The Doors (6 page)

Imagine what it must have been like to make “The End.” No matter how comically overstated it sounded then or sounds now, you can hear that it made the people who made it feel free as they made it—worldly, tragic, bigger somehow. You can hear that it let them apprehend the terror of freedom and made them move forward nevertheless, a note at a time. “It was almost a shock when the song was over,” the late Paul Rothchild, the Doors' producer, told the pioneering rock critic Paul Williams just after the Doors' first album was released. “I felt emotionally washed. There were four other people in the control room at the time, when the take was over and we realized the tape was still going.” Try to imagine the same people in the same studio a year or two later, making “Hello, I Love You,” number one in 1968, or “Touch Me,” #3 in 1969, songs the Monkees might have blanched at. Hits keep the halls full, but people are there for the instant myth, to see someone else be free, onstage, in front of them. What does it mean for the people in the crowd, or for the people they've paid to watch? “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” the Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon wrote in 1983. “Maybe people don't know whether they can experience the erotic or whether it exists only in commercials; but on stage, in the midst of rock 'n' roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment. As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists.”

In Oliver Stone's movie, and in real life, the Doors made the myths and were instantly their victims—as people were more than twenty years later, standing in line to watch it happen. Already in 1968 the Doors were performing not freedom but its disappearance. This is what is terrifying: the notion that the Sixties was no grand, simple, romantic time to sell others as a nice place to visit, but a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape.

It can seem as if the movie was made solely to give reality, not meaning, to a few moments when this trap is sprung. The Sixties—as clothes, drugs, sex, style, politics, art—come forth
as a time and place where people live by breaking rules they know are right, mainly to see what might happen. The Sixties are an arena. Jim Morrison, a confused guy, enters this arena because it's where the action is, and he becomes a new person, someone he doesn't recognize. A few years later, on stage, he performs as a double: the old person watching the new one, just like any fan in the crowd. When the new person looks at the crowd, the crowd that long ago learned just what it wanted from him, no more and no less, a song from a few years before—was it only two years, even last year?—plays in his head: “Now people just get uglier, and I have no sense of time.”

In
The Doors
, in a long, delicate dramatization of the first full performance of “The End” at the Whisky à Go Go in 1966, you see the new person, and, in the audience, new people struggling to emerge from the people they were or are. On stage, the band is moving slowly through the first movements of the song: Kyle MacLachlan as Ray Manzarek, Frank Whaley as Robby Krieger, Kevin Dillon as John Densmore, all of them right, and Val Kilmer as Morrison, more than right.

He has more to play with, and he has a subtle touch. In his first role, in
Top Secret!,
⁵
as orange-haired pretty boy secret agent Nick Rivers, Kilmer is being slammed in the face by uniformed Communist thugs. As he loses consciousness, he sees himself running through a high school corridor. He stops another student. “Do you know which room the final chemistry exam is in?” he says. “All the exams are over,” says the other
student robotically. “Haven't you been to class?” “No—” “But it's the end of the semester,” says the Twilight Zone kid, losing interest. Kilmer's face is all terror. “No,” he says. “No. I haven't studied. I can't believe I'm back in school . . .” As he wakes up, back in the torture chamber, he finds himself strung up from the ceiling. He's being whipped by two goons, and a smile spreads over his face like water: “Thank God,” he says.

A scene like that requires that the actor hold something back in each moment. As an actor, he has to stay a step behind the audience; as a character who hasn't read the script, he has to stay a step behind himself. Onstage at the Whisky, Kilmer waits behind his words as he sings them; he'll follow them, one step at a time, but what Kilmer gets across as he sings is that he doesn't know where the words are leading him, and doesn't care. There's no sense at all that the pace is ever going to break; the tension comes from a conflict between the feeling that nothing is happening and the sense that at any moment anything can.

The camera pans through the crowd, its eye behind a red filter. At tables on the main floor, you see well-groomed, well-dressed men and women sitting quietly. As the camera moves up to the balcony against the stop-time of the drums, the vamping sound of the organ, a sound that in 1967 the band will share with the Velvet Underground's “Heroin,” women, including Meg Ryan, playing Jim Morrison's girlfriend Pamela Courson, bob their heads up and down, as if trying to will themselves into a trance, or anyway into the song, which is hanging back, moving not toward them but away. A man stands alone at a railing, smoking, looking down. Go-go dancers sway in elevated cages. At the foot of the stage, women of different ages, again all of them well dressed, ogle
the singer. But the mood changes as the band refuses to let the music build in any conventional manner, refuses to even hint at a change, a break, a release. Everywhere in the room there is a sense of anticipation and dread. People know what roles they are expected to play, that they have come to the club in order to play—the amused scene-maker, the would-be groupie, the hipster, the fan, the skeptic, the music-business insider—but those roles are beginning to break down.

Everyone means to leave the place talking about what they've seen, ranking it above or below what they saw the night before, but no one expects to leave wanting something different than he or she wanted when they came in. Behind the band, the camera catches the go-go dancers as they stop dancing and turn to watch. Behind the women at the front of the stage, standing, are men and women dressed roughly, their hair straggly. Behind them, against the wall, people are talking, as if to deflect the music coming from the stage. The women at the front are still moving, but the sexual charge that covered their faces a few minutes before has evaporated. The camera fixes on single faces in the crowd, isolating them, and there's a coldness in the faces, as if they're watching a snuff movie: as if they know they aren't going to like what comes next, but can't turn away.

