In this way, the film is similar to Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” his cinematic scud missile of 1997. In that film, the 40-something Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling development in a film whose plot was regularly described as a Möbius strip by reviewers.

“Mulholland Drive” is a movie along those lines, though its filmic palette is broader, its setting (Hollywood and the film industry) more portentous, and its themes plainer. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal rather than opaque and frustrating.

Indeed, it may be the most conventional and coherent of Lynch’s “hard” movies (“Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks,” “Fire Walk With Me,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway”). All the themes that cycle through his work — strange figures pulling the strings behind the scenes, random acts of extreme violence, bizarre character fixations and the feeling that the surreal is an active part of our everyday life — are present here, but he’s tied them to a narrative structure that, in the end, resolves itself. For aficionados, there are red herrings that will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is finally coming out and telling us what he’s all about.

Still, of recent American movies, only “Memento” is remotely as challenging, and it’s still almost impenetrable on first viewing. What follows includes a synopsis of the plot and then questions and answers about what in the world is going on in “Mulholland Drive’s” strange universe. So stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen the film.

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Here’s the basic plot: The film opens with garish, distorted footage of people jitterbugging; it’s a hellish version of a Gap ad. Then we see washed-out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face.

Then there’s a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack.

Then the movie proper starts, with a few parallel stories: In one, a gorgeous woman is in the back of a limo, climbing the winding curves of Mulholland Drive above Los Angeles. The driver stops unexpectedly and points a pistol at her. But before he can fire the limo is rammed by one of a pair of drag-racing cars. The voluptuous woman gets out in a daze and stumbles down the hills into Hollywood and ends up sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation.

Then we see a diner, with an odd, nervous, nerdy-looking young guy talking to a more composed middle-aged man. The younger one says he’s had a dream about the diner and a monster outside. They go outside and see the monster! The young guy collapses.

Someone is after the woman who wandered off from the car wreck. We see a strange man pick up a phone and hear that they haven’t found her yet. He calls a number and passes along the message; we see a dirty yellow wall phone picked up and accept the message. Then we see that phone hung up, picked up and dialed. A phone rings on a coffee table next to an ashtray, but no one answers.

We are introduced to another character, Betty, as she gets off a plane, chatting gaily with an elderly couple she met on the flight. Betty is a bushy-tailed, almost painfully chipper young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an actress. The older couple effusively wish her luck.

In yet another narrative stream, a young director, Adam, is being forced by some evil Hollywood studio types to cast a certain ingénue in his film — a blond named Camilla. Arrogantly, he refuses; a strange man in a spooky room orders that the film be shut down. Adam leaves for home in despair and finds his wife in bed with the pool man, who beats him up.

Meanwhile, a scruffy blond-haired guy is talking to a long-haired guy in a shabby office, who mentions something about an accident. The blond guy pulls out a gun and shoots the other, apparently to get a mysterious black book that has some sort of connection to the attempted killing of Rita. But a shot goes awry and hits a woman in the next office. The hit guy tries to strangle her, then shoots her. Then he shoots a janitor who wanders by. Then he shoots the janitor’s vacuum cleaner and starts a fire, which sets off alarms and sprinklers.

Betty is staying in the vacant apartment of her aunt, in a building run by an older woman who calls herself Coco. Betty stumbles on the bruised woman hiding out in the shower! She’s under the impression, at first, that she’s a friend of her aunt’s; but it eventually is revealed that the strange guest is suffering from amnesia. She christens herself Rita, after seeing Rita Hayworth’s name on a movie poster; the pair find $50,000 and a mysterious blue key in Rita’s pocketbook. This suits the Nancy Drew-like inclinations of the out-of-towner perfectly, and they set out to figure out the secret of Rita’s life.

The director is thoroughly menaced by some dark forces, including a very scary guy in a cowboy hat in a deserted corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon, high above Hollywood.

The cowboy, calm but dangerous, tells the director again to hire Camilla, the ingénue. “If you do what you’re told, you’ll see me one more time,” the cowboy says calmly. “If you don’t do what you’re told, you’ll see me two more times.”

Betty, meanwhile, is preparing for her first audition. She and Rita practice her lines; she’s clumsy and conventional. But at the actual audition she turns into a sensual bombshell — and blows away the producer and everyone watching!

Then a casting agent walks Betty over to the director’s movie set. It seems to be some sort of ’50s period piece. We see a woman sing Connie Stevens’ “16 Reasons.” Then Camilla, the ingénue the bad guys are shoving down Adam’s throat, sings Linda Scott’s “I’ve Told Every Little Star.” “This is the girl,” Adam says.

Betty and Adam’s eyes meet. But she runs home to Rita.

The two women follow clues to the apartment of another young woman, Diane. They speak to Diane’s neighbor, then break into her apartment and find her dead and decayed in her bed!

Shaken, the two return home and dress Rita in a blond wig as a disguise. Betty invites Rita to share her bed that night. Rita makes a pass and the pair find comfort in each other’s arms.

“Have you even done this before?” coos Betty.

“I don’t know,” replies Rita, “– have you?”

Betty says, “I want to, with you. I’m in love with you.”

Rita has a dream about a stage show in a nightclub. She drags them to the club, which is called Silencio. There, musicians and singers pretend to perform, but the music is all canned. Says the emcee: “This is all a tape recording. It is an illusion.”

Up in the balcony, the pair begin crying. Betty shakes and weeps in some hyperemotional response to the music. Without explanation, she finds a glistening blue box in her purse.

They go home. Rita turns to the closet. When she turns around, Betty has disappeared. Rita uses the key to open the box. She’s apparently sucked into it; we zoom into it, presumably from her point of view, and it drops to the floor.

The movie suddenly changes. We’re back at the dead Diane’s apartment. We hear knocks at her door; we even see the mysterious cowboy again! “Hey, pretty girl, time to wake up,” he says.

Her neighbor, whom we met before, finally wakes her up. Diane is a haggard, dirty-blond with a nervous twitch and a beaten-down look. She notices a blue key on her coffee table.

She’s involved with a taunting but cold brunet — the amnesia victim, Rita! The brunet’s real name, we learn, is Camilla — which is the same name as the ingénue the studio bad guys are pushing. But that woman was blond and much shorter — an entirely different woman.

The two women have sex on the couch, but Camilla suddenly goes cold. Camilla says, “We shouldn’t do this any more.”

Diane, horrified, says, “Don’t say that,” and tries to force her way with her.

This Camilla is suddenly the object of the charms of the young film director, now happily separated from his wife. We see him putting the moves on her on his movie set. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which she does, glowering.

Later we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy.

The phone rings; the phone she picks up is the one that isn’t answered at the beginning of the movie. Diane is taken in a limo to the party — the same limo, it seems, we saw Rita in at the beginning of the film. It’s on the same ominous trip up Mulholland Drive, too.

But she’s not about to be shot. Instead, she’s greeted at a party by Rita, who is now Camilla. The host is the director, and the weird Coco is now the director’s mother! She questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. We learn that Diane was a teen jitterbugging champion in Canada who came to Hollywood after her aunt died and left her some money. Diane says she’s acted a bit, and met Camilla at an audition for a big part in a movie called “The Sylvia North Story,” directed by Paul Bruckner. But she lost the part to Camilla.

Diane, humiliatingly, is forced to watch first as the blond Camilla from the first half of the movie comes over and kisses her Camilla, deeply on the lips. And then Camilla and Adam make out in front of her at the table. They seem to be about to announce their engagement.

This scene abruptly cuts to one in which we see a distraught Diane sitting again in the diner, paying the shaggy hit man $50,000 to kill her girlfriend. He’s holding a black book. She’ll find a blue key on her coffee table when the deed is done, he says.

The camera pans out into the back lot of the diner, where we see the monster again. It’s a homeless man, it turns out, his face filthy and his hair matted. He’s turning the mysterious deep blue box over in his hands.

We suddenly are reintroduced to the cheerful elderly couple who accompanied Betty off the plane — incredibly tiny, and crawling out of the mysterious box. Now they are shrieking and horrific. They chase Diane around her apartment in a phalanx of terror. She flees to her bedroom and shoots herself in the head.

The couple laugh maniacally.

We see the ominous L.A. cityscape at night. Spectral washed out images float over it, just like at the beginning of the movie. This time we can see Betty and Camilla’s faces.

Then there’s a shot of an odd, heavily made-up actress from the club the women went to.

“Silencio,” she says.

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This all leaves a number of questions. Let’s take them in order. (Feel free to send us suggestions, quarrels or further thoughts on the film.)

What the fuck is going on in this movie?

Well, it seems that Diane had her girlfriend murdered. Then, in a masturbatory fantasy cum fever dream in the moments before she commits suicide, she reimagines her ruined career and failed relationship with the woman she loves.

The dream begins with Camilla/Rita miraculously escaping the hit Diane had taken out on her. From there, Diane, a product of Hollywood, imagines the story in cinematic fashion: She sees herself as the naive wannabe starlet Betty, who succeeds on sheer talent and solves whatever problems are thrown her way. She even gets the girl!

Thematically, Lynch seems to be working out a number of things: the enticing but empty imagery of the movie screen; the accompanying imagery that is used as stardust to cover up the unpleasantries of the movie-making process; the imagery that the ambitious use to reimagine and remake themselves; and the imagery and imagination actors put to work to create their characters.

Wait, go back to the Diane and Rita stuff. Where does Betty fit in?

Diane and Betty are the same person.

Get out!

Some viewers see that it’s the same person right away; others are flummoxed because they just seem different. If you look closely, you see they’re the same actress. The actress, Naomi Watts, delivers a technically dazzling performance. It’s difficult to believe that chipper Betty and the ground-down Diane are the same woman, but they are.

As a reader points out in a letter to the editor, Lynch even slips in a wry joke. “It’s weird to be calling myself,” Rita says as the pair call Diane. “Hi, it’s me,” Diane says immediately afterward, on her answering machine.

Fine: “So it was all just a dream.” Is that the cliché you’re contending Lynch is giving us?

Well, it’s a little more complex than that. It certainly does explain the exaggerated gestures, heightened emotions and odd plot turns in the first part of the movie. Seen as dream motions, Betty’s hokey “I’m goink to be a stah, darlink” schtick makes more sense.

Diane’s fantasy is a number of things. It’s obviously a dream of a world in which her relationship with Camilla was different — a place where Camilla loves her and is dependent on her. But it’s also a requiem for her lost career, and arguably an elegy to a lost Hollywood as well. But Lynch seems rather ambivalent about the lost Hollywood, which by analogy undermines Diane’s dream vision, too.

Lynch may be telling us that this is the dream we all share when we watch Hollywood movies, and reminding us at the same time that it is a dream — that it is wishful, and says a lot about the dreamer. The movie’s most problematic conceit is Diane’s hallucination of the mad powers behind the scenes in Hollywood. Are those imaginings the incoherent ones of a cockeyed youngster turned sour by failure? Or the unvarnished truth of someone who’d seen it happen, up close and personal?

Indeed, Diane herself is someone who deals with personal rejection by hiring an assassin. Lynch does a great job intertwining the dicier sides of Diane’s character with a wider critique of Hollywood as a business and the complex relationship between Hollywood as dream factory and its audience. It’s possible Lynch sees consumers of popular Hollywood fare as unable to work out their grievances in their real lives, so they resort to fantasies of revenge.

What’s the time period of the movie?

It’s apparently the present, but the dream part of the film is an eras-spanning romanticized netherworld of ivied Hollywood apartment buildings, aging stars and picture-perfect period re-creations on busy sound stages. (In “Blue Velvet,” too, Lynch pulled off the trick of creating a modern setting that seemed somehow to have previous decades still hanging heavily in the air.) The women ride around in cabs a lot, an anachronistic touch. But the thuggish hit men and crack-addled hookers wandering around are up to the minute. Overall it’s typical of the fine line Lynch walks between the fantastic and the real, all set against a malevolently filmed skyline, harsh parking lots and the endless expanse of light that is L.A. from the hills at night.

Speaking of which, despite a few night scenes, this is one of those odd noirs in which terror lives in broad daylight.

OK, so what about the box?

We don’t know about the box.

What about the monster?

The monster, who hides behind the diner where Diane contracted the killing, seems to be the demon Diane metaphorically begins dealing with when she decides to have her girlfriend knocked off. In the end we see he’s just a homeless man, a reminder of the grimy Hollywood Diane came to know after her jitterbug-queen optimism got beaten out of her. And, OK — he’s also the keeper of the box, the symbol of Camilla’s death and perhaps reality contained (sort of like a movie). Once it’s unlocked, Diane has to return to the physical world and accept that she’s done an inhuman thing.

Readers see a lot more in the box: Several found an amusing — and hard to argue with — sexual connotation. (Maybe that’s why the hitman laughs when Diane asks what the key opens.) Others make a case that it’s a television. The multiplicity of meanings fits in well with the film’s texture.

The blue key is supposed to mean Camilla’s dead; but we see her alive after that.

After the fairly straightforward narrative of the film’s first two-thirds, the last part of the movie is a staccato sequence of flashbacks. Diane sees the key, and understands that the deed is done. (She probably understands that she’s going to pay a price for it, too; her neighbor even tells her that “Those detectives were here again.”) She starts reflecting on how she came to be in this position, from Camilla’s coolness to her flirtations with Adam to the unforgivable humiliations at the party. Diane sees that she’s been reduced to an object of pity and contempt by even someone like Coco. That takes her into the downward spiral that produces the hallucinogenic first part of the movie and then her decision to shoot herself.

Let’s talk about the 50 grand. Diane gives it to the hit man; why is Rita carrying it?

This is a good example of Lynch’s dream logic. Diane fetishizes it, and it turns up in an odd place in the dream. Same with the mysterious blue key. The hit man says he’ll leave a normal blue key in her apartment when the deed is done. This transmogrifies in her fantasy into that futuristic one. Both are also necessary to Diane’s dream mélange of film clichés, particularly noir film clichés (and the director’s deconstruction of the genre as well: “A dame appears out of nowhere with 50 grand in her purse and a mysterious key.”)

Watch the movie carefully and you see that many characters and props in the last third of the film are picked up in Diane’s mind and repurposed for the dream: The hit man’s black book; her grouchy neighbor; the waitress at the diner; the director’s mom; the director who didn’t give her the movie part; the woman Camilla kisses at the party; the cowboy; even her aunt.

What mélange of film clichés?

Diane seems to have imbued herself with the worlds of film, TV, even pop-culture camp, in her time in L.A. Much of what she and Rita attempt are procedures right out of a Sam Spade noir handbook by way of Nancy Drew — peeking into windows, talking to neighbors, making anonymous phone calls and so forth. When the two are in their bed together, there’s a double-profile shot that’s an homage to Bergman’s “Persona.” Betty helps Rita turn herself into a blond, a rough doppelganger of Betty, à la “Vertigo.” The sequences in which the director is bullied into using Camilla in his film have a tangential similarity to the conversations leading up to the infamous horse’s head scene in “The Godfather.” Readers note that “The Wizard of Oz” is in there too, as well as a strange pattern of parallels to “Pulp Fiction.”

There are also vague echoes of TV soap operas, pornography and a lot of other things, not to mention the presence of Chad Everett (the guy Diane does the audition with), ’40s hoofer Ann Miller (Coco), Lee Grant (the aunt’s weird neighbor), Billy Ray Cyrus (the pool guy), Robert Forster (a cop), and others.

The references all seem to be what the theorists call “blank,” just memories ricocheting around in poor Diane’s head at a really bad time.

Fine, fine. Isn’t the cowboy just sort of a twist on the menacing Robert Blake character in “Lost Highway,” the reindeer man in “Wild at Heart” etc., etc.?

It certainly seems like it. The goofy Roy Rogers getup is also another echo of a prelapsarian Hollywood when the studio system ruled and studio heads of virtually limitless power really did pull the strings.

The director did what he was told. Why did we see the cowboy twice?

Well, the cowboy appears once to Diane as a transition from her dream back to reality, apparently part of her fantasies before she kills herself. In the “real” last third of the film, we see the cowboy passing out of the party at the director’s house. To us, caught up in the backward dream logic of Diane’s fantasy, this would have been the one last time the director would see him, since he agreed to put Camilla in the movie. But in reality he was just someone she once saw out of the corner of her eye who was then incorporated into the paranoid fantasy of her dream.

What about that hooker the hit man questions and then ushers into his van? And what about those diner waitresses?

They seem to be Lynch’s nods to the milieu he’s filming in and the diverse women Hollywood chews up in various ways. Diane imagines herself as Betty in the dream after seeing a waitress named Betty when she’s talking to the hit man. In the dream, Betty meets a waitress named Diane.

Betty loses a part in “The Sylvia North Story” to Camilla. Who’s Sylvia North?

Beats us. But note that the director of that movie is Paul Bruckner — the milquetoasty guy at her audition.

That weird old couple?

They appear in the opening jitterbug sequence as well. They may be the judges of the contest she won, or her parents. In the end, they seem to be signs of her innocent past come back to terrorize her.

The film’s dedicated to Jennifer Syme. Who’s that?

Syme was an actress who appeared in “Lost Highway.” She died in a car accident. The tragic death was noted in the tabloids because she used to date Keanu Reeves.

What about the Silencio Club?

In the dream logic of Diane’s imaginings, it’s part of the glamour of Hollywood, and the out-of-body existence of many actors, and perhaps the ultimate emptiness of the reality that films purport to give us. The unexpected focus on sound, as opposed to image, which is what the rest of the film seems to be about, is typical for Lynch as well: His soundscapes, here as in his other difficult films, are extraordinary, and he regularly conflates sound and image. Remember that in “Blue Velvet,” which also dealt with the reality beneath the surface image, young Jeffrey, the Kyle MacLachlan character, is introduced to that netherworld via a severed ear.

Lynch’s longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, plays the espresso-drinking movie exec at the beginning of the film, incidentally.

Also, speaking of “Blue Velvet,” Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Betty is from Deep River, Ontario.

What is the point of that scene with Chad Everett, Diane’s audition?

This strikes us as possibly the heart of the movie. It’s the linchpin of Diane’s idealized image of herself. Yet beyond that, the care with which the sequence is set up and the scene’s immense punch seems to suggest that Lynch believes, perhaps passionately, that there is such a thing as acting, even great acting. It may be his tribute specifically to the miracle of character imaginings like Diane’s and, by extension, to the creation of self in our subconscious and the many selves we don’t know. Actors make it up out of nothing more than sheer imagination and persuade the audience to believe it. Lynch has been doing the same thing explicitly over his entire career.

