Scocca

Spoiled, Unpleasant Heiress Still Spoiled and Unpleasant

Well, Courtney Love got enough cash from selling her dead husband’s reanimated corpse to the Guitar Hero video game (and then

claiming she didn’t

) to keep herself in

Vosges chocolates and Marlboro Golds

, to judge by what Eric Wilson of the New York Times saw in her expensive hotel room. Or maybe the fashion industry is just giving her cigarettes and chocolate—and racks of designer clothes—for free, because she is so endlessly disgusting-amusing.

At The Awl, Mike Barthel meditates on the fact that Wilson’s profile was ”

fundamentally indistinguishable

from any other long-form profile of Love written in the last twenty or so years,” arguing that Love

falls and rises and falls and rises in a way so personally traumatic that it can’t possibly be planned and yet is so perfectly reflective of the stories we want to hear about the famous and famous-for-being-famous that the media almost have no choice but to cover her.

Maybe, probably, I guess. And this part strikes me a fair and correct reading of another part of Love’s behavior, even though Barthel likes her a lot more than I do:

Wilson begins his piece with Love bursting into a hotel room naked, putting on a see-through gown, and then walking through the lobby “with her breasts exposed to an assortment of prominent fashion figures.” If you’ve ever had any sort of affection for punk rock, it’s hard not to love this gesture as a fuck-you to the Madonna-whoring of the female form, flipping the bird to cultural attitudes that hold women’s bodies to be something so precious that they can only be revealed in private. They’re just boobs, after all! But then, this is Courtney; it’s entirely possible she just didn’t realize her tits were out, and it’s hard not to feel this would undermine the power of the gesture maybe a little.

Still, when I read another piece that recounts yet another apparently chaotic chapter in the apparently chaotic life of Courtney Love, by now the main thing I notice is the consistency of it all. For all her provocations and drunken meanderings and tantrums and short-lived reforms, there’s always a fairly bright-line, well-defined theme: here is a mean, spoiled, entitled person, who is acting as mean, spoiled entitled people do. You don’t really need to understand punk rock or feminism or drugs or the celebrity-fame-industrial complex to get what Courtney Love is all about. All you have to understand is money.