In this long sequence, nothing is stressed, nothing is glamorized. But two performance scenes in the movie as memorable—scenes as carefully thought through, as carefully made—are crude, overblown, too much, and they are if anything more compelling. That's what Oliver Stone is all about as a director; he's a sensitive thug or he's nothing.

The first is the fire concert. The band is playing in the open air on a stage with Greek-like columns. There's a backdrop of
flames licking up, too bright to be a light show. Off to the side there's a huge bonfire; naked people dance around it. As Kilmer sings, he sees a small, plain, seductive woman at the side of the stage; she glances at him, he glances at her, back and forth as the music goes on, and when Kilmer looks up again her clothes are gone, as if by pagan magic. It's a displacing moment: Kilmer glimpses that the forces he has unleashed are simply mouths, a maw without a brain; it wants to eat, it doesn't care what.

The scene was shot at a water temple south of San Francisco: a beautiful, ghostly spot on a long, straight, unlit two-lane mountain road. High school kids went there to drink beer, sing songs, to see if our cars could hit a hundred, six car radios tuned to the same station in the parking lot. There never was a Doors concert there, but what Oliver Stone staged was the concert both the place and the band always wanted. It offers a sense of what the Doors' music contained, and what they had to pull back from with “Touch Me” and “Hello, I Love You”: annihilation.

This is a sequence that trumpets noise; the second points from noise to silence. The setting is the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami in 1969, the show that all but ended the band's career, when in self-hatred and hatred of his audience, Morrison tried to think of some final rule to break, some final humiliation, and so, more like a confused little boy than a dirty old man in a public park, exposed himself. The silence Stone got contains the noise that Dave DiMartino, in 1969 a teenager in the Dinner Key crowd, writing twelve years after the fact, describes best: “Phrases remain. Morrison screaming ‘THERE ARE NO RULES!' and exhorting those in the ‘cheap seats' to rush the stage; after a lengthy pause, the band
breaking into ‘Touch Me,' which Morrison sang maybe three lines of before screaming ‘STOP!' and telling us that the song sucked and that Robbie Krieger wrote it . . . But what I remember above all was the feeling that anything could have happened that night, that Jim Morrison could have died when he dived into the audience at the show's end, that the people in the cheap seats could have trampled those in the more expensive ones and made the Who-in-Cincinnati no big deal years later. The show might have gone on forever, the rest of the band could have quit, right there, onstage. If Morrison had passed out, we might have cheered—part spectators in the Roman colosseum Morrison imagined himself in, part voyeurs, excited and gleeful at the man exposing more of himself than what was in his pants. We simply watched, most of us, and felt the man doing the things we'd like to do and saying the things we always wanted to say.”

Oliver Stone puts this on the screen. And then, in the midst of the chaos—with fans leaping naked or clothed on the stage and the stage still seemingly containing more police than fans, the band playing on as if a fight has broken out in the crowd rather than at their feet, then stopping, Kilmer going to pieces but still convincing you his Morrison is saying exactly what he means, the noise and fear and darkness and spotlights making a fire far uglier than anything in the fireworks at the water temple—everything stops. The show goes on, the band plays, the crowd leaps and screams, but there is nothing to hear. It's a moment of complete suspension; Jim Morrison's first, public death. No one else can see it, no one else on the stage or in the audience can hear the absence of all sound hammering in Val Kilmer's rough, bearded face. Anything could have happened, DiMartino wrote, including this: a conjuring,
an arrival, of nothing, the show as a vortex that sucked everything into it until there was nothing left behind, a rapture to the void. This is as far as it can go, the movie says, with Kilmer feeling his way through this utopia, this nowhere, in the silence—art, politics, life, death, wish, fear, desire, love and hate. The moment hits not like some defining event in one person's tawdry, finally insignificant life, but as a moment in history.

You could have walked out of Oliver Stone's movie—easy enough to break down, to write off, to write up the next day as junk—with a great echo pounding in your head, an echo you couldn't decipher, an echo with no meaning, only force. It's a good metaphor for a 1960s that in 1991 had no part in the media's Sixties life-support system, that had nothing to do with teenage Deadheads going to see the Grateful Dead. If, as the bumper stickers said then, THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GRATEFUL DEAD CONCERT, this isn't what it wasn't like. The echo of that suspended moment is an enormous, thudding silence, the bang the world doesn't end with, and that was, for some, precisely what the world felt like after the show ended, the show of the concert, the show of the times.

It's this silence, this almost physical sense of an absence, that as culture the Sixties bequeathed to the next decades: with all of its stupidities, mysticisms, solipsisms, self-promotions and cons, the sense of a different world. It's a silence that ultimately silences all the endlessly programmed Sixties hits, that mocks their flash. And it's this silence in which
Pump Up the Volume
begins.

A night shot travels over a suburban development. It's 1990, but it could be twenty years later, or forty years earlier: the setting is straight from any number of 1950s or '60s movies about
the Trouble in Suburbia, mainly adultery and alcoholism for the parents, shoplifting and hot rods for the kids. Here, in Paradise Hills, Arizona, it's lights out. There aren't even crickets. In the first line of the movie, a disembodied voice-over from Christian Slater, there's a question: “Did you ever get the feeling that everything in the United States is completely fucked up? You know that feeling that the whole country is like one inch away from saying, that's it, forget it?”