Oliver Stone's "The Doors"

When dealing with corporate music stores, it's good to recognize the big poppa of all corporate music stores: Walmart. I never realized the power of Walmart until I got to graduate school and moved to a town where a 24-hour Super Walmart was the high point for youth culture on a Friday night. Walmart fared better than the bowling alley, which as far as I could tell was the only other place opened at 11pm that wasn't a supermarket (of course meaning a supermarket that wasn't also a Walmart). It's easy to hate Walmart when it's just an idea, something that is destroying small businesses and eroding the foundations of middle America. I also think that it's funny that Walmart gets such flack in my area when pretty much any other business is a chain of some sort.

...including my beloved Corporate Music Store©.

Walmart, as must people know, has a 5 dollar DVD bin and that bin always seems to have Oliver Stone's "The Doors" which is essentially a meditation of the life of Jim Morrison. It's also probably the funniest movie I've ever seen.

When I was in the 9th grade, I was obsessed with the movie. I saw it the summer before 9th grade while visiting some family friends with my parents. The family's son was the coolest person I knew, which pretty much meant that he did everything I could never see myself doing in the 9th grade: drink, smoke, do drugs, drive, go out all the time, sleep with girls, and know people in bands. Moreover, he was only 1 year older than me. While I never really ended up doing anything seedy in my life, he represented everything I could've been within one year's time, even if I wouldn't really be. We also both listened to thrash metal, particularly Metallica. While my yearbook quote was "following an instinct not a trend/go against the grain until the end" (Damage, Inc.), he embodied that a whole lot more than I did. My life was more Nothing Else Matter than Damage, Inc.

The summer before I entered my freshman year, this guy was particularly into the Doors. I came over and he and his friends were watching Oliver Stone's "The Doors". He had a huge room (which seemed more like an awesome apartment than a room) and it was full of (who at the time I thought were) more really cool people. Oliver Stone's "The Doors" was on in the background and while all the cool people were doing whatever cool people do, I watched the life story of someone who was seemingly cooler than all of them: Jim Morrison.

Now, I hope you're seeing where I'm going with all of this and you're catching a sense of the self-deprecation in this little bit of writing. Jim Morrison is NOT awesome. Jim Morrison kinda sucked. He wrote really crappy poetry and sang on more crappy songs than good. It's easy to talk about how awesome the Doors are when you're only listening to the 2-disc "Best of..." or if you're Perry Farrell or Door's keyboardist Ran Manzarek. But the idea of the band The Doors is probably stronger than the reality of The Doors.

I bought the movie soon after at another Corporate Music Store© location which was located in the deadest mall in America (which I'm pleased to say is even deader than ever, though I did attend an advance screening for the new Incredible Hulk movie there tonight). I also picked up the soundtrack to the motion picture at, coincidentally, a Walmart that is located in the same plaza as my current Corporate Music Store© location. It was 1995 and I missed the Doors resurgence by a good 4 years, but it was all new to me. The soundtrack, in all honesty, was pretty awesome. It played on the Jim Morrison mystique flawlessly and you really get the sense that some mythical god walked this earth for a brief period in the mid-to-late 60's, an image that's just plain silly because at the end of the day (or the end of his day, really), he was a dopey guy in his mid-20's. I'm currently the same age Jim Morrison was when he died (he died at 27) but I feel generally more comfortable where I'm at. I don't think I've missed out, even in comparison to Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's "The Doors".

The soundtrack was also my first introduction to the Velvet Underground and I remember being really surprised when I found out what they really looked like because the band I pictured looked more like the Screaming Trees (I can't even explain why) than a bunch of sloppy mods with a supermodel.

The movie itself is unintentionally hilarious. I later learned that almost anyone involved with Jim Morrison was appalled by the movie. His mistress, Patricia Keneally (who, thanks to Google, I just found out 2 seconds ago is now a science fiction writer) hated how she was depicted, which is odd because she's portrayed (as far as the movie's concerned) pretty positively, being a voluptious pagan who initiates Jim Morrison into some faux-godhood by drinking each other's blood and dancing to the introduction of Carmina Burana. Doors drummer John Densmore also ripped into the movie, though he has a cameo as an engineer. Others probably would've been offended at their portrayal if they weren't already dead. Andy Warhol is portrayed as hitting on Jim Morrison while giving him a gold phone and the stoic Nico gets a little rawdy with some Love in an Elevator.

I've pretty much disavowed the movie from my life, with the occasional relapse whenever it's featured on VH1 Classic. But recently, I was thinking about it and something kinda bothersome hit me: Val Kilmer is a better Jim Morrison than Jim Morrison.

The real Jim Morrison was a little pudgy and awkward. Val Kilmer had better delivery, better stage presence, looked better, and kinda sounded better than the real Jim Morrison, ALL while still being Val Kilmer. Regardless of the film's artistic value (very little) or historical value (even less), I think that the shot of Val Kilmer as the dead Jim Morrison, laying perfectly still in a bathtub is probably one of the most iconic images in rock cinema. This is no way what Jim Morrison looked like when he died. I saw a picture of Jim Morrison in an old Rolling Stone that was taken just days before he died, and it looked like someone ate Jim Morrison and wore his skin. Even in death, Jim Morrison is trumped by Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison.

Which brings me to a last point with bio-pics. I can't help but picture the band in the movie more easily than the real deal. Maybe that's why there are movies like Eddie and the Cruisers. It's easier to mess with a made-up legend than a real one. In the case of the Doors, the other Doors were portrayed by Frank Whaley (as Robbie Krieger), Kevin Dillon (as John Densmore) and Kyle Maclaughlin (as Ray Manzarek). Frank Whaley also played a fake Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone's equally overblown "J.F.K." and Kyle Maclaughlin was in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. In real life, the other Doors look like a bunch of skeezy and/or ratty old guys. I almost need to picture the fake band more. I've put off seeing Anton Corbijn's "Control" because I don't want a definitive film verson of Ian Curtis and Joy Division when I've already been messed up by the fake versions in "24 Hour Party People". This also means that there are now 2 sets of fake Joy Divisions, which is as odd and arbitrary as having 2 fake versons of Steve Prefontaine, who was himself the subject of 2 films about his life.

As a result, I would not be able to pick out the real Steve Prefontaine in a police line-up, and I guess that's okay.