Post by tzinana on Jul 23, 2005 22:24:16 GMT
"For Groupies Only . . ."
By Caryn James
The New York Times
March 24, 1991
The novelist Eve Babitz slept with Jim Morrison when
he was still lean and beautiful, she says in this
month's cover article in Esquire. Richard Goldstein,
in The Village Voice, recently revisited an interview
he did with Morrison more than 20 years ago. And Lisa
Robinson began a column in The New York Post a few
weeks ago, "I knew Jim Morrison toward the end of his
life," when he was bloated and constantly drunk. So
here is my own journalistic confession: I never slept
with Jim Morrison, I never drank with Jim Morrison, I
never saw the Doors in concert and I never even, as
Oliver Stone has admitted he did, worshiped Jim
Morrison from afar.
Such neutrality shouldn't be an obstacle to watching a
movie, but the greatest problem among many in "The
Doors," Mr. Stone's latest 60's extravaganza, is that
it demands an audience already as enamored of Morrison
as the director is. "You're a poet, not a rock star,"
Morrison's girlfriend tells him in the film. And every
pseudo-poetic scene in "The Doors" -- from the Indian
shaman who enters little Jimmy Morrison's soul, to a
hallucinatory peyote trip in the desert, to the final
shot of Morrison's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, alongside Oscar Wilde, Balzac and Sarah
Bernhardt -- declares that Mr. Stone uncritically
bought into the myth of Morrison as a self-destructive
genius.
That's fine; a lot of people did. But at the very
least, "The Doors" needs to convey some of that
idolatry to viewers for whom Morrison is nothing more
than a vague memory from Top 40 radio or just another
rock star who died before they were born.
Instead, the film charts Morrison's quick ascent to
the rock stratosphere and his steady self-destruction
from drugs and alcohol without giving a clue about
whatever possessed him or his fans. Was he done in by
fame or artistic frustration or some demonic gene that
would have got him even if he'd turned out to be a
plumber? Was it simply Morrison's sex appeal that made
young women scream and tear off their clothes? Or was
he, on stage, the momentary embodiment of a social and
sexual freedom that owed very little to the Doors? Why
is he hotter dead than alive?
These are questions that Mr. Stone is too bedazzled by
Morrison to ask. No wonder so many film-goers are
measuring "The Doors" against their own memories or
fantasies of Morrison and the 60's. Mr. Stone creates
a movie virtually inaccessible to anyone who doesn't
share his assumptions. He distances viewers from his
film, throwing them out on their own.
That approach, the bullying narrative surface and the
hollow interior, is typical of Mr. Stone's work. He
turns characters inside out, splashing their psyches
across the screen with montages and quick cuts and
circling cameras and extreme close-ups that are meant
to mirror some internal energy but are often just
dizzying. Pouring all that action onto the surface
leaves nothing within the characters.
The most extreme example of Mr. Stone's hyperactivity
was "Talk Radio," a nearly unwatchable 1988 film that
disastrously busied up Eric Bogosian's one-set play.
"Platoon,"made two years earlier, was filled with
blatant symbolism, including the now-famous Christlike
image of Willem Dafoe dying with his arms outstretched
as if on a cross. And even in Mr. Stone's most moving
work, his 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July," a parade
marches into the audience's face as a substitute for
social context.
Leaping off the screen with relentless energy and
ants-in-the-pants camerawork, "The Doors" is just
Oliver Stone at his Oliver Stoniest. When Val Kilmer,
as Morrison, sings the Doors' most notorious lyrics --
about his desire to kill his father and sleep with his
mother, the sophomoric poetry of someone who has just
discovered Oedipus and Freud -- Mr. Stone's camera
predictably goes crazy, swirling and jumping and
acting like a giant exclamation point. At its best,
the film's haunted Doors music and visceral look
creates the sense of being in some hypnotic trance.
But by the end, audiences may feel they have been
beaten over the head with a stick for two hours.
In "Born on the Fourth of July," Tom Cruise's
wonderfully deep performance created the most fully
developed character in any Oliver Stone film. In "The
Doors," Mr. Stone also gets a first-rate performance
from his star. But despite Mr. Kilmer's miraculous
impersonation of Morrison, despite his shifts from a
sensitive seducer to a vulgar monomaniac, he can't
invent a man from a character written as a myth, with
no inner life.
How, for example, did Morrison transform himself,
inside and out, from a chubby college kid to a
drooled-over sex symbol in the space of a year? Now
that story would have shown myth-making in action. But
Mr. Stone ignores it; he seems uninterested in any
un-glamorous vision of Morrison. Even the singer's
selfish, pot-bellied last days are idealized as the
fall of a tragic hero.
So, what does Oliver Stone see in Jim Morrison? On the
evidence of "The Doors," it must have been Morrison's
way of playing an audience. He could apparently
manipulate a crowd, using flash and noise and a poetic
facade that masked the emptiness behind the act. Mr.
Stone's film does very much the same. It is made by a
Morrison groupie for other groupies, a film that
leaves the rest of us locked outside wondering what
the fuss is about.
