Hollywood presents us with the life and times of Jim Morrison — or does it? BARRY HEALY looks at Oliver Stone's The Doors.
This film is unashamed adoration of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors. On the altar of the legendary Lizard King, Oliver Stone uses the latest wizardry of the Hollywood machine to recreate the life and the times of his favourite star. It is a ceremony of excess and indulgence that reveals as much about Oliver Stone and Hollywood as it does about Morrison.
Jim Morrison was a great myth maker; the fact that this film was made at all is proof of Morrison's ability to mesmerise the America of the late '60s. He created his entire life as a metaphor of rebellion. Yet while his power still glimmers through this film, Oliver Stone has managed to tame him while cementing his myth.
Morrison quite self-consciously saw himself as a Dionysian rebel offering himself, poetically and physically, as a sacrifice to his audience. While Stone communicates that part of his story thoroughly, to the point of boredom, what is largely passed over is the context in which such overblown posturing could be seen as having importance and acquire meaning.
What Stone has produced is a variation on the old Hollywood theme of "A Star is Born". Young, poetic Jim overcomes the fuddy-duddies and makes it to stardom and is slowly destroyed as the pressures of the role he has made for himself become too much. The outside world, with its Vietnam wars, its revolutionary street battles in Paris, Chicago and the ghettos of North America appear as wall paper behind this personal drama.
The beauty of the film is the Hollywood magic: pouring an endless bucket of money into recreating the look of the time. This produces a sensation of familiarity: it looks and feels like a Hollywood bio-flick about an important figure and plays according to those rules — even while representing Morrison breaking all the rules.
An example is the scene where Morrison engages in a night of wild sex, cocaine snorting and blood drinking with a witch. Hollywood is sensitive to the image of male genitals on screen, so Morrison is demurely clad in a sarong during all this romping, while his partner displays her breasts throughout. This was precisely the sort of double standard '60s youth rebelled against, yet it flows through Stone's film as unself-consciously as in Days of Our Lives.
The Doors formed in 1966 and blew apart in 1970. Their career coincided with the greatest revolutionary upsurge of youth in modern history. The Doors rode that wave and articulated a part of it; the authorities' violent reaction was because of that relationship, not because the dreaded "f" word was said on stage.
A right-wing critic wrote in 1969: "Music is now the weapon used to make the perverse seem glamorous, exciting, and appealing. Music is used to ridicule religion, morality, patriotism, and productivity — while glorifying drugs, destruction, revolution, and sexual promiscuity." The same critic named Paul McCartney as a member of gue.
The other members of the Doors have commented that the film makes too much of Morrison's drug taking and drinking (he is seen sober or straight only occasionally) and gives too little insight into why he was so attractive to them. The complaint misses the whole point of how and why Hollywood turns reality into myth.
It isn't only Hollywood of course. In her review of The Doors in the US Guardian, Elayne Rapping begins with George Bush's claim that he has "put an end to the Vietnam syndrome". The Vietnam syndrome here stands for everything the powers that be hated and feared about the '60s: the questioning and rejection of establishment values across the board. Music, like other aspects of culture, reflected this. As Rapping puts it:
"Music does not lend itself to the 'Great Man' theory of history any more than other phenomena do. The meaning of the Doors' music, ultimately, has little to do with Morrison's sad life or damaged personality. It has to do, as art always does, with social context and significance; with what is done with the music, how its meaning is socially constructed and used. It's about what people were feeling, thinking and doing when the records were played, and afterwards."
It's the social significance of the '60s rebellion that has to be mythologised out of existence. Thus the "media specials celebrating and re-evaluating the decade of Woodstock ... managed to dismiss the entire scene as, at best, a party".
Probably despite Stone's intentions, The Doors isn't able to rise above the myth-making format. The combination of Hollywood and Morrison's own myth ensures that.
Our culture manufactures stars to rise above the common herd, and we have industries to ensure the production and exploitation of this "commodity". In the industrial production of rock culture, the image of the performer is fused with that of the author, so that the performer is seen to be living out on stage the life of the songs.
Rock video has brought this to perfection. The best of modern technology, a melding of advertising and art, rock video throws itself from our TV screens imploring us to believe that the people we are seeing in fast edited highlights really represent something. The gestures and poses are received from the past, recycled and stylised to the point of cliché.
Learn the right moves, the short-hand of the rock vocabulary, and anyone can look like a star. US music critic Greil Marcus writes that stylised moves say "that these people are, in fact, rock stars. It walks like a duck, it talks like a duck, it must be a duck." Milli Vanilli proved this.
Jim Morrison created many of the rock star turns which are now taken for granted; in fact, he virtually gave his life for them. Would Michael Hutchence of INXS know how to strut and pout if it were not for Morrison?
In The Doors, the past returns, sanitised, to haunt us through the lens of images and expectations that have been constructed as ular media. Morrison walks like a rock star, he talks like a rock star, so he must be a rock star — and nothing more.
Oliver Stone has sanctified and preserving the Morrison myth. But in the very act of preservation, he has incorporated Morrison into the cosy world view of Hollywood and handed Morrison's legacy over to his enemies.