The scene depicted in this picture is everything at once....showing a flawed, highly sensitive, intelligent artist fighting inner demons that are winning the battle for his soul. He's recording lyrics that are authentic commentary on humanity, set to a stunningly beautiful intro on a harpsichord that sounds like it would belong either in a gothic horror film or a sad sweet opera......it then suddenly transitions to a bluesy rhythmic bassline that matches up flawlessly with a jazzy organ riff that dances with guitar picking that is precise. The music and the mood it creates is so intentional it can only be described as perfect. The singer is recording his track over the music that has already been recorded by bandmates who watch in the studio in a state of ambivalence, not sure whether to feel awe, hope, disgust, or betrayal. Some make their choice and walk out of the studio. It portrays the protagonist as pure, beautiful, vulnerable, horrible, ugly and worthy of contempt all at once. And like so much of what Hollywood creates, it is wrong for a lot of the right reasons without ever really being right for any reason. What you are seeing is NOT Jim Morrison and his Doors bandmates in a studio, but a talented yet overly ambitious artist telling on himself. That artist is Oliver Stone, and what we are seeing is the product of how Jim Morrison and The Doors affected his imagination. We the audience are supposed to feel just like the shadowy blurry background figures, the other three members of The Doors and producer Paul Rothchild watching Jim and trying to decide if the figure in the booth is a genius that will never realize his potential or a narcissistic sociopathic on a collision course with disaster that will hurt everyone within his blast radius when he blows up.
This scene and many others is how I was really introduced to The Doors in 1991. I was born two years after Jim Morrison passed away and never heard his name until I was in high school. I had heard songs like Hello, I Love You, Touch Me, and Riders on the Storm such that I was mildly familiar with their music, but I doubt that I could name the band that performed them. So my first deep dive into a band took place when I was 17, and it was a band I knew almost nothing about. For that, I think Oliver Stone gave me a gift. There is no other movie before or after that attempts to do this for any band the way he did it for The Doors. That alone is worth the price of admission, which I paid multiple times. The first time I bought a ticket, I wanted to know what it was about The Lizard King that was so captivating to so many people. I came away confused and even a little angry. What was I supposed to learn from this other than this guy that is so revered was really a dangerous self-absorbed asshole? AND yet, I was mesmerized by this hypnotic music and how the effect that it was depicted to have on people in the movie simultaneously had on me while I watched it. This is where I still to this day can't decide whether the movie fails or succeeds. If we want to know who Jim Morrison and The Doors were, the movie fails tremendously to give much real insight into that. If we want to know what it might feel like to be affected by The Doors music without really knowing them at all, it succeeds. And that might connect us authentically to people who were present for the Doors whether they were fans, bystanders, or passionately opposed to everything the Doors and their generation represented.
Unfortunately, we will not get to see Jim the way people who believed in him saw him. What we'll see is something magnificent in performance mode, and some person backstage that doesn't seem to square up at all with the person who could inspire such alchemy. No scene better depicts this than a performance of Not To Touch The Earth that is so fraught with inaccuracy that modern day Twitter (X) trolls could only sit back and admire. This is a scene that had a profound effect on me when I first saw The Doors. I was drawn into the performance, with sounds and rhythms so ominous I thought something significant and scary was about to occur during the show. It did, but not in the performance. The concert portion of the scene was an intense example of Jim Morrison's ability to form an unspoken bond with his audience so powerful that they would all trust him to take them on a journey that transcended their collective existence. BUT, the scene is intertwined with a montage of Jim engaging in acts of immense cruelty to those who love him and the consequences of debauchery and excess. It is the epitome of the conflict that I felt about the entire affair when walking out of the theater after the first viewing.
Take a minute, and then I'll be back to debrief:
"I am the Lizard King, I can do anything." At that moment I wanted to believe that, except I just saw this character try to burn his girlfriend alive in a closet, crash into a police car while driving drunk with a naked groupie on his lap, and engage in some pagan marriage ritual with a witch. It kind of undermines the case for the whole thing. Also, none of it is true. Where shall I start.....
- The scene is meant to convey authenticity by captioning this as some sort of concert that took place in San Francisco in 1968 YET:
- The Doors rarely played outdoor concerts as they liked more intimate indoor settings where they could better connect with their audience
- The Doors didn't play any outdoor evening concert in San Francisco in 1968
- The Doors never opened a concert with Not To Touch The Earth
- Drummer John Densmore was quoted as saying of this scene (and many others in The Doors) that Doors concerts were not filled with people dancing naked, and not once did he ever witness that occurring
- Jim did not try to burn Pamela Courson alive in a closet by any account from anyone who knew him and if he did in the manner depicted, the whole house would have burned to the ground which there would be plenty of evidence of.
- Those who knew him well readily admit that Jim had a bad temper when drunk, but his temper did not manifest itself in the form of becoming violent toward others, just angry and provocative in ways that got people to be violent toward him.....usually resulting in some type of physical altercation, where he was a punching bag that didn't fight back.
- Did Jim crash his Bullitt edition Mustang Cobra into a moving police car? The Big Empty will not think you crazy to assume that there would be a public record of an arrest should that happen to a driver in a car with naked women and booze. Yet no such record exists. Nobody knows what happened to Jim's Mustang, some say he crashed it into a tree behind a police station and others say it was crashed into an unoccupied police car and abandoned. But his very rare Bullitt Cobra edition vehicle is the kind of specimen where car enthusiasts can account for every single model. Yet what ever became of this car is not known.
- Jim did not have a Celtic handfasting ceremony with Patricia Keneally until 1970, after many of the events depicted as the climax of The Doors have occurred. Strangely enough, the woman performing the ritual in this scene is the actual Patricia Keneally. She described Stone as giving off vibes that were visionary and brilliant, but also ‘sleazy.’
I could provide evidence all night but why bother. Big Empty fairly concludes that when watching The Doors, we are seeing what Jim Morrison has inspired in Oliver Stone's imagination. And that's fair, to Stone. Morrison is a mystery, gone before anyone could really know or begin to understand him. But the real footage of him depicts someone who connects with people, not the self-absorbed, self-destructive manipulative maniac that Stone shows. So while I'm being fair to Stone, I must say that Stone has not given Morrison equal treatment in any way, nor did he even attempt to. He saw an opportunity to boil down the complex Morrison to equal parts God and The Joker.
In many ways, The Doors was an opportunity to be rock music's Amadeus. Instead it was an exploitation film that chooses to show us a one-dimensional binary protagonist the way the most extreme and irrational elements of 60’s culture viewed him. I suspect what we’re seeing is Oliver Stone projecting his own self loathing onto the image of Jim Morrison and viewing that as some sort of kinship he feels as a fellow artist and lover of moviemaking. The Big Empty cannot award such a movie, yet we here will always love it for drawing us into the real story and helping us to see the kind of magic that such a band could implant in the imagination of a generation in their very short tenure as a band. And with that, I'll give you the scene described in the opening paragraph....fraught with inaccuracies to the point that significant portions of the actual song being played are totally skipped over. Yet in my mind, this is the first way I ever heard The Soft Parade, and it is my favorite way to hear it, and the real version sounds wrong to me (but also very very right in an authentic and different way). Go figure.
(If you're not a fan of this song or just not familiar with it, consider taking a moment to contrast that scene with the actual studio version and consider the differences.....beautiful, absurd, bluesy, and poetic. It is a commentary on the state of humanity where the music accompanies the lyrical intentions so well. Nobody attempts art like this right now in any kind of medium.)
