The Doors
1991
Oliver Stone
I'm writing this before all the reviews for The Doors come in, but I'm going out on a limb (a tree limb, because "I don't like doors" ha ha ha) to say that Jim Morrison is going to be the main focus of many of the reviews. And why not? He was (and still is, from the afterlife) a larger-than-life figure, more myth than man. He's not the reason the Doors were good—that can be attributed to the actual musicians in the band—but he was the reason they were important. So it certainly makes sense that a movie called The Doors, about the band the Doors, would mostly be about Jim Morrison as well.
It's pretty well-known, mostly due to the post-movie reactions from the living members of the Doors at the time, that The Doors is inaccurate. We pretty clearly have a case here in which a real-life figure (Jim Morrison) portrayed himself as fascinating enough to base a movie on, but whose real life wasn't quite interesting enough to make a good movie out of. And so the filmmakers fib. Which is fine, I don't mind that. I'm not looking for historical accuracy in a music biopic. I'm not claiming that I know more about the Doors than I did prior to watching this movie. It's just entertainment, man. I'm not holding the bag for the Morrison estate, I honestly couldn't give less of a fuck about Morrison's legacy.
That's what's interesting though about this movie, though. Not whether it was accurate or not accurate, but more so that the film clearly had an immense power in shaping what we see as Morrison's legacy today. It's shaping truth, which is kinda fucked up, but only a little bit (since, ya know, who fucking cares). The film portrays Jim Morrison as a insane drunken asshole. Ray Manzarek stated that, while Morrison certainly had issues with alcoholism, he was also a sensitive and funny guy. But the film portrays him as a guy with a bottle all the time, a fucking prick and a louse. Now you tell me what the majority of people on this planet earth picture when they think about Jim Morrison in 2025. Whose portrayal are they going off of, testimony from band members, or Val Kilmer's performance in a major motion picture?
I'm not saying that this is the responsibility of the film, to portray anything or anybody "accurately." Its only responsibility is to provide entertainment (with bonus points if it manages to say something important). If The Doors was entertaining while it fabricated entire scenes out of thin air, then so be it. I'll watch it. I just think it's a little frustrating that this movie was well-known enough that it managed to skew an entire generation's perspective of a guy who's been dead for over fifty years now, and it thus becomes something that the listener has to grapple with as they attempt to listen to any Doors album, featuring the voice of Jim Morrison (as opposed to the voice of Val Kilmer).
Putting all that to the side, there were some flaws here that occasionally made The Doors tough to watch. The first and most glaring was that it indulged in all your classic movie biopic clichés. Were they clichés in 1991? I don't know. But they sure as shit are now. The tortured artist, everyone around him saying "you're going too far!" The part where someone in the band says "I've been working on something" and everyone else's eyes get wide because they know it's a hit and then they smash-cut to the band performing it on stage. It's all here! And I still hate it (especially since I'm watching it after I watched Walk Hard)!
There was something going on with the camera that I also didn't like. This is something that I wouldn't have noticed that some directors do if I had forced myself to watch 500 movies in the past five years, but I'm at the point where I'm like "I don't like that camera movement," which feels pretentious but hopefully well-earned! Here it is. Whenever Morrison was drunk or high, and the movie wanted to underline his inebriation, the camera would slowly rotate a little bit, moving toward a canted angle, back and forth, like a ship rocking on a stormy sea. And, like a ship, the movement made me seasick whenever it happened. I understand why it happened, but I also think it underlined the point a little too much. Like, we get it, the dude is fucking tripping or hammered, let Kilmer's performance carry that shit.
Another thing that rankled me, but just a little bit, was that there were a couple scenes in which they had Morrison speak about Respecting the Music and Being a True Artiste. I forget the exact words, but I noticed them because they were ideas that I usually find myself espousing. Yes, it's true! Music really is the most important thing! But my issue was that, in Morrison's words during these scenes, they felt empty. Nothing else about the rest of the movie indicated that Jim Morrison cared all that much about anything besides drinking and fucking. And yet, we've already said that this wasn't accurate, that Morrison the poet who cared deeply about his work was probably a truer picture of the man than a dipshit with a whisky bottle glued to his hand. What I'm saying is that you can't portray him like that and then also have him talk about the importance of art. It doesn't ring true.
Oh well. It was still entertaining. I enjoyed watching it, despite these flaws, and despite the fact that the "historical inaccuracies" tab on Wikipedia is over 1200 words long. The irony is, I think I actually would've liked an accurate depiction of Jim Morrison as his friends and family knew him. I was thinking about this regarding the Ed Sullivan incident. In the movie, some producer tells the band not to say the lyric "girl we couldn't get much higher" on the telecast, and in response, Jim Morrison screams the line while looking directly into the camera, in an act of defiance. But that didn't actually happen. He did sing the banned lyric, but he sang it normally, and claimed later that he was so nervous to be on Ed Sullivan that he forgot about the lyric on accident.
If they had shown it that way, then I would've found room to relate to him. In my junior year of college, I was in a play that had my character saying "fuck" a bunch of times, but La Salle made us take the words out. During the final performance, I put them back in (after Hannah put her one censored word back in too). There was a disciplinary meeting in which we had to explain that it was just the pressure of putting on a show that made us forget about the censorship. I believe Hannah when she says that's the case for her; I don't know if you should give me the same benefit of the doubt. Still, it was shockingly easy to convince a group of college administrators that I was a terrible actor. Was it just as easy for Jim Morrison to claim the same? I want to know.
But I probably will never see that question answered in a major motion picture about the Doors, because that's not what this movie is about. It's not about the nuance of the Jim Morrison character. It's loud and sloppy and inaccurate and entertaining as hell, but I can't relate to any of it. Maybe that's the point. We can't relate to legends, that's what makes them legends in the first place. Just be weary when you learn about that legend from a movie!
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Group F finally gets a crack at it, and they've chosen Nashville.
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