"Falling Hard for a Dead Drunk"
THE DOORS
A film review by Ann Hodgins
Copyright 1991 Ann Hodgins
I wrote this title after seeing THE DOORS IN EUROPE, a documentary of the original Doors' performances. That movie made a worshipper out of me. Then I was brought down hard by NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE, the biography: Jim made so many deadly errors it's a wonder he didn't die sooner. But although the book killed my hero worship it did not kill my love for the guy. But what difference does it make. No woman could have broken through to Jim. All my love's in vain. Total failure. No blame. Jim talked of women as "meager food for souls for God." What woman could win out in the face of such a total negation?
So I was prepared to find Oliver Stone's DOORS a grueling experience. As a great admirer of Stone's artistry I was afraid that he would successfully revive the past, the feeling and meaning of it. I was 17 in 68, and if he was successful Stone could make me relive my feelings. I was prepared for that but it didn't happen. Instead I was able to compose this review in my head during most of the movie. The music was there, and the fashions and all, but nothing touched me as it should have.
Perhaps the problem was that Jim Morrison was not just a guy in the crowd that a mere camera could capture. Jim was a soul who was doomed to be the spirit of his times. He was racked on the extremes of those times. He was born into a proto-typical American family -- his mother a neglected nag and his father Mr. Megadeath, a nuclear war expert in the army. He appeared to be normal and conforming, like every other boy did. But he caught a spirit from those Indians. He passed puberty just as Rock and Roll was being born. He came of drafting age during the War in Vietnam. He came to consciousness just as LSD was invented. He discovered love during the Summer of Love. He briefly became a father when the red tide of abortion reached its peak.
In himself he was the times and he did his best to work out those terrible internal/external conflicts and make something positive emerge from the struggle into his poetry and to give that good thing to others. That's why I love his soul, because he was the anti-Hitler. He fought harder than his father who was the youngest general in the navy. Jim's personal struggle took him farther faster.
"Don't underestimate the audience," Jim said. "They want the sacred." Stone's movie fails to deliver. One can hardly blame Stone for that. Maybe Jim's soul was just too big to capture. Or maybe I just expected too much after viewing THE DOORS IN EUROPE. Or maybe it was because I'm a woman looking back at a time of life and a time in history when men and women just didn't see the same things. I can find myself in the movie only as a rag of Indian silk, a boney body and a hank of hair. My experience is locked on the wrong side of those heavily made-up eyes.
Maybe I should not have expected Stone to revive those times for me, but actually I think that the movie missed all the points. Things didn't ring true or have the impact they should have had. For instance, in the scene where Jim tells his wife to kill their baby, I can't believe that Patricia replied to that by criticizing Jim's recent weight gain! That is not how the scene could have been or how it is described in NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE.
Everything in the movie was like that for me -- just not right. So I left the theatre competely unmoved and unable to write the review I wanted to write. I suggest seeing the documentary and reading the poetry.
a.h.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews