Next, Cobain wanted the video to depict "bodies entwined in old oak trees . . . Ask about Dante's Inferno movie from the 30s to use instead of making our own props. We will use the scenes of people intwined old withering oak trees." He refers to the 1935 Spencer Tracy movie Dante's Inferno, about a man who stages a Coney Island carnival attraction based on Dante. He bribes the inspector, the building collapses, and people die. The theme of corrupt showbiz and mass death appealed to Cobain.
So did the Inferno. The bodies entwined in trees, briefly seen in the finished video, are from Canto XIII of Dante, the suicide canto. God turns people into trees to punish them for stealing their own souls: when Dante snaps a twig, it bleeds, and he hears a cry. God also sends winged harpies to torment them, like Cobain's crows.
Alice Wheeler
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The journals contain several sketches and plans for "Heart Shaped Box's" central symbol of purity: a 4-year-old "Aryan" girl in a KKK hat. (Could she be associated with his beloved blond kid sister and blond toddler daughter?) She is oppressed by her parents' views, but when her hat blows off, it symbolizes the fresh wind of revolutionary ideas. She reaches up to the half-human trees with fetuses dangling from them (another image of purity).
This captures the theme of the lyrics: "Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back." Cobain had a deep need to crawl back to the womb. In a journal quoted only in Heavier Than Heaven, he writes that his first memory was fighting to climb back up into his mother's womb when his head first protruded into the terrible alien air. His first sight was the aqua floor tiles, perhaps related to the color of Nevermind's underwater cover, inspired by an underwater-birth documentary Cobain had seen. The last album, and the "Technicolor" palette he planned for the "Heart Shaped Box" video, was to be the color of the Inferno instead. "Heart Shaped Box" is his metaphor for a womblike place of safety: his marriage, the protective warmth of loved ones. It is also a confinement associated with the afterlife, as is the warm snugness of heroin.
The craving for innocence expressed in the video notes, and throughout the journals and albums, was acted out in Cobain's last days in a poignant way. With his ever- juvenile delinquent friend Dylan Carlson, he hot-wired a car, went on a joyride, and trashed it. He could have bought a car lot full of brand-new BMWs, but instead he stole a crummy car and destroyed it, perhaps as a way to recapture the lost innocence of his lost vandalistic youth. It was pathetic. And yet, in his art, he could shape his yearnings for innocence and his appetite for destruction into something of lasting value.