Again, Naomi Watts, the actress, should be given credit for balancing the many levels of control needed to convincingly act the part of a ground-down starlet imagining herself as a chipper and idealistic young thing who then can convincingly deliver a unexpectedly searing audition performance — and then have the levels of the conceptions make emotional sense to viewers at the end of the film. Brava!

The hit man thing is confusing. Who is the long-haired guy he murders? And what about the prostitute he ushers into the van? Is that Diane, too?

The guy he shot so perfunctorily made some remark about a car accident. The implication seems to be that he was in one of the joyriding cars that hit the limo, and that he ended up with some sort of black book that the guys who were about to kill Rita possessed. In the logic of Diane’s dream, the hit man needed that as a lead to where she was. We know that it’s not going to help him find Rita, but he doesn’t know that.

The scene is also another movie nod, this time to the absurdist modern black noir; here it allows Lynch, at his bleakest, to film a senseless carnage that out-Tarantinos Tarantino. It’s also part of the confusing background noise Lynch likes to put into his movies. It is a deeply felt contention of his that not everything makes sense. Less charitably, you can say it’s a loose end from the TV series that never got made.

What TV series?

“Mulholland Drive” was supposed to be the pilot for an ABC TV series that was going to both make ABC the network of the moment and put Lynch back into a “Twin Peaks”-like limelight. Fat chance. The network approved the script, but balked when execs saw the two-hour-plus result. Lynch apparently tried to slice off the last 40 minutes, but the network didn’t like that either. He eventually found a French film company, Studio Canal, to put up some money. He reassembled the cast, filmed some more and created the feature version out now.

So what is Lynch trying to say about Hollywood?

You can’t help noticing that no one comes off very well in this fetid world. In interviews Lynch has been putting the screws to ABC. While he points out that the network had approved the script before he filmed it, it’s hard to believe any sane person would expect broadcast television to air a movie anything remotely like this. And we’re somewhat suspicious when a director like Lynch — who’s been given tens of millions of dollars to make extraordinarily dark, sometimes positively inhuman (“Wild at Heart,” for example) movies for more than 20 years — whines about Hollywood. He’s been nominated for a best director Oscar twice. What does he have to complain about?

All that said, the movie is certainly no polemic. Lynch seems pretty detached from this. The character of Adam the director seems a mocking version of himself. Lynch’s nuances and implicit respect for the magic of the art make the film a complex portrait of the industry.

And the artistic rationale for the extended sequences of lesbian sex would be …

He’s playing explicitly with how Hollywood uses women predominantly as sex objects — except he’s turning the formula on its head, making the women’s world a closed one, at least in Diane’s fantasy of it. But of course, in the end she’s doing the same thing a Hollywood movie normally does to a Camilla — imagining that she’s an empty object that she can possess.

In the end, “Mulholland Drive” is Lynch’s most sympathetic film, particularly to women. Even if Betty’s dream is an extended apologia for a terrible crime, the density of her character, the expansiveness of her dreams and desires, and the catch-all giddiness of her imagination all make her something close the one the thing she always wanted to be: the ultimate movie heroine.

And she’s just part of the film’s dense milieu. The network of aging actresses and incoming starlets ineffably captures the implacable Hollywood mill. Lynch seems to accept the manifold processes by which women come in to self-invent themselves: by sheer talent, the way Betty does; desperately, as Diane does; by hook or by crook, as Rita does, plucking a new identity off a movie poster; or sexually, the way Camilla does. All, he seems at pains to point out, are ultimately in the business of dream fulfillment, which is why we as consumers go to the films as well. Right?

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Jackson, the New Zealand director of “Heavenly Creatures” and “The Frighteners,” has helmed perhaps the most ambitious film production ever undertaken, filming both “Fellowship” and its two sequels, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” with a reputed $300 million budget and a cast and crew of 2,500. Actual filming began fully two years ago. The studio plans to release the chapters over successive Christmases, with the first coming in December and the others following in 2002 and 2003.

The film’s supposed to be about two and a half hours long. It stars Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, McKellen as Gandalf and Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, with Cate Blanchett, Brad Dourif, Viggo Mortensen, John Rhys-Davies and Liv Tyler along for the ride.

In the preview, viewers see three major scenes, and then a five-minute collage of other footage. In the first one, we see Gandalf visit Bilbo, the title character in the Ring prequel, “The Hobbit.” We see a merry hobbit celebration and watch as Bilbo disappears on his journey to Rivendell, and Frodo, his hobbit nephew, gathers a band together and goes off with Gandalf. It’s all very nice, and after a few seconds of slightly unnatural footage you don’t even notice how the filmmakers have the towering Gandalf sharing screen space with the diminutive hobbits.

The two middle sequences, however, make a strong case for the film’s high-toned special effects and distinctive vision. The two scenes are from the book’s battles in the Mines of Moria, an old abandoned dwarf kingdom.

In the first, Gandalf, Frodo and their cohort of hobbits and humans battle a horde of monsters in an underground dungeon. While it’s edited frenetically in the modern style, the sequence has terrific production values and is breathlessly exciting. When a blunt-headed cave troll rushes in and starts whirling a mace around the room, with sonic shreds of concrete flying about the theater, viewers duck their heads in alarm.

The second set piece finds the group chased into a towering cave and then forced to rush down a crumbling concrete stairway hundreds of feet tall, which begins shaking apart as a new and gigantic monster — a balrog, to be precise — comes after them. The running heroes on the crumbling bridge scene is an action-adventure staple, of course, but it has seldom been done with such jittery vision.

Beyond that we see a collage of other scenes, snowy mountaintops and fog-strewn marshes, portentous utterances and teeming CGI battlegrounds.

We remember that in the second edition of “Survivor,” the one in Australia, one of the tribes, the Kucha, was a lean and mean fighting machine. The other, the Ogakor, were sort of feckless and unkempt, had a sex maniac named Jerri who made all the boys nervous and distracted, and couldn’t win a challenge to save their lives. The only thing that saved the Ogakor in the end was when the leader of the Kucha, Mike, the psycho alpha male who killed a baby pig with his bare hands, fell into a fire and burned himself. After that the Kucha caved and eventually became extinct.

But for now, in this, the third season of the show, the Boran are looking positively Ogakorian.

Our Bantu dictionary, close by at “Survivor” recap HQ, says that Boran means: “Steals food. Buffoonish fat guy. Losers.”

Last week, you’ll remember, the strapping basketball coach, Clarence, was busted for food pilferage. First, he gobbled an extra (but, here in Africa, ineffably valuable and symbolic) cherry from a can the group was passing around. Then he broke out a can of beans without asking and hid the evidence. He got nailed easily on both counts, however. And tubby Tom, the goat farmer from Virginia, was merciless.

But instead of tossing him, the tribe offed doughty Diane, the mail carrier. Since those booted are required to go immediately, they didn’t have to worry about her going postal on them right then, though we remind Diane now that she still has the chance, with everyone in America distracted by threats other than those of disgruntled postal workers.

But they also gave a shot across the bow of Clarence. He ended up with two votes against him, one from Diane and one from Tom, who’s got an overloud opinion about everything,

“Just to teach him a lesson,” as Lex, the tattooed, be-earringed guy, puts it. “Just so he knows he needs to shape up.”

Clarence wavers between being properly repentant and still trying to assign blame elsewhere. He figured out Diane voted against him. “She was looking for someone to scapegoat,” Clarence tells Jessie. “It’s my own fault for being too nice.” He’s sticking to his story that he only opened the beans for Diane’s benefit.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Clarence whispers urgently to her.

“You opened a can of food!” she expostulates.

“All right, yeah yeah yeah yeah, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right,” he says quickly, running for cover.

Jessie’s not buying what he’s selling. “He was trying to get my approval for what he had done,” she sniffs to the camera later.

“Everyone knows what he’s about,” Tom says. “He can’t hide anymore.”

We think Clarence is a jerk for taking the food but we also think we’ve heard quite enough from Tom on the subject.

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Lots of shots of the local wildlife tonight — giraffes, lions, lion cubs, even ostriches. But not a single hyena. We’re suddenly worried that “Survivor” is being filmed in a hyena-bereft environment. This complicates our hopes for a scavenger/survivor face-off or two.

Our money would be on the hyena.

At the Samburu tribe, everyone aches.

“It’s a lot colder than I thought it was going to be,” Kim, the marketing expert from Pennsylvania and one of the tribe’s two indistinct young women, says. “Not one person has gotten a good night’s sleep since we got here.”

Samburu’s resident psycho alpha male is Frank, the army vet and general gun nut, who’s always bustling around and telling people what to do.

The group decides to build a roof over its circular compound. When Frank tells Kim to do something, she mugs for the camera: “Yes, captain!”

“He barks orders,” she tells the camera later. “He just wants things done right now his way.”

Bummer!

Often on “Survivor,” there are people who come in under the misapprehension that the name of the show is “Food and Shelter Will Come to Me If I Just Sit Right Over Here on My Butt.”

That’s Carl’s feeling. He’s the dentist from Florida and he, like Frank and unlike some of the younger members of his tribe, has a work ethic.

“I’ve been working my buns off. Frank’s been working his buns off. We’re always thinking the next step ahead and these guys aren’t,” he grouses.

“It’s like they’re on a vacation. They just straggle here and there,” Frank says grimly.

Indeed, there’s a big age difference in the camp. Frank and Carl are simpatico with Teresa, the go-getter flight attendant and real estate agent, and Linda, who works for the administration at Harvard and beat cancer. They are all in their 40s.

The rest of the group are chicks by comparison, including Brandon, the gay bartender; the two women whose identities we can’t keep straight; and Silas, who’s … another bartender. This is a group that could help us get a Jell-o shot in a San Fernando Valley bar but that looks well nigh useless in Africa.

Time for the first challenge. The prize is a bunch of new supplies. There are a pair of 20-foot towers. The challenge is for the groups to lug a series of massive logs through a long obstacle course over to the towers, and slide them into holes bored around it. The idea is to then use the posts as a sort of ladder to scramble to the top of the towers.

“I’m going to open up a can of whoop-ass,” blustery Tom vows. Boran really needs it: It will be humiliating to have to jettison another member.

It’s hot and unpleasant work. Dangerous, too — a dropped log could really hurt someone. The tribes are both close when Kim — the older, Boran Kim, that is — hits the dirt face first. That gives the other Kim, the one from Samburu, enough time to clamber to the top and win.

Boran Kim blames herself. We do, too. “I tried to give it my best,” she tells her dejected tribe mates, “but it was my day to screw up, so I’m sorry.”

“I’m proud to be on your team,” says Tom, by way of being comforting. Ethan, the hunky young soccer player, agrees.

The group has a bigger problem, though. Jessie, the sheriff’s deputy hottie from Orlando, where she presumably spends her time directing traffic into Disney World, is refusing to drink the tribe’s gross water. (The Boran water hole is basically an animal sewer. The group boils the water, but it apparently doesn’t help much.) She’s shaking. “I don’t know why I’m shaking, whether it’s lack of water or because I’m cold.”

The water, she says, “looks like tar.”

Kim’s worried that Jessie’s not drinking. “She says she’s all right, but … ”

“People don’t want to show they’re weak!” Ethan observes.

“The water does not taste great,” Clarence acknowledges, “but you just gotta take it.”

Ethan goes to Jessie. “Do you have a little appetite?”

“No, ” she says shortly.

“Just trying to help,” he says resignedly.

“The guys are being really good,” Jessie says dejectedly.

Her lips are crusted and mottled.

“They said it’s OK, but I don’t know at this point. I don’t know.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Back at Samburu, the youngsters are still playing the exciting reality TV show, “Twentysomethings Who Don’t Do Much.”

Lindsey is lying on the ground as people work around her. “You guys don’t mind me not helping?” she asks.

Brandon is sitting on a stump playing with two fun sticks. “Need any help?” he asks Teresa.

“No,” she replies.

“OK,” he says happily. He goes back to pretending to drum. Surviving is fun!

Now the group is actively plotting. Frank, Carl, Linda and Teresa have a pact. That’s four votes in the eight-member tribe. They’re trying to use Silas, who’s the bigger and stronger and probably the dumber of the two boys, to give them a majority.

The plotting is obvious and upsetting to the two younger women.

“There’s never a moment when someone isn’t whispering in someone’s ear,” Lindsey says.

Says Teresa: “I like the younger people but I need to be on the stronger side.”

Frank and Carl think it’s time to spell things out for Silas. They ask him to come fetch some water with them.

Silas the bartender says goodbye to his coevals by touching his fingertips to his lips and then extending his hand in their direction.

All of a sudden, we’re swept back to a memorably sultry evening in West L.A.

Future generations of archaeologists will be able to pinpoint the moment as the introduction of that particular gesture to Kenya, we’re pretty sure.

It’s a Judas kiss, too. Silas seems more than ready to throw in his lot with the oldsters and betray, symbolically, an entire generation. This is exactly the sort of moral decay that comes from listening to too many No Doubt CDs, we think.

But Brandon, Lindsey and the younger Kim seem to deserve it.

Out on the trail, Frank and Carl tell him that they have a solid block. “Linda’s so concrete she’s buried in the bottom of the Hoover Dam!” Carl says, somewhat infelicitously. “We want you on our side!”

Silas can’t see what else to do. “You can’t be a nice guy. Nice guys finish last, and that’s a fact,” he marvels.

More footage of lions and ostriches. We think the “Survivor” producers are telling us that someone has his head in the sand

Back at Boran, the girls think the boys are ganging up on them.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see these guys are trying to get rid of the girls.”

“This game breeds paranoia,” Ethan says. “When people go off in the distance you’re sure they’re talking about you.”

Lex and Big Tom have a deal already. “We promised on our son’s names,” Lex tells Ethan. He wants him to join a long-term three-way pact. “If it’s the three of us, we don’t have to cannibalize each other until it’s three.”

Back at Samburu, Frank, like a lot of rigid gun-nut types, gets overexcited when he starts talking about offing someone. “Brandon — he’s outta here!” he tells Silas forcefully.

Lindsey overhears him. Bad move, Frank.

Lindsey starts freaking out. “The game became real to me!” she squeals.

Frank uses the passive voice to avoid admitting that he’s screwed up: “There were some discussions; the younger group overheard somehow.”

Silas does his best to lie his way out of it. “We have to get rid of the older people!” he says earnestly to Lindsey. “Trust me on this!”

He’s not very convincing, but Lindsey admits she has no recourse.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Time for the immunity challenge! The letter to the tribes make a reference to a cafe. Everyone’s seen the other “Survivors” and knows what’s in store.

“It’s the gross food challenge!” says Kelly. “Bring it on!”

“Hey, there’s nothing I won’t eat,” she says later. “Beef brains, goat testicles. Whatever!”

The goat testicles remark, we’re sure, is a Freudian slap at Tom, the goat farmer.

They assemble for the challenge. Jeff Probst, god love him, gives them a zinger.

“You’re going to feast as the tribes out here in eastern Kenya have feasted for thousands of years,” he tells them. “The tribes around here don’t eat vegetables and they don’t eat meat. They rely on milk from cows and blood from cows. We want to show you exactly how the tribes do it.”

Some local African tribesmen, in full get-up, enter, dragging along a hapless cow.

“When I first saw this done it seemed brutal to me,” Probst says. “I spent some time with these guys and found out it’s precisely the opposite. They would never do anything to endanger a cow.”

What we like about Probst is his utter moral vacuity. He could be talking about a baby facing the same outrage the cow is about to and we’re sure he’d say it with just the same sincerity.

And then, unbelievably, the tribesman shoots an arrow into the cow’s neck, which begins spurting blood.

The cow reacts the way you would expect, by jumping about three feet in the air.

But Jeff told us it wasn’t brutal, so we feel OK about it!

Still, it’s one of “Survivor’s” finest moments — making the contestants drink still-warm blood, fresh from the neck of a cow.

“They’ve tested and quarantined this cow,” Probst says. “The blood is completely clean.”

As we’ve said before, we basically trust the reality of a lot of “Survivor” — there’s no reason for it to fake anything — but we suspect that when the definitive book is written we’ll find out there was some sort of sleight of hand with the blood. It’s hard to believe that there aren’t some dangers drinking something like that fresh from a raw neck wound inflicted with, we suspect, a not-too-clean arrow.

Still, it’s as icky as “Survivor” has yet gotten. The challenge sees the members of the respective tribes downing shots of the stuff until someone can’t take it. Everyone saw the gross food segments in the first “Survivors”; they all know how to open their mouths and stick out their tongues to show they’ve downed their blood ration.

Neither side cracks, however. Indeed, quite a few of the guys, accustomed to doing shooters, get it down nicely.

The tiebreaker is a drink-off. Each tribe gets to pick the most skittish member of the other tribe to gulp down a big jug of the stuff as fast as possible.

Linda and Kelly (the Boran member who’d boasted about eating goat’s testicles) are the selections; in the end, tough Linda downs hers the fastest.

The Boran are losers yet again — and have to vote off another member. They’re three for three!

Back at the depressed Boran camp, Clarence tries to stir up resentment against the women. “We got beat!” he says excitedly. “They’re beating us with their girls.”

“I feel like a big loser,” says Kelly. “I couldn’t chug beer in college and I can’t chug blood out here.”

Yet another example of how our system of higher education is letting down the next generation.

But now the boys are fairly decided to get rid of one of the women, not Clarence. “We need Clarence’s back,” is how Tom puts it.

They head off across the prairie to the tribal council

“I never expected anything to be this hard,” Jessie tells Probst that night.

Probst asks the group about Clarence again.

“We’ve had a couple of speed bumps,” Lex says.

“We’ve done nothing but do better since then,” Tom says generously. “I think he’s proven himself.”

Still worried, Clarence? Jeff asks him.

“I think you have to put it in perspective. All of our issues in regards to me are in the past,” Clarence says hopefully.

During the vote, Tim dings Clarence again. “This is another reminder!” he tells the camera.

It’s a smart move. The way “Survivor” works, if there is ever a tie in a tribal-council vote, earlier dings begin to count. Tom’s being smart to give himself an edge, just in case something weird happens a few councils down the line.

In the end, the group gangs up on Jessie, the comely sheriff’s deputy from Orlando who couldn’t drink the water.

“The tribe has spoken,” Probst tells her.

She leaves the land of the duplicitous hyenas and heads back to the arms of the Mouse.

(Bill Wyman)

Back to the “Survivor: Africa” home page

Back to the “Carina Chocano’s TV Diary” home page

- – - – - – - – - – - -

If you like Salon’s reality TV show coverage, please take a minute to click here to read a note from the Arts & Entertainment staff about Salon Premium.

By disconnects, I mean that the story Cross tells us reorients us to what was important about Cobain’s life and his death. In a couple of ways it’s different from what we thought — or were, in effect, led to think — at the time.

Cross charts, painfully and for the first time, how Cobain’s heroin addiction informed and then dominated the band’s day-to-day activities during the period in which most of us cared about them. This is in contrast to the band’s first serious chronicler, Michael Azerrad, whose 1993 book, “Come As You Are,” was written with the cooperation of the group; despite that access, Cobain’s friends apparently covered up the star’s problems. Cross has the benefit of the passage of time and the apparent desire of many around the band to finally set the record straight.

It was known that Cobain used heroin; one or two major magazine articles and Azerrad’s book during Cobain’s lifetime talked about it. Still, it seemed like most of the press — and MTV — and even we fans just didn’t want to know. It’s a little sobering, in fact, now, to watch again MTV’s coverage of Cobain’s death, and see the channel’s agreeable news anchor, Kurt Loder, tell viewers that Cobain had only “experimented” with heroin. You can see various Rolling Stone types bending over backward to assure us that Cobain had said he’d cleaned up. (There’s a certain breed of journalist that is always rushing to tell us that celebrities have stopped doing something they, the journalists, had never told us about in the first place.) In the year before his death, Cobain barely toured; the band canceled a lot of shows; controversy swirled around virtually every public appearance the group managed to make. There was a report of an “accidental overdose” in Italy. It all seems plain in retrospect.

The second disconnect had to do with the band’s status in — and Cobain’s function as the de facto avatar of — a world of self-consciously indie rock that had sprung up in America in the 1980s. (“Indie” refers to bands who recorded for independent record labels, those companies unaffiliated with the handful of multinational record distributors. At the time, this type of music and these bands were also identified as “college rock.”) In this, purity counted for a lot, and the epithet “major label” was a routine slur.

The indie critique dominated much critical discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s and in some ways continues to whimper along today; Nirvana wasn’t the first of the celebrated indie bands to go to a major, but that didn’t make it any easier. Nirvana was criticized for signing with Geffen records, part of, at the time, the huge MCA conglomerate; for remixing — sweetening the production — on “Nevermind” in general and specifically the sound of what would become the band’s first hit single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; and finally, doing similar sonic manipulation of two radio-friendly songs on its last Geffen studio album, “In Utero.”

All three of these controversies are covered in Cross’ book, but not breathlessly. The casual reader won’t miss them because it is plain, in retrospect, that history has passed these concerns by.

But together the two points are something of a cautionary tale, a reminder that in pop culture things really aren’t all they seem. The tempest in a teapot of the day dissipates; the jut-jawed statement of principle by the talking head of the moment will soon be forgotten. Does anyone really care, at this point, that “Smells Like Teen Sprit” — now routinely cited as one of the great singles of rock history — was made to sound good on the radio? And what’s wrong with sounding good on the radio, anyway?

In the unappetizing story of Kurt Cobain, we can see something that puts all that into perspective — we now know that the self-destruction that we saw was exactly what it looked like, and it eventually came back to haunt us. Cobain’s friends and loved ones didn’t exactly sit back and watch — they held confrontations and interventions. Yet, still, his coterie, over and over again, protected him — and the press, for the most part, went along.

Our age is supposed to be a media-saturated one. Privacy is gone, people claim; cameras and nosy reporters are edging into everyone’s lives. So how did Kurt Cobain die right before our eyes?

- – - – - – - – - – - -

By the early ’80s, punk had come and gone. Then what came to be called post-punk — new onslaughts of still rough-edged but more complex bands, like X, from Los Angeles, or Gang of Four, from England — came and went as well. Besides a fluke or two like the Clash, with “Combat Rock,” none of these bands sold any records.

Punk was going to change everything. When it didn’t, corporate radio, corporate labels and the corporate press settled into complacency. Besides a few super-duper stars like Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, there was a large group of second-rank multiplatinum artists to keep folks occupied: Call it the Live Aid era, with Sting, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, from England, joining a bunch of rootsier but presentable Americans like Tom Petty and John Mellencamp to function together as rock’s reigning royalty. There were exceptions, like Prince, but that was the status quo of the time.

Then things got worse. In the latter half of the decade a new wave of lite heavy metal alchemized and hit the charts. Even the best of these groups — Guns N’ Roses, say — were obviously bozos. They looked absurd, and their music was almost comically derivative. The worst were almost unspeakable. (Remember Sebastian Bach, from the group Skid Row, who appeared on stage with a shirt that said “AIDS: Kills Fags Dead”?)

There is bad popular music in any era. (I’ll see your REO Speedwagon and raise you a Def Leppard.) But even as Huey Lewis and the News was selling 9 million copies of “Sports,” a roiling group of people across the country were adhering to a slightly more elevated set of rock verities, at least as they saw them. R.E.M., the most high profile and ultimately the most successful of these bands, found it in tunefulness, chiming guitars and relatively straightforward business dealings. Others — a lot of others — found it in terrifically high volumes, intermittent personal hygiene, various species of what they imagined was antisocial behavior, and, sometimes, actual sonic experimentation.

This period is chronicled in a new book by Azerrad, “This Band Could Be Your Life,” which profiles, fanzine style, 13 of the groups from this period. The bands include Black Flag, the greatest of the violent Los Angeles hardcore bands; Sonic Youth, the intelligent New York art rockers; the Replacements, the tuneful, alcohol-drenched Minneapolis combo; and many others. His choice of subjects is unerring, and he got admirable access to the groups he chose. But I got tired of the book after a few chapters.

While the intro and outro aren’t bad, the meat of the book is superficial. It doesn’t paper over conflicts or financial problems between the bands and their labels, for example, but there’s still a way in which the book accepts at face value the band members’ view of themselves. In the Black Flag chapter, Azerrad makes a lot of references to the pressure Greg Ginn, the group’s founder and bassist, had running his label, the celebrated SST, but you never got a sense of its finances, or how much Ginn was making versus his band mates. In the end, did Ginn end up with a hefty chunk of cash? How are the other group members doing?

The Black Flag story is a truly amazing tale, full of violence and absurdism; Ginn actually ended up in jail for violating a court injunction in a legal fight with MCA. (Now that is indie.) But Azerrad is also a little credulous, as when he says the Los Angeles Police Department was listening in on the label’s phones and stationing undercover officers around its offices. It may be true, but the assertion isn’t sourced, and it sure sounds like stoner rocker hyperbole. (“And, man, the police were, were, wiretapping us!”) A more enterprising reporter would have sourced the charge, gotten comment from the LAPD, or tried to find out if wiretapping warrants were ever issued or carried out.

Still, the story is an inexorable one: These bands soon began popping up on, and then dominating, critics’ end-of-year 10-best lists and building up decent (if uniformly tiny by mainstream standards) tour followings, but couldn’t get a break from radio, or, for the most part, MTV. And it wasn’t clear, at least at first, if they wanted it. The new indie rock had different concerns, including a distrust of technology, and affinity for a lot of things the corporate masters didn’t like: American roots music in some cases, and, most broadly, a commitment to volume, dishabille, contrariness generally, and “authenticity.”

Ah, authenticity. It wasn’t seriousness, exactly — irony in a fairly watered-down form existed in the work of the wacky Camper Van Beethoven and, certainly, in the psychedelic ferocity of the Butthole Surfers. But bands were for the most part expected to be honest and feel honestly. They were supposed to care about their true fans — since the members of the bands, it was assumed, were true fans themselves — and not be in it for the money, exactly.

The everyman stance wasn’t a posture. The band members, with a few prominent exceptions, were lowlifes every bit as foul as the members of the audiences that came to see them, and they suffered — came from broken homes, were abused, felt like losers and despaired — in just the same way. Some of these groups had singers who howled in fury, like Black Flag’s Henry Rollins or Cobain himself; others were just, well, losers. But the message was the same.

Anyway, as time went on, many of these groups found themselves cluttered in a few small benchmark labels across the country, like Sub Pop in Seattle, Touch and Go in Chicago, SST in Los Angeles, Twin-Tone in Minneapolis, Matador and Homestead in New York and many others not as well known. The idea was that they could forge a community and make music without the benefit of the big bad major labels or the big bad national press. They listened to each other on college-rock stations, slept on couches in a nationwide network of fan houses, saw one another’s tiny posters on telephone poles and read about one another in a network of national fanzines.

Which brings us to the poignant conundrum at the heart of the indie-rock way of life: How could they demonstrate this outsiderness, this authenticity, in a commercial environment? It was never quite articulated in quite so crude a fashion, but it was a given in that world at the time that there was a special group of true fans of any given band, surrounded by a much larger group of people who weren’t quite so worthy.

Indie rock was in effect a series of concentric circles, with each successively larger circle representing an inevitable dilution of the select. Whichever one you stood in, you scowled at the bigger ones. Were you a true indie rock fan, really? At the time, you could hear scenesters disparage Matador, the coolest and contrariest label of the era, as being hopelessly compromised.

What most bands did was draw imaginary lines in their minds: We’ll put handbills up, but not posters. We’ll do interviews, but never say anything serious. We’ll show up for the concert, but go on late to make clear we’re not eager-beavers. We’ll do some college radio interviews — and act bored to be there — but not mainstream ones, and if we do do mainstream radio, we’ll act even more bored! And we’ll talk to major-label people, if they insist, but get drunk and act like the fuck-ups we are when we meet, the better to have tales with which to regale our fans from the stage that night. And sometimes, to reward our really cool fans, we’ll have secret shows, so the uncool people can’t get in.

Some of the bands did silly things, but the indie-rock movement in America in the 1980s was something to see. Dozens of great records by great artists came out of it. But in the end, as the years went by, it turned out that the labels, the fans and the fanzine writers exulting in the indie-rock-band lifestyle found themselves deserted by the actual indie-rock bands — almost all of the best of which eventually departed for major labels.

You can say they were greedy, call them sellouts, think they were misguided. But the thing that drove Kurt Cobain, and the other indie bands, was a dream about pop. Money entered into the equation, of course, and why not? But something else was going on as well. As the 1980s went on, you could feel an interest building in something. It wasn’t interest in a new type of music, exactly. But there was an odd sense of a thirst for something … different. If you were one of these musicians, you could smell that need, and suddenly visualize yourself in a different world, one where kids everywhere jammed to your music, their hearts feeling that they would burst.

The most honest of these musicians admitted that they felt that way as a kid, and that it was a feeling that had driven them to the point they were at. The artists who went to the major labels could feel something hungry, almost animalistic, out in the wilderness, something alive that wanted their music. One of them was named Kurt Cobain.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

The outlines of Cobain’s life were well known before Cross’ biography. He grew up in a crummy logging town, Aberdeen, in western Washington state. His parents divorced when he was 9. By the time he was 15, he was a lowlife, long-haired, trouble-causing kid from a broken home with a lot of broken emotions and a healthy interest in the scatological and anatomical. He started his interest in rock early on, roadie-ing for a sludge-rock ensemble called the Melvins. He eventually formed his own combo; he paired up, luckily, with a gangling kid named Kris (later Krist) Novaselic on bass; the two became best friends. A few years later — after recording their first record as Nirvana — they lucked out and found the astonishing drummer Dave Grohl. (Grohl now fronts the band Foo Fighters.)

Cobain and Novaselic played under the name Fecal Matter but, in an early concession, you might say, to commerciality, ultimately christened themselves Nirvana. They went on to suffer a few years of the casual indignities — poorly attended gigs, resounding apathy from even the smallest record labels — kids in bands with big ideas are fated to go through. Cobain finally caught the eye of Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt, who owned and ran Sub Pop records. Sub Pop, based in nearby Seattle, was a household name in the rock underground of the time for releasing albums by grunge groundbreakers Soundgarden and Mudhoney.

Cross does a good job of explaining the label’s odd finances and clever marketing practices. The best of the latter was the Sub Pop singles club, which had underground kids shelling out cash monthly for releases in the moribund 7-inch format. As for the former, at the time it recorded Nirvana’s first album, “Bleach,” the label, in the midst of a money crunch, got the band to pay its own recording costs. Ah, the purity of indie rock. (The band borrowed the cash for the fabled $600 bill from a friend and never paid him back.)

The band’s first album contained a lot of enthusiastic noise, but also a giddy cover song — the obscure but irresistible “Love Buzz” — and one oddly Beatlesque tune, “About a Girl.” (Playing covers was another theoretical minefield for indie bands. Many rejoiced in blasting through unexpected schlock classics on stage. But adding covers to albums of otherwise original music by unknown bands was an old major-label trick to get some easy airplay.)

Enter Geffen, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s had one of the industry’s canniest A&R departments; the company had unloaded about 20 million Guns N’ Roses albums on unsuspecting American teens. The label, presciently, had signed Sonic Youth; for Cobain, that made the label legit by association, and he said, frankly, that he was frustrated, as the band toured the country, when fans told him that his album wasn’t available in stores. (Both bands technically ended up on a Geffen imprint called DGC.)

Nirvana got out of its Sub Pop contract; the indie label got $75,000 and, Cross says, a 2 percent piece of the band’s next two albums, which together ultimately sold in the neighborhood of 15 million copies in the U.S. On paper this was probably worth at least $2 million to Sub Pop — not to mention the catalog sales of “Bleach,” which eventually went platinum. That’s not a bad return on an initial outlay of zero dollars. (In 1995, as the post-”Nevermind” alternative-rock sweepstakes began to wane, Sub Pop’s moment past, Poneman and Pavitt sold a 49 percent interest in the company to Warner Bros. for $20 million.)

Geffen grabbed the band and paired the members up with producer Butch Vig. Cobain had found something deep within himself to write about, and some bolt of primal musical inspiration to frame his thoughts. Vig made the songs Cobain gave him roar. The best of this was “Smells like Teen Spirit.” The phrase was from an ad for a feminine deoderant. Kathleen Hanna, of the Seattle riot grrrl band Bikini Kill, had written “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on the wall in Cobain’s bedroom; it was a reference to another member of Bikini Kill, Cobain’s girlfriend at the time, Tobi Vail. Cross captures Hanna’s signifiers perfectly: “Kathleen was taunting Kurt about sleeping with [Vail], implying that he was marked with her scent.” Cross, making the case for a deep sexual element in the song, says Cobain is referring to Vail in the lyric, “She’s overbored and self-assured.” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became the first track on the album, kicking it off with a solitary, low-volume guitar riff; the stunning assault that kicked in on the fifth measure catapulted Nirvana, and Cobain, into the consciousness of a generation.

Songs this loud, this unrestrained, were seldom heard in America at the time. There was criticism in some quarters about how a talented remixer named Andy Wallace had fiddled with some of the songs to improve their radio sound, but that didn’t stop “Nevermind” from becoming the most sensational album release of the decade. Cross says that sales peaked the week after Christmas as kids shelled out holiday gift money — or traded in other records they’d gotten — for “Nevermind.” During the second week of January, the band knocked Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart. The band played “Saturday Night Live” that same week.

Cobain was living amid a squalor that transcends most rock band tales. He crashed with various friends in various filthy apartments. While it appears he never actually lived “under a bridge,” as his personal mythology put it and as he sang in the powerful “Nevermind” song “Something in the Way,” it’s also true that the reality wasn’t much nicer: He had so run out of options in the months riding up to the release of his Geffen album that as late as the summer of 1991 he was literally living out of his car when he wasn’t on tour.

He hooked up with Courtney Love the month after “Nevermind” was released. Love was a remarkable self-made underground demistar, with her own band, Hole, and a checkered past; like Cobain she’d virtually lived on the streets. (Unlike him, she had a small trust fund to help her out.) Love in many ways was an accident looking for a place to happen, generally to someone else, yet she had a sparkling intelligence and was an undeniable onstage presence. She was a sometime junkie as well but lacked, fortunately, Cobain’s lacerating tendency toward addiction. While Novaselic has gone out of his way to note that Cobain was an addict before he met Love, to most of the rest of the members of the band’s coterie she symbolized the drug; Cross says Novaselic’s wife, Shelli Dilley, was particularly appalled at what Love represented. Cobain and Love’s marriage, in February 1992, in Hawaii, marked the effective end of Cobain and Novaselic’s friendship. The happy couple had a daughter, Frances Bean, that September; while Love screamed in her hospital delivery bed Cobain was vomiting helplessly in detox in a nearby room.

A collection of B-sides and such, “Incesticide,” was released, contrarily, a few days before Christmas 1992. (Most Christmas releases come out in October, to allow plenty of buying time.) It featured an extraordinary original song, a neck-snapping bit of childhood-separation fear called “Sliver.” (“Grandma take me home!/Grandma take me home!” the head-snapping chorus repeats; thematically, it could have appeared on “Plastic Ono Band,” John Lennon’s primal scream album.) But aside from some fun covers, there wasn’t much else of interest on the album.

A Vanity Fair profile of the couple appeared the month the baby was born; it gleefully compared Cobain and Love’s marriage and lifestyle to the fateful one of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. (Love had even had a bit part in the film “Sid and Nancy.”) The most damning passage was Love’s admission that she’d done heroin after she knew she was pregnant. The pair denied the story, but ended up losing custody of their child for a time. They demonized the writer, Lynn Hirschberg, for a year; Cobain explicitly threatened to kill her several times. After Cobain’s death Love admitted that the allegation had been true.

For the band’s studio follow-up to “Nevermind,” Cobain chose Steve Albini, an acerbic fanzine writer, recording artist and producer, to safeguard the group’s purity after the Andy Wallace “Nevermind” remixing contretemps. The album, “In Utero,” begins with the line, “Teenage angst has paid off well/ Now I’m bored and old,” and contains Cobain’s most beautiful songs: “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb,” “All Apologies” and “Pennyroyal Tea.”

But Albini clashed with Love — he later called her “a psycho hose beast” — and paid Cobain back for his largesse as the album neared release by telling a reporter that Geffen was forcing the band to make changes in the record’s sound. The truth was probably somewhat different, but the Albini charge eventually found its way into Newsweek and forced the band to take out a full-page ad in Billboard saying it wasn’t true.

But Cobain had bigger problems. His heroin addiction had put him into a downward spiral. The Cobain-Love marriage, with an infant daughter in the mix, became a disgusting melange of gutted hotel rooms, domestic-abuse police calls, stints in rehab, and lots and lots of heroin. Cobain walked out of a Los Angeles rehab center on Friday, April 1, 1994, and disappeared. Love and his friends and family spent agonizing days looking for him. He shot himself in a greenhouse behind his suburban Seattle home on Tuesday, April 5; his body was found three days later.

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Heroin didn’t kill Kurt Cobain. Cross tries his best to draw together the various threads that contributed to his demise: The addiction; an obvious but, it seemed, fully undiagnosed depression; and a mysterious and seemingly untreatable stomach ailment that troubled him chronically. (Azerrad says that Cobain’s mom had had a similar ailment when she was younger; neither author goes out of his way to figure out what in the end the ailment might have been.)

Cross, who’s written previous books on Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin, has spent his career in Seattle; his editorship of the music magazine the Rocket let him watch Nirvana’s career from the beginning and gave him unique access to the major characters of his story. His book is a rare thing — a rock biography that’s strongly written, looks at the world through open eyes and doesn’t assume its audience is full of idiots, yet retains an unspoken but always present moral grounding. His research makes for careful judgments, the narrative throughout seems persuasive, and he leaves few questions in the reader’s mind.

He has an eye for the absurdities of the rock-star lifestyle. Love is one of his best sources, and she perhaps comes off here better than a lot of the people who hate her would prefer. But he does pause from time to time for an elegant skewering, as when he mentions Cobain’s professed fondness for the writings of Camille Paglia. “This was one of the many influences Courtney affected,” he writes. Later we see Love go into her own rehab — a special star-friendly version called “hotel detox.”

And his sources say the things that hurt: At the final intervention of Cobain’s life, Cross notes how most of the friends and managers there really couldn’t face Cobain, couldn’t actually deliver the condemnations and threats they were supposed to. It raises the possibility that Cobain’s circle never really did the one thing that might have saved his life: Articulate a threat to publicly disassociate themselves from the star en masse, and point out, in the process, that he’d become exactly the sort of excess-driven rich rock icon his music was supposed to have been an antidote to. Instead, Cobain could point to his own wife, a junkie as well.

Indeed, the confrontations never had an effect and the rehabs didn’t either. The ironies, by contrast, got richer. At his last stint, Cobain arrived at the facility right after Eagle Joe Walsh had left; he hung out in the center with Gibby Haynes, from the Butthole Surfers. In the punk world, no group was lamer than the Eagles, and no underground band had more raunchy credibility than the Buttholes, as they were known. Cross doesn’t say whether Haynes and Cobain reflected on the clichés they had become.

Cross’ book isn’t perfect. I wish he referred to the characters by their last names. Use of first names — Kurt and Courtney, Krist and Shelli — I think diminishes the subjects. And while he’s generally admirably detached, you can see him, once in a while, lose perspective. The tale of how Cobain and Love nearly lost custody of their daughter is told with too much sympathy for the Cobains. They were junkies, and not gentle ones, either. Love did do heroin after knowing she was pregnant. The arrangement they finally adopted, hiring a friend with no child-raising experience as a nanny, doesn’t speak much for their judgment either. (They couldn’t bring an outsider into their druggy world; it was just another bit of enabling for the pair’s self-destructive lifestyle.) Cobain at the time was barely able to show up for a sound check, much less raise a kid. His behavior after the article was published — brandishing guns and threatening to kill Hirschberg — merely underlines the point that his judgment was impaired.

And finally, once or twice Cross skates over a more interesting story. The Albini-”In Utero” contretemps, for example, is mentioned only in a short paragraph in the book. Clippings I have from the period tell a more complex story. It was a terrible embarrassment to Cobain, yet he was always unapologetically honest about what exactly did happen. Albini seems to have had an agenda to keep the band from going too soft; one of the producer’s assistants, in a Chicago magazine profile of Albini, once described Albini doggedly trying to stop the band from adding ornamentation to the songs: “Kurt would say, ‘I want to do a guitar overdub,’ and Steve would explain to him for a half-hour why it wasn’t a good idea, using all these weird technical terms. And Kurt would say, ‘Well, that may be so, but I still want to do a guitar overdub.’ And Steve would explain to him again why he shouldn’t do it. The last line of any of these lectures is always, ‘But you’re paying me, so I’ll do what you want. I have to put in my two cents because you’re paying me.’ But his two cents turns out to be, you know, five hundred dollars.”

Cobain himself at the time forthrightly explained that he, not the label, had a problem with “In Utero”: “I just could not put my finger on it,” he said. “I called up Steve, and I basically asked him for some advice, like ‘Why don’t I feel the same emotion I did on “Nevermind” or “Bleach”?’ It took me a long time to realize the vocals weren’t loud enough, and the bass guitar was almost impossible to hear.” This rings true to this listener; whether Cobain actually told Albini that Geffen was threatening not to release the album (perhaps as a way to cover up his own opinion), we’ll never know. For his part, Cobain in later interviews at the time acknowledged that his Geffen A&R person didn’t like the tracks, but went out of his way to reiterate his own displeasure with them and to say, “There was never any sense of a threat like, ‘We’re not going to put this record out,’ because they can’t.” (The band had the rock equivalent of final cut on its releases.) In the end, Nirvana brought in R.E.M. producer Scott Litt, who remixed “All Apologies” and “Heart-Shaped Box.”

The story is a illustration of the indie mentality gone wild. Cobain is certainly the most uncompromising major star in rock history; and yet here he was forced to fight a rear-guard action to defend his purity — forced, humiliatingly, to take out a big ad, backed by his big major label, trying to limit the damage being done to his reputation. The irony is that the argument can be made that what Cobain needed at the time was someone to help him tone down the album even more. In Albini’s defense, it must be said that others of the album’s softer songs — “Dumb,” for example — sound just fine. But in the end “In Utero” is an irritating work of brilliance, with unforgettably wrenching and passionate songs like “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Dumb” desperately gasping for air between too many tracks (far more than on “Nevermind”) whose unrelieved clamor and sophomoric lyrical ugliness (“Her milk is my shit/ My shit is her milk”) seem little more than sops to the rock underground.

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Was Cobain really that good? Was he really that important?

A lot of “Bleach” is noisy and boring; too many songs on “In Utero” are, too. But Cobain’s lyrics — naive and sophomoric but sometimes containing unaccountably beautiful poetry rife with disturbing body-part imagery — can have a rare force; when mixed to his instinctual understanding of dynamics and strangely unforgettable way with a guitar riff, the mixture could produce songs of almost unprecedented gorgeousness and power.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the song that kicked off the “Nevermind” selling spree, accomplishes something other songs try to do but don’t achieve, which is at once wear its influences on its sleeve and turn them into dust. There’s lot of the spacious, disturbing sound of the Pixies in “Teen Spirit”; its potency comes partially from the way that that aural space mixes with the song’s dense central riffs, which are right out of the Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla.” Beyond that, there’s a very heavy bottom, vaguely reminiscent of the one in Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower.” That mixture, Grohl’s brutal drumming, and the song’s crushing dynamics — where the ominous casualness of the verses are pulverized by the assault of the chorus — make the backing track articulate and persuasive to this day.

Having accomplished that setting, Cobain then did something else that very few rock acts care to do: He told his audience something it didn’t want to hear. Did the moshing kids — and the moshpit at a Nirvana concert had a churning ferocity — see themselves in the chant: “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous/Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious”? It’s one of the most bruising critiques of the rock mass audience since “Like a Rolling Stone.” Did the dancers feel the sting of his mocking words: “Our little group has always been/And always will until the end”?

And yet, much more than Bob Dylan, Cobain plainly includes himself in his indictment. Not yet a star, he still seemed horrified by that audience; it was something he plainly saw himself part of as well, as stupid and contagious as his fellows, in the song’s closing litany of “A mulatto/ An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido/ A denial/ A denial/ A denial …”

In the end, Cobain used his uncommon charisma and neck-snapping command of a rock riff to become a star. The story would be only mildly interesting if that’s all that had happened. But because he was a peculiarly uncompromising, particularly arresting star who happened to make a very good record at the end of a decade in which an odd unprecedented cultural pressure had been building, something else happened as well. Nirvana and Cobain ended up effectively yanking an entire industry leftward and opened up ’90s rock into a dazzling kaleidoscope of unconventional artists.

Their influence has only something to do with grunge, which has become more or less a footnote in the history of rock. Nirvana was bigger than grunge rock. The word “epochal” is misused a lot when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll, and particularly rock ‘n’ roll albums. But remember that, when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit radio, many major radio stations wouldn’t play it. It was too loud, too aggressive and too confrontational for the average AOR station’s sound.

It seems almost implausible now, but many stations were actively hostile to the new “alternative” bands. Through an odd chain of circumstances I was interviewed on a big St. Louis AOR station the morning after the 1992 Lollapalooza show, which featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. It took me a while to realize that the morning zoo gang on the station considered the show a massive punch line.

Yet the force of “Teen Spirit,” and “Nevermind,” was unrelenting. The album sold 100,000 copies a week for much of the year. Sure — Garth Brooks or Shania Twain do that too, but they’re not purveying confrontational music. Radio began to crack under the pressure — and soon, some of those hostile radio stations didn’t exist anymore. In many cities, conservative AOR outlets were supplanted, and in some cases handily replaced, by a new crop of alternative stations; within a year or two after the release of “Nevermind,” even bellwether AOR stations were wounded, as, punch line or no, the Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden became staples of AOR programming for the rest of the decade.

You can sneer at a movement that puts J. Mascis on the charts, and sure, in the end, a couple of media conglomerates merely had to do a few format revisions. I’m with you on both points. But there was one twist: That thirst those bands could sense. It wasn’t for something in particular. It was for something different. The stations, and the record companies, had to accept that odd was selling, and so they went looking for odd. A lot of bad bands got record contracts, but a lot of good ones did as well; and this openness brightened the pop palette of the ’90s in all sorts of ways. To pick an obvious one, consider whether the Breeders, Liz Phair, Hole or Belly would have received airplay or MTV attention before 1992.

In other words, the band forced the industry to institutionalize openness. Nirvana didn’t do it alone, of course; besides the 10 years of experimentation that came before them, the architects of rap, too, had strikingly pushed the boundaries of pop; and so, of course, had R.E.M., who by the time of “Nevermind” were a refreshing, if not sonically daring, presence on radio. But for the decade of what is now known as the post-”Nevermind” era, the record companies, and radio, were forced to look for the next new thing.

This unaccustomed state of affairs created new outrages, of course — with industry people and too many journalists running around declaring that the next Big Rock Thing was, say, “electronica,” whatever that was, or “post-rock,” whatever that was. And from today’s perspective, 10 years on, we can see rap was the truly revolutionary cultural form, that boy bands will always be with us, and that crossover country can still generate more record sales than just about anything.

And let’s even stipulate that at least part of what Nirvana represented was merely a great resentful roar of masculine rawk, and who cares about that anyway?

But that is to overlook the metaphor that Nirvana, to this day, represents: The assault can be made, and that revolution in pop can be accomplished. There’s a case to be made that this battle, this ongoing reinvention and revitalization, is one of the things that makes rock ‘n’ roll what it is. The Clash wrote a song, “Hitsville U.K.,” about this phenomenon: “The mutants, creeps and muscle men/ Are shaking like a leaf/ It blows a hole in the radio/ When it hasn’t sounded good all week.”

In songs like that, rock imagines its future. Today, things are calmer, and even the adventurous acts — Beck and Moby come to mind — have perfected the art of industry game-playing without really seeming to. But now we know that in the background there are always some new rough beasts running around, and not even Kurt Loder is going to stop them from coming.

In this way, Cobain is an odd rock martyr. The indie rock world that spawned him was in almost all its practices charmingly innocent; it worked as long as it did because, in the end, few people cared for the anti-pop music so many of them purveyed. When a few people with that dream of pop entered the equation, it heightened a few of the contradictions of the world, but it still stood.

But Kurt Cobain was fated to discover that the train he’d gotten on couldn’t be stopped. The corporate rock world, which he joined voluntarily, simply has no reason to halt it once it’s going; there’s not even really a way to describe such an act. And Cobain was ambivalent about it anyway. One day he was enraptured with his success; the next night he was horrified. It’s not clear if his images of how stardom should be simply didn’t connect with the realities of it, or if in the end he did understand what was happening but felt guilty about it.

If the band Nirvana can be a metaphor for a victory that transcends its time, Cobain’s life is a metaphor for the one key theoretical weakness in the indie rock ethos: You can’t be semi public. There was a patina of falsity in the rock world at the time. To a young and overearnest would-be rock star, it’s pathetic to repeat, night after night, a shtick that begins “Hello, Seattle/Dubuque/Tallahassee!” and ends with your biggest hit, just before the encore. A lot of professional musicians do that, night after night, and, after they become famous, they take the next step, and the step after that. And soon the star is smiling for the talk shows, telling People magazine that it was time to get back to his roots for the new album, and, no, he and Jennifer Aniston are just close friends. Then you hook up with a beer company for tour sponsorship, bringing in a few outside songwriters at the suggestion of your label and all of a sudden you’re Aerosmith, or Mick Jagger.

Cobain never could deal with the compromises. He never was able to grow up to understand that even if you’re sick of playing your hit, it’s even more pathetic to go out and collect people’s money and not play it. And to have contempt for that uncomplicated desire, which of course is a species of the one he himself had as a kid, is to have contempt for oneself.

Cobain had made the decision to put himself in a position to go large, but never, apparently, figured out what that meant. He was perhaps the frailest star ever to face such intense public interest. Cross’ book is spotted with more than enough examples of Cobain being something, one suspects, he didn’t want to be. He learned to smile and lie in public, and he knew, deep inside, he had become a different person.

He said so in his suicide note: “The worst crime I could think of would be faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100 percent fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should punch a time clock before I go out on stage.” Later he wrote of “the hateful death rocker I have become.”

Did Cobain die of shame? Has ever such a star surrendered in this way? You want to point, feebly, at what Cobain had going for him. Besides the talent, the wife, the kid, the fans, he seemed to have something rare — the capability to transcend himself and his origins, first by wrenching himself out of his dismal upbringing and then by facing down the elements in the subculture that spawned him who didn’t share his dream about pop. We expected everything of him in the future. We just didn’t expect the one unthinkable thing, something the 27-year-old suspected and then convinced himself of — that a future was the one thing Kurt Cobain didn’t have.

For the first days of this dusty, jittery aftermath, the cable channels were virtually indistinguishable, and together they felt bloviation was not appropriate. They had real bravery and real people to film and to talk to: dust-covered survivors, grim rescuers and a lancingly on-point New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, with the exception of live footage of the president or Giuliani, it seemed like anything the channels broadcast was paired with transfixing, continuous footage of two planes hitting two buildings.

First there was one piece of film of a plane flying toward a building, disappearing into it for an instant, and then bursting — bursting in a way no digital-effects-laden disaster movie could ever have envisioned — in a silent roar out the other side. We watched that one until another appeared, and then another after that. Within six or eight hours there were four or five of them, creating a “Matrix”-like sense of a 360-degree portrait of disaster. By late that evening, East Coast time, footage of the first plane hitting the first building came through as well. During its first showing, we heard the soundtracks too — uncontrolled screaming, and uncontrolled obscenities. A defiant commentator noted that the language seemed appropriate.

President George W. Bush appeared on TV briefly on Day 1, capturing the channels’ attention, and then faded out of our consciousness, it seemed. He began flying around the country, then finally returned to Washington to speak to us again. On Day 2, he was spanked roundly for this peregrination by many pundits, and his staff spent the day furiously spinning behind the scenes; the cable channels dutifully bent over backward to assure us that the president was indeed in danger on Day 1.

It seemed an odd media boomlet — after all, in the hours after the concussions, no one knew for sure if these were not merely the beginning of some even more terrible assault on the country, and why should the president fly into the heart of the uncertainty?

The scenes we kept seeing of the president after that had him spending far too much of his time reassuring us that he was in charge. On Day 3, we saw the most painful footage of all — the president talking on the phone to Giuliani and the governor of New York, George Pataki. “Make no mistake, my resolve is steady and strong!” the president told them.

The image of CNN that first day became the pained look of Judy Woodruff, her face proudly weathered, her intelligence fierce. She talked with a grieving Jeff Greenfield, and their sober miens were buttressed by the quiet and classy features of Bruce Morton, Garrick Utley and Candy Crowley. The confusions of the story were many, but the channel seemed almost never to falter.

Only on Day 3, during a press conference with President George W. Bush, was there a misstep: Just as the president, speaking about the victims and their families, teared up, the camera unaccountably cut away from his face, even as a fusillade of flashbulbs went off. Was the cutaway an accident? A well-meaning but misguided effort to spare the president embarrassment? A producer’s brain seizure?

Over at MSNBC, we are given the sober and quiet Brian Williams. His voice, a bit stentorian, pierces though the dust. But his staff can’t keep up. Lester Holt, a sophisticated recent addition to the channel’s staff, is one of those guys who’s been told to wander around the set during broadcasts; he’s been doing his best to retain his dignity. But on Day 2 he lost the battle.

Intrepidly, he rode a boat over to the closed-off southern tip of Manhattan for what the channel said was the first on-the-scene ground-zero footage. This initiative was spoiled by his ridiculous getup — he was all orange life jacket, hard hat and dust mask. For some of the sequence he actually spoke to the camera through the mask, with predictable results. It would have seemed more dramatic if some of the hundreds of milling workers around him were wearing their masks, too.

Holt’s accouterment difficulties were shared by the supremely irritating Ashleigh Banfield, whom the channel had stationed in Manhattan a few blocks from the disaster scene. Banfield wears expensive glasses and plainly revels in being part of a Very Big Story. With a little Roland Hedley and a lot of Suzanne Stone Maretto — the murderously ambitious newswoman from “To Die For” — in her, Banfield worked the tools of her trade mightily, sporting a surgical mask around her neck. This was soon accessorized by a chic pink air filter mask. On Day 3 she went before the camera again, with these fashion statements accented by a pen behind her ear.

This was the tone of MSNBC. If the network is going to interview a doctor, you can be sure that it will be a blond and comely one. And the reporters quickly become best pals with their sources. One correspondent was interviewed in Florida, piecing together information gleaned from the owner of a flight school some of the alleged terrorists may have trained at. “Rudy told us these guys were clean!” the correspondent gushed. “Rudy” was Rudy Dekker, the owner of the flight school. The pair were apparently already on a first-name basis.

Similarly, on Day 3, Banfield interviewed a doctor on the scene at the World Trade Center wreckage, whom she called “Sue.” Banfield breathlessly dragged out of “Sue” a story about a police dog who had “turned blue.” The medics on the scene gave the pup some oxygen and had him back on its paws in no time, Banfield reported.