideas. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw Luke standing in the hallway. Kurt knew about Luke’s behavior and he asked Luke what he was doing there. Luke said he could be wherever he wanted. I was working at my desk drinking a beer when I heard Kurt shouting in the hallway, “Why don’t you just leave Kathleen alone?!” I opened my door to see Kurt about to physically fight Luke. I pulled him away and into my apartment. After drinking probably my fifth beer, I showed Kurt some album art ideas and tried to act cool, but I was secretly elated that someone had stood up for me.

I wasn’t attracted to Kurt, but he definitely glowed. Like he had sounds bouncing off his skin. I always picture his sunken chest barely filling out his white T-shirt as he giggled at some stupid shit on TV. Kurt’s apartment became my escape hatch over time. The bubble I wrapped myself in to get away from Luke. Kurt used to joke that we were brother and sister and the Brawny paper towel guy was our dad. We would smoke pot while watching his turtle walk around his tiny living room. He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched. “SCUM” is said to stand for “the Society for Cutting Up Men,” and the book itself is super violent and funny as hell, which reminded me of Kurt. A few days after giving the book to him, I went to a barbecue in his backyard, but every time I came close to him, he’d go into his apartment “to get something.” I came by a few nights later and Kurt let me in. I asked him point-blank if he was mad at me. 

“I don’t need you to buy me books,” he said. “I’m not fucking stupid. I can pick out my own books.” It wasn’t the content that offended him, it was me. I was acting like Ms. Smarty Pants College Girl who had come to educate dumb working-class Kurt. And then it hit me. Kurt probably wasn’t financially able to go to college, even though he was one of the most intellectually curious people I knew. He was also treated like a local in Olympia even though he was from Aberdeen, because the town was divided that way—college students vs. locals. And now someone he thought of as a friend was telling him, “Here, let me educate you with this cool book because I’m so smart and you need my guidance.” Having being put down as a woman had blinded me to my own power to hurt people. I never would’ve guessed Kurt cared what I thought of him until that moment. I told him I was sorry but I didn’t ask him to forgive me. A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: 

Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead. Kurt and I continued listening to records and hanging out. On one of those nights, we got drunk and talked about everything from how white the scene in Oly was to the massive new building that had just been put up down the street from his apartment on Pear Street. The sign on the building read, “Pregnancy Help,” but when I called to find out more, they let me know what they really were: a pro-life place that wanted to show me videos of infants in trash bags to scare me out of having an abortion. Kurt agreed we needed to take action via spray paint. Of course, he always had tons of stuff in his apartment—all kinds of art supplies. We went to the wooded area across the street from the fake abortion clinic like wasted feminist vigilantes. Once hidden, we staked out the “clinic” with Kurt’s binoculars and put on gloves so we wouldn’t have spray paint on our hands if the cops appeared. When the coast was clear, I yelled, “No cars!” Kurt ran across the street with his Kermit the Frog–in–jeans legs and spray-painted “GOD IS GAY” in ten-foot-tall letters.

After we did our “activism” on the building, we picked up Dave and headed downtown to my apartment in the Martin because I always had forty-ouncers in my fridge. It was springtime and my windows were open. My living room had two things in it, a shitty futon couch and a massive drafting table. That table was my HQ. I wrote both Bikini Kill zines there while listening to Rites of Spring and the Slits on heavy rotation. Pages of “Girl Power,” the second issue of our zine, were meticulously laid out on its massive surface. When Dave tried to touch it, I told him to step the fuck back. At some point, Kurt left Dave and me alone at the drafting table, talking drunk talk. Dave said he used to be in a band called Dain Bramage. And then I saw Kurt climbing through my window. He was holding yellow daffodils that I recognized instantly. “I picked them for you,” he said, like I was Darla in The Little Rascals and he was Alfalfa. “Oh shit, those are Darren’s,” I said. “He’s been trying to grow them for months. Oh shit, you got those from his window box!” Kurt dropped them. I explained loudly not to worry. “Darren is this guy who decided to take care of me,” I said. “He makes me dinner all the time. He’s my caretaker, basically.”

I was a young feminist and I was trying to sound cool, trying to fit into the tough-girl persona I assumed Kurt and Dave had of me. The undertone was: I hate and use all men except you, which makes you special. “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger. He takes care of me so I can make art.” Really Darren was one of my closest friends, my confidant and my lifeline. But I went on to describe him as if he were some loser I was just using. I wanted to give them what I thought they wanted—and I also wanted to make Kurt feel okay about rooting up the three flowers Darren had worked months to produce. We left my apartment and went back to Kurt’s. Kurt and I turned the lights off in his bedroom and went on a rampage, drunkenly destroying everything. We wrecked every inch of his room—his paintings, his blanket, the wall—because it was dark. Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel. . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds.

After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Kurt called a few months later asking if he could use the line “Smells like Teen Spirit” in a song. I was immediately transported back to that terrible night and wanted to get off the phone as fast as I could, so I just said, “Sure,” thinking it was no big deal. Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him. We were obnoxious feminist punks, and in the summer of 1991, DC embraced us. “Suggestion” wasn’t a perfect song. I never liked that Ian used the word “I” repeatedly in the lyrics, since it implied he was speaking as a woman. But when I first heard Fugazi play it in Seattle, it was a watershed moment for me. I had never seen punk men stick their necks out for feminism before.

We played with Nirvana at the Paramount in Seattle on Halloween of the same year. We were the opening band. I knew he’d called Tobi over the summer and asked if we wanted to be in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video as anarchist cheerleaders (an image he borrowed from a drawing in our zine). I responded with a HARD NO, because I wanted our band to be judged by the “meritocracy” of the time, not through the lens of association with an all-male band. Tobi, Kathi, and I talked about it and decided to decline. Kurt was hiding in the corner of the biggest dressing room backstage, and he seemed really far away. I assumed he was freaked out by all the attention. Nirvana was touring constantly and probably living out of hotels, so I tried not to take it personally and instead focused on how sweet it was that they’d asked us to open for them. I don’t think any of us realized how huge they were about to become, but something had clearly changed. I knew Kurt was using heroin, because he’d asked me to get him some the last time we’d hung out in Portland. After the show, I was sitting in the van next to the window when Tobi scrunched in next to me. I told her I felt like we’d never see Kurt again, and she knew exactly what I meant. I could tell by her expression and the cadence of her speech that she was also in a lot of pain, but she still played the big sister and calmed me down. She told me she’d lost people to heroin before and knew the drill. 

Tobi and Kurt had broken up, but it seemed like they were on good terms. We wore pajamas at the show I’d invited Joan Jett to. It was at the Wetlands in New York City. The owner put us in a room downstairs, and I immediately began snooping around, looking for a sneaky vault of chocolate bars, vintage records, or band shirts left behind. Joan Jett came to see us play that night, just like she said she would. She took me aside after the show and told me she could hear how she would produce us while we were playing. She wanted to make a record with us. The woman who’d produced the Germs’ first album wanted to work with us! She didn’t even ask about the pajama thing. It was like she already knew. Riot Grrrl had become like a hydra monster—super complicated, at times beautiful, but also potentially destructive. In LA Weekly, Emily White referred to it as “an underground with no mecca, built of paper.” In a way, she was right. Many of us had written the outlines of places where we could be heard in our zines and were now using physical locations like punk clubs and meetings to realize our imperfect dreams. In the punk tradition, we weren’t meant to have a mecca, a center, or a hierarchy. Except we did. 

And whether I liked it or not, I’d become the de facto leader. Not knowing what to do, I asked Ian MacKaye for advice. His answer was simple: “Keep your head down and do the work.” Tim Green had quit the Nation of Ulysses and had some downtime, so he offered to teach me to play guitar. But when he encouraged me after I made a mistake, I mistook his patience for condescension, put the guitar down, and stormed off. The thing is, Tim was genuinely trying to help me. He had this way of putting chords together that made me think of angels flying around with sunglasses on. He could bring everything great about Rites of Spring, the Wipers, and the Pandoras into one song. Tim lived at a punk house near the post office called the Red House. He converted the garage into a combination bedroom/music studio and we made a record, Real Fiction, there under the name The Fakes. Joan Jett made good on her promise to record us and we met her in Seattle to lay down our new songs, “Demirep” and “New Radio.” She loved “Rebel Girl” when we played it at Wetlands and had specific ideas about how it could sound better than it had on our album Pussy Whipped.

Joan and her manager Kenny Laguna had me in the vocal booth for hours. I was also sick of being in the fishbowl Olympia had become since I’d become indie famous. Tobi had no interest in the meetings or going to LA, so just the three of us met with Lenny Waronker at Capitol Records, Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, and Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Needless to say, we did not sign with Interscope. Soon after, Jimmy Iovine signed No Doubt. Their first hit for him: “Just a Girl.” Gwen Stefani celebrated on the cover of Spin with the headline “Riot Girlie.” Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, who I’d met on a previous New York trip when I was writing with Joan. Kim was working on lyrics for the first Free Kitten record. She would sit at their kitchen table for hours with headphones on, listening to instrumentals with mock vocals, writing and rewriting lyrics—a technique I quickly added to my repertoire. Sonic Youth toured with Nirvana, so I tried to get info from Kim and Thurston about how Kurt was doing. 

He’d married Courtney Love, who’d been putting Bikini Kill down in the press for a while, so it felt like seeing him with her around was a bad idea. But then Kim told me Kurt was going to be in Seattle without Courtney for a month and encouraged me to go visit him. The last time I’d spoken with Kurt was two years earlier when I was living at the Embassy in DC. He’d called for Tobi, but I’d picked up. When I told him Tobi wasn’t home, he asked if I had time to talk. As we began to chat, he brought up a Seattle show we’d played together at the OK Hotel a while back. After Nirvana’s set that night, a bunch of punk girls had yelled at him about Nirvana’s new song “Rape Me,” and he thought I was the leader of the campaign against him. I was confused by that song and had talked about it with some girls that night. We were all in agreement that a guy making a comparison between being sold out by a friend to being raped wasn’t the best idea, but I hadn’t spearheaded anything. I knew he was still doing heroin and wanted to at least let him know I cared about him and was there if he ever needed help, before it was too late. Just as I was packing my car to drive to Seattle to go see Kurt, I chickened out. I thought: He has a whole new life. He’s in one of the most famous bands in the world! 

After Kurt's suicide, everywhere I went I saw pictures of Kurt, which made me feel physically ill. I felt like he had died because he was sick of being exploited and treated like an object, and now that he was gone people were lining up to make money off his suffering. His death made me more secure in my strategy of eschewing fame whenever possible and working toward things that actually mattered. I was having a hard time dealing with the minuscule amount of fame I had; I couldn’t imagine how he had lasted as long as he did. But more than anything I was sad. Sad about the heroin, about the gun, about his not having the happiness he deserved. Sad we would never be old together, sitting on a porch talking about when we were stupid young musicians who thought we could change the world. Why hadn’t I had the courage to go see him when he asked me to? To tell him I loved him and to reassure him that I in no way thought he was a bad person for signing to a major label? I was a fucking coward. Scared of Courtney Love. Scared of Kurt rejecting me when he never had before. 

Courtney Love got in my face and started hissing like a cat. She began screaming stuff at me like, “Are you leaving now, Kathleen? Go home and feed the poor!” She held her lit cigarette up to my face and traced my features with it, like she was going to put it out on my face. Then she coldcocked me in the face. I’ll never know why she did it. Maybe because “trauma begets trauma.” Maybe she was on drugs and mourning Kurt’s death; maybe it was the fact that Tobi had dated Kurt while he was writing Nevermind, and it was widely speculated that Tobi was the inspiration for much of that record. Maybe Courtney was embarrassed because I’d seen her using my stage banter as an empty schtick. Whatever set her off, it was ironic that a woman attacked me for no reason and then claimed she was a better feminist than I was. As we left the theater’s parking lot, I got directions to the nearest police station. I just wanted the assault to be written down so no one could pretend it had never happened or say that it was a “fight,” like they had when Courtney assaulted singer Mary Lou Lord. 

Later Courtney told the media I provoked her by whispering “Where’s the baby, in a closet with an IV?” referring to her daughter. I absolutely did not say that. The “fight” became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a “catfight,” which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, “Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?” A few days later we played the Warfield in Los Angeles, the same venue we’d played with the Go-Go’s a year before. Before the show, I went to a deli and looked at magazines. I flipped through Spin, the one with Green Day on the cover. Inside was an essay by Courtney about Lollapalooza. She claimed I was “Kurt’s worst enemy.” I looked up and saw Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, walking toward me. Even though we ran in the same circles, we didn’t know each other well. He made a beeline straight for me, sat down at the table, and started talking. And from what he said, it was like he knew I’d just read the interview: “Kurt would have been really upset to hear that someone hit you in the face. He loved you, I know he did.” —"Rebel Girl" (2024) by Kathleen Hanna