My favourite moment in Oliver Stone’s exhilarating, grotesque, heroically ridiculous biopic The Doors isn’t even in the movie itself: it’s in the parody that appears during Wayne’s World 2, in which Mike Myers’s Wayne, having been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jim Morrison, relays his experience to the veteran roadie Del Preston, played by Withnail & I’s indelible geezer Ralph Brown. “Didn’t you think it was a trifle unnecessary,” reasons Del, who had the same vision of the Lizard King and his Native American guide, “to see the crack in the Indian’s bottom?”
The scene might goof on Stone’s film – in which Morrison believes himself possessed by the spirit of a Navajo man – on its wobbly mysticism, gonzo indulgence and rock ’n’ roll bacchanalia, but it also pays tribute to a movie that succeeds precisely because it leans into those very qualities. As an account of the 1960s West Coast icons who soundtracked the demise of the decade, The Doors is a film perfectly synchronised to its subject, staggering down the road of excess in search of a palace of wisdom, or maybe just the next whisky bar. And none of it would work, of course, without the electrifying lead performance by the late Val Kilmer.
Critics love to talk about actors losing themselves in roles, and it’s true that Kilmer seems to commune with Morrison, to the extent that the surviving band members, upon hearing Kilmer’s vocal recordings for the soundtrack, were said to have wondered whether they were listening to the actor or the singer. But impersonation is only half the trick; anyone can mimic a star and collect an Oscar. Commensurate with Stone’s audacious design, Kilmer summons forth something that transcends mere behind-the-music drama, realising the mythical version that Morrison himself – a self-made Dionysus fleeing the conformity of the American dream – strove to construct.
With his baritone voice and serpentine stage movement, Kilmer embodies the singer’s uncanny physicality. He has the swagger and the volatility, the insolent pout that Eve Babitz once described as “so edible”. Still, Kilmer’s playful sense, his mischief, and his swirling self-doubt – “I’m lying. I’m afraid,” he admits during an acid trip – offsets the movie’s bombast. His Morrison is both rock god and little boy lost, a tale as old as time.
“We gotta make the myths,” says the band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan, in a wig that Evil Cooper might covet). Cliche, sure, but also power: as Baz Luhrmann would later accomplish with Elvis, Stone embraces the primal essence of rock’s archetypes, playing them loud to find the ecstatic truth. “The program for this evening is not new,” the film’s intro asserts. “You’ve seen this entertainment through and through.”
If Stone is heavy-handed, then Mr Mojo Rising, with his songs about Oedipus and snakes and funeral pyres, wasn’t exactly subtle – and I mean that as the highest compliment. At one point, a heaving concert turns into a nightmare from Bosch’s hell; during another, Stone dissolves Morrison’s face into a literal ancient idol before his screaming fans.
Echoing the band’s contemporary critical reception (recall Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, dismissing Morrison as “a drunken buffoon posing as a poet”), The Doors wasn’t especially well reviewed on release. It was taken to task for its historical liberties, its supposed humourlessness (did critics miss Crispin Glover’s lurid turn as Andy Warhol?), its starstruck desire to print the legend in place of some kind of “real” self – as though the two things were somehow inseparable.
Stone’s real subject was fame. One of the great shots in The Doors has a listless Morrison gazing over the city from an airplane window, in homage to Fellini’s 1968 film Toby Dammit. Like Terence Stamp’s hollowed-out movie star, Kilmer’s Morrison becomes a shadow image of himself, where the only escape from fame – from the excess he sought to mainline – was a nice warm bath and a cold Parisian slab.
Kilmer’s performance understood this: the pursuit of abandon for its own sake, the contradiction and absurdity of his subject; he knew that illusion was truth, that art can be simultaneously serious and stupid, even if one accepts that Stone didn’t.
Like Morrison, Kilmer was also a poet and an artist – a “funny, crazy, pain in the ass”, as Cher lovingly described him – whose fire burned too wild for anything Hollywood could offer. It’s pretty clear he saw the amusing side to it all: reprising his role for a Saturday Night Live skit in 2000, Kilmer plays Morrison in heaven, his ever-present bottle of Jack yet to quench the existential thirst. “I’ve broke on through but I still got a question for you,” he sings, to the tune of Break On Through. “Now we’re on the other side, whaddya we do, now that we’ve died?” Farewell Val, you beautiful freak.
The Doors is streaming on Apple TV, Google Play and YouTube in Australia, Prime Video in the UK and Pluto in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
