Post by tzinana on Jul 28, 2005 6:18:58 GMT
'The Doors' Distorts the 60's
By Brent Staples
The New York Times
March 11, 1991
The poster for the movie "The Doors" mimics a
photograph of Jim Morrison popular 25 years ago. In
the original, Morrison pouted at you from the walls of
college dormitory rooms and through the marijuana haze
of crash pads from Philly to the Haight. Sex radiated
from his bedroom eyes; the naked chest was smooth and birdishly small, but he bared it as a sign of
virility. Val Kilmer plays Morrison in the film and
pouts well enough. But Mr. Kilmer, among other things,
has too much chest hair to be credible.
This faux Jim Morrison is just enough not him to vex
those who turned 18 with the original. This is more
than nitpicking for people who came of age in the late
1960's, when rock was the true and only religion.
Judging from the forlorn reactions of other moviegoers
and some critics, this film pains my generation.
The version of our history offered in "The Doors"
trifles with the history we remember. That such a
rival version exists at all is a grim reminder that we
have lost our pioneering cultural influence. This
wasn't supposed to happen. The mental charter of the
60's expressly forbade decline and the passage of
time.
The rock music we hear every day sustains the illusion
that time has ceased to pass. Whether in our offices
in Manhattan or our homes in Brooklyn, music three
decades old still washes over us. The Byrds, Jimi
Hendrix, Crosby, Stills & Nash pour out of the radio;
their music has outlived vinyl and fills the bins at
the compact-disk store. Parents and kids don't fight
over what to listen to as in the previous generation;
they hum along together.
"The Doors" relies on this omnipresent nostalgia for
its emotional impact, and traffics heavily in the
iconography of the period. Legions of us expected,
perhaps unfairly, to revisit the decade through the
film. Instead, we were brutalized by its images.
Oliver Stone tells the period through Morrison's short
and wretched life. The women are vacuous, and leap to
sex in public places. The men are all ciphers, except
Jim. Most painfully, the film lacks the brightness of
the time and the sense of boundless possibility that
was so deeply felt then.
Baby boomers are taking this badly. Some beefs are
minor. For instance, people who claim to know denounce
as false the scene of Andy Warhol meeting Morrison at
the Factory. But there are larger grounds for
discomfort. Terrence Rafferty, in The New Yorker,
wrote more of an elegy than a review: "The movie
leaves us exhausted and depressed; it makes us voyeurs of our own memories."
The trauma of "The Doors" will not be the last for us.
We altered art, music, love and marriage. The guys
from the Hollywood history mill can do what they will
with our memories. The 20-year-olds sitting across the
aisle at "The Doors" think it's all groovy. But we who
lived the stuff wince at the infidelities -- big ones
like the absence of hope and light, and even tiny
ones, like too much hair on a rock star's chest.
By Brent Staples
The New York Times
March 11, 1991
The poster for the movie "The Doors" mimics a
photograph of Jim Morrison popular 25 years ago. In
the original, Morrison pouted at you from the walls of
college dormitory rooms and through the marijuana haze
of crash pads from Philly to the Haight. Sex radiated
from his bedroom eyes; the naked chest was smooth and birdishly small, but he bared it as a sign of
virility. Val Kilmer plays Morrison in the film and
pouts well enough. But Mr. Kilmer, among other things,
has too much chest hair to be credible.
This faux Jim Morrison is just enough not him to vex
those who turned 18 with the original. This is more
than nitpicking for people who came of age in the late
1960's, when rock was the true and only religion.
Judging from the forlorn reactions of other moviegoers
and some critics, this film pains my generation.
The version of our history offered in "The Doors"
trifles with the history we remember. That such a
rival version exists at all is a grim reminder that we
have lost our pioneering cultural influence. This
wasn't supposed to happen. The mental charter of the
60's expressly forbade decline and the passage of
time.
The rock music we hear every day sustains the illusion
that time has ceased to pass. Whether in our offices
in Manhattan or our homes in Brooklyn, music three
decades old still washes over us. The Byrds, Jimi
Hendrix, Crosby, Stills & Nash pour out of the radio;
their music has outlived vinyl and fills the bins at
the compact-disk store. Parents and kids don't fight
over what to listen to as in the previous generation;
they hum along together.
"The Doors" relies on this omnipresent nostalgia for
its emotional impact, and traffics heavily in the
iconography of the period. Legions of us expected,
perhaps unfairly, to revisit the decade through the
film. Instead, we were brutalized by its images.
Oliver Stone tells the period through Morrison's short
and wretched life. The women are vacuous, and leap to
sex in public places. The men are all ciphers, except
Jim. Most painfully, the film lacks the brightness of
the time and the sense of boundless possibility that
was so deeply felt then.
Baby boomers are taking this badly. Some beefs are
minor. For instance, people who claim to know denounce
as false the scene of Andy Warhol meeting Morrison at
the Factory. But there are larger grounds for
discomfort. Terrence Rafferty, in The New Yorker,
wrote more of an elegy than a review: "The movie
leaves us exhausted and depressed; it makes us voyeurs of our own memories."
The trauma of "The Doors" will not be the last for us.
We altered art, music, love and marriage. The guys
from the Hollywood history mill can do what they will
with our memories. The 20-year-olds sitting across the
aisle at "The Doors" think it's all groovy. But we who
lived the stuff wince at the infidelities -- big ones
like the absence of hope and light, and even tiny
ones, like too much hair on a rock star's chest.