By Caryn James
The New York Times
March 24, 1991
The novelist Eve Babitz slept with Jim Morrison when
he was still lean and beautiful, she says in this
month's cover article in Esquire. Richard Goldstein,
in The Village Voice, recently revisited an interview
he did with Morrison more than 20 years ago. And Lisa
Robinson began a column in The New York Post a few
weeks ago, "I knew Jim Morrison toward the end of his
life," when he was bloated and constantly drunk. So
here is my own journalistic confession: I never slept
with Jim Morrison, I never drank with Jim Morrison, I
never saw the Doors in concert and I never even, as
Oliver Stone has admitted he did, worshiped Jim
Morrison from afar.
Such neutrality shouldn't be an obstacle to watching a
movie, but the greatest problem among many in "The
Doors," Mr. Stone's latest 60's extravaganza, is that
it demands an audience already as enamored of Morrison
as the director is. "You're a poet, not a rock star,"
Morrison's girlfriend tells him in the film. And every
pseudo-poetic scene in "The Doors" -- from the Indian
shaman who enters little Jimmy Morrison's soul, to a
hallucinatory peyote trip in the desert, to the final
shot of Morrison's grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery in
Paris, alongside Oscar Wilde, Balzac and Sarah
Bernhardt -- declares that Mr. Stone uncritically
bought into the myth of Morrison as a self-destructive
genius.
That's fine; a lot of people did. But at the very
least, "The Doors" needs to convey some of that
idolatry to viewers for whom Morrison is nothing more
than a vague memory from Top 40 radio or just another
rock star who died before they were born.
Instead, the film charts Morrison's quick ascent to
the rock stratosphere and his steady self-destruction
from drugs and alcohol without giving a clue about
whatever possessed him or his fans. Was he done in by
fame or artistic frustration or some demonic gene that
would have got him even if he'd turned out to be a
plumber? Was it simply Morrison's sex appeal that made
young women scream and tear off their clothes? Or was
he, on stage, the momentary embodiment of a social and
sexual freedom that owed very little to the Doors? Why
is he hotter dead than alive?
These are questions that Mr. Stone is too bedazzled by
Morrison to ask. No wonder so many film-goers are
measuring "The Doors" against their own memories or
fantasies of Morrison and the 60's. Mr. Stone creates
a movie virtually inaccessible to anyone who doesn't
share his assumptions. He distances viewers from his
film, throwing them out on their own.
That approach, the bullying narrative surface and the
hollow interior, is typical of Mr. Stone's work. He
turns characters inside out, splashing their psyches
across the screen with montages and quick cuts and
circling cameras and extreme close-ups that are meant
to mirror some internal energy but are often just
dizzying. Pouring all that action onto the surface
leaves nothing within the characters.
The most extreme example of Mr. Stone's hyperactivity
was "Talk Radio," a nearly unwatchable 1988 film that
disastrously busied up Eric Bogosian's one-set play.
"Platoon,"made two years earlier, was filled with
blatant symbolism, including the now-famous Christlike
image of Willem Dafoe dying with his arms outstretched
as if on a cross. And even in Mr. Stone's most moving
work, his 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July," a parade
marches into the audience's face as a substitute for
social context.
Leaping off the screen with relentless energy and
ants-in-the-pants camerawork, "The Doors" is just
Oliver Stone at his Oliver Stoniest. When Val Kilmer,
as Morrison, sings the Doors' most notorious lyrics --
about his desire to kill his father and sleep with his
mother, the sophomoric poetry of someone who has just
discovered Oedipus and Freud -- Mr. Stone's camera
predictably goes crazy, swirling and jumping and
acting like a giant exclamation point. At its best,
the film's haunted Doors music and visceral look
creates the sense of being in some hypnotic trance.
But by the end, audiences may feel they have been
beaten over the head with a stick for two hours.
In "Born on the Fourth of July," Tom Cruise's
wonderfully deep performance created the most fully
developed character in any Oliver Stone film. In "The
Doors," Mr. Stone also gets a first-rate performance
from his star. But despite Mr. Kilmer's miraculous
impersonation of Morrison, despite his shifts from a
sensitive seducer to a vulgar monomaniac, he can't
invent a man from a character written as a myth, with
no inner life.
How, for example, did Morrison transform himself,
inside and out, from a chubby college kid to a
drooled-over sex symbol in the space of a year? Now
that story would have shown myth-making in action. But
Mr. Stone ignores it; he seems uninterested in any
un-glamorous vision of Morrison. Even the singer's
selfish, pot-bellied last days are idealized as the
fall of a tragic hero.
So, what does Oliver Stone see in Jim Morrison? On the
evidence of "The Doors," it must have been Morrison's
way of playing an audience. He could apparently
manipulate a crowd, using flash and noise and a poetic
facade that masked the emptiness behind the act. Mr.
Stone's film does very much the same. It is made by a
Morrison groupie for other groupies, a film that
leaves the rest of us locked outside wondering what
the fuss is about.
