1991's The Doors Epitomizes Everything That Makes Oliver Stone the Absolute Worst
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In writing up the films of Oliver Stone for this column I find myself thinking a lot about satire and parody. That’s not because Stone understands satire or parody, as evidenced by the unholy, unfunny mess he made of Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers.
No, I find myself returning over and over again to the theme of satire because Stone’s wildly excessive, perversely non-self-aware oeuvre lends itself so beautifully to parody. Stone has inspired some of Ben Stiller’s most brilliant non-Zoolander satire both in terms of The Ben Stiller Show and Tropic Thunder while Walk Hard satirized the bleary cliches and conventions of rock and roll biographies so brilliantly, affectionately and mercilessly that after its release Oliver Stone should have had The Doors removed from circulation out of embarrassment.
With The Doors, one world-class pretentious asshole paid worshipful tribute to another with predictably insufferable results.
The Doors’ 141 minutes of numbing excess felt like an eternity to me. This might just be the sloppiest, most shapeless two hours and twenty one minutes in the history of film, if not entertainment as a whole.
Scene after scene drags on interminably without direction or purpose. Filmmaking is about choices and Stone unwisely seems to have deliberately decided to leave EVERYTHING in, until the whole blasted, damned enterprise begins to feel like a sadistic endurance test.
The Doors begins with Jim Morrison a film student whose characteristically solipsistic student film is deemed pretentious by a malevolently bearded professor played by Stone himself in one of his many wink-wink cameos.
The blowhard decides to abandon film altogether and hooks up with what the movie depicts as the three most boring men in Southern California, organist Ray Manzarek (Kyle McLaughlin), guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) and drummer John Densmore (Johnny Drama from Entourage) to form the Doors.
Fueled by Morrison’s movie star good looks, brooding charisma and catchy ditties The Doors enjoy the proverbial rocket ride to super-stardom. They are the right group for the time and place but Morrison seems intent on killing his career, his band and himself from the band’s very inception.
In an annoyingly convincing lead performance that captures Morrison’s insufferable essence entirely too well, Val Kilmer plays the rock icon as a hurricane of self-destruction hurtling madly towards oblivion.
He’s a sex panther in tight leather pants with a bottle of whiskey perpetually in his hands as he staggers sullenly from one sexed and drugged-up caricature of Aquarian depravity to another, never thinking about anything or anyone beyond his own mindless pleasure.
Jim Morrison is selfish. He’s arrogant. He’s cruel to the people who love him as well as the people who don’t. But in Stone’s coke-addled mind at least, he’s also a poet, a genius and a true visionary with a wounded soul and that makes his flagrant cruelty and misbehavior understandable and forgivable.
Stone thinks that he made a movie about a charming and and ferociously talented young man who is corrupted by fame, money, sex, power, adulation, alcohol and drugs. In actuality he made a movie about a legendary jerk who begins the movie a raging asshole and is empowered by money and fame to become the worst person in the history of the universe, with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler.
Morrison’s insatiable appetite for booze, sex and self-destruction causes a rift in his relationship with Pamela Courson (a poignantly and hilariously miscast Meg Ryan), a good girl gone bad who loves him madly but cannot compete with either the public’s worship of the Doors frontman or his own formidable demons.
Ryan hoped to change her image as America’s adorable rom-com sweetheart by portraying the tortured, heroin-addicted muse of acid rock’s answer to Lord Byron but no matter how grim things get Ryan retains an incongruous air of freshly-scrubbed cheerfulness.
While Kilmer keeps exploring new and seedier depths Ryan seems stuck in a romantic comedy about a lovable gal who finds herself in the unenviable position of being hopelessly in love with the world’s most self-destructive rock star. Call it That Dang Jim! In a movie like that, dialogue like “Jim Morrison, you’ve ruined ANOTHER Thanksgiving!” would seem natural rather than laugh out loud funny for all the wrong reasons.
That dang Jim! He’s a menace! He won’t get out of here alive!
Kathleen Quinlan is much better as Patricia Kennealy, the dark and stormy yin to Pamela’s yang. Where Morrison’s other great love is sunny and bright, Patricia is a witch and an intellectual who refuses to be just another sexual conquest for the promiscuous and intermittently impotent sex symbol.
A sexually assertive woman who refuses to be mistreated by a rich, powerful, arrogant “artist” is Stone’s worst nightmare so the film infers that Morrison might have met a sad fate because she hexed him for mistreating her in addition to, you know, literally everything else.
Throughout the film Jim sees visions of Native American shamans the screenplay connects to the young Jim Morrison witnessing a fatal automobile crash involving indigenous people, something that had a profound effect on him throughout his life.
Three decades on Stone’s use of Native American imagery, particularly involving shamans and spiritual quests, feels like the worst, most blatant kind of cultural appropriation.
Native Americans have no agency or autonomy here. They exist solely to lend our heroic Irish-American sex god a transcendent spiritual dimension unreachable to white people who have not chosen to co-opt the rituals and religion of indigenous people for their own creative and personal ends.
Native Americans and Native American spirituality play a major role in The Doors but I don’t think a single Native American has a single line of dialogue in a nearly two and a half hour long movie that finds time and space for everything else.
That’s because Native Americans aren’t flesh and blood human beings in The Doors but rather ethereal spirits ostensibly lending meaning and purpose to what otherwise sure looks like a bleary, drunken race to oblivion.
My opinions have softened with age in countless ways. I’m more inclined to let people enjoy their passions regardless of how I feel about them personally but The Doors served as a vivid reminder that I do, in fact, hate Jim Morrison, his music and his persona. It’s not a casual dislike, or a lack of appreciation either: the more Doors music I hear (and The Doors, regrettably but predictably has a lot) the more I despise it with every fiber of my being.
Yes, even the spoken-word stuff.
I’m not too crazy about Oliver Stone either.
That said, this column has made me appreciate Stone’s gifts in a new way but The Doors is Stone at his absolute worst. If it’s not his single worst, most unbearable and bloated effort then it’s certainly up there.
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