There are bits of this movie that I liked more, watching it again, and other bits which really just seem to be Oliver Stone mythologising. I like Doors songs, and I like Morrison\’s poetry, but who out there that writes poetry would want the idea given that they talked in snippets of their own poetry just as a common thing throughout the day? That would really not make you look too good.
You have to have a descent from the happy simple days into the dark so you have to smooth out the complexities. People who hated The Doors were always talking to me about the pretension, and this movie feeds into that … but I suspect it is more Stone than Morrison. Of course, I am taking from it what I want, just like Stone, to create a picture that makes sense to me.
Where is the happiness though? I\’ve seen it in the pictures, heard it in the music, heard it in the poetry tapes. How many people see an interpretation, with incidents that are amped up, and take that as gospel? For me, the movie doesn\’t really display the smarts of Morrison or his band mates, and if you read their words that is an easy thing to find. Drunken druggy buffoon is easier to show on screen I suppose, but then I think of movies like Lenny where you shine a light into the recesses of someone\’s consciousness and background the controversy in favour of the character sketch.
I found Jim Morrison through Lost Boys four years before this movie, so got into the music and the poetry a bit before. It all became easier to get after the movie. But it gave me an idea of Jim before the movie landed. When the movie dropped for a while some of the incidents were true for me, but reading around some things seemed to fall apart through more exploration, but even the books wanted to build in this distorted framework of myth. Stone has this desire in all his work, and he had the biggest budget to paint his canvas, so it stuck in a lot of people\’s minds.
The music and the pictures and the poetry for me are the closest thing to the truth.