Kurt Cobain Conspiracy Theorists, Rejoice!

I love the word "Docudrama." It reminds me of another madeup word, "docufiction", that attempts to combine the editing style of a documentary with entirely fictitious characters and embellished plot points. We were introduced to these terms with Animal Planet's smash hits Mermaids: The Body Found and a second installment, New Evidence. These seemingly truthful tales broke ratings records for the network, and for an unsurprising reason: They were claiming their shows to be fact, using real evidence and real scientists to back their claims. But as audiences soon found out with a quick Google search, both the footage and the "scientists" were falsified. Actors hired and CGI images built, the audience was duped. It was all legal, apparently, because a small disclaimer at the end of the final credits (because we all stick around to watch those) was shown. And now, the industry is at it again, bringing us the docudrama Soaked in Bleach, about Kurt Cobain's death and the conspiracy theories surrounding the 20-year-old incident.

As the press release for the film explains, the film offers, "the definitive examination of the artist's death from a yet unseen perspective..." With the words "unseen perspective," we can only imagine they mean "conspiracy theorist perspective." It's been 20 years since the Nirvana frontman passed away, but fans and theorists and the general public have taken an interest in defining Cobain's death as something other than a suicide. Was he murdered? Was his suicide a set up? Is he still alive living on an island with Marilyn Monroe and Tupac Shakur? The docudrama attempts to answer this question.

The film is shown through the eyes of Tom Grant, the private investigator hired by Courtney Love to find her missing husband in 1994. Cobain's death was ruled a suicide, as the singer was found with a fatal, self-inflicted, gun wound to the head. But because of the investigator, doubts about the nature of his death have been raised, and clung to, by Nirvana fans for two decades. According to the release, Grant's own investigation proved that there was "significant empirical and circumstantial evidence to conclude that foul play could very well have occurred." The docudrama claims it will develop a "narrative mystery" with cinematic recreations, interviews with witnesses and key experts (actors?) and examine artifacts from the 1994 case.

Don't get me wrong — Sure, I'm skeptical — But I eat this shit up. I've watched the Mermaids docufiction films more than once, because while I'm 99.9% sure that mermaids (and mermen) don't exist, it's a whole lot of fun to feed that 0.1% of me that believes otherwise. So, when it comes to the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, it could have been suicide, or... I'm not going to say it was aliens, but...

Watch the trailer for Soaked in Bleach below: