When I heard that Tom diCillo (Living in Oblivion) had a documentary on The Doors in competition at Sundance this year, I was very excited.  His 1995 film, Living in Oblivion is a bitterly funny take on the frustrations of independent filmmaking.  More importantly, The Doors was my favorite band in High School - that I believed I’d discovered myself, a few decades after their heyday - and Jim Morrison became something of a personal hero.  I had posters of him on my wall, I had all of the albums, I read No One Here Gets Out Alive and a volume of his poetry, and I even grew my hair out to look like his before he’d grown a serious paunch and facial hair.  I’ve since outgrown this fad, and Ray Manzarek’s organ just doesn’t move me anymore, but who wouldn’t want to go back and relive the exciting moments of teenaged discovery?  

Unfortunately, When You’re Strange is not quite the intoxicating blast from the past I’d hoped it would be. The story the film tells is familiar - in fact there was almost nothing in the film that was not told with much more detail and passion in No One Here Gets Out Alive.  There is some very intriguing footage, some of which I understand has been unpublished until now - and the subject matter held enough interest that I wasn’t bored.  The problem is with the basic structure of the film, organized around the very bland and utterly conventional history-lesson narrative of a fairly unenthusiastic narrator.  

The film starts out strong, with footage I’d never seen before that seems to have been created as a kind of visual accompaniment to one of the storylines from the Doors’ song “Riders on the Storm”: somewhere in the desert there is a car accident, and a bearded Morrison emerges unscathed from a shattered vehicle, hitches a ride, and is later seen driving away in the same vehicle, no longer as passenger.  ”If you give this man a ride sweet memory will die ….”  Janis Joplin on the radio is interrupted then by a real radio broadcast that reports the famous singer Jim Morrison to have died in his bathtub under mysterious circumstances - and then we see an image of a candle going out and a montage of images of The Doors in reverse: what follows, clearly, will explore what happened and why this unique talent had died at such a young age.  

The problem is that what follows is not so much an exploration of a mystery as an explanation of a history.  A narrator (Tom di Cillo himself? I didn’t stay through the credits to be sure), tells the story of the life of young Jim Morrison, passing quickly through his childhood, as a voracious reader and Elvis Presley fan, to the point where he meets Ray Manzarek when they were both studying at the UCLA film school and they decided to form a band.  The filmmakers clearly had access to a wealth of footage and images, both of The Doors and of culture and events in the 60’s and 70’s.  What surprised me is that they didn’t use these images to tell the story, but merely to illustrate the words, to the point that in many cases the words seemed redundant or simplistic.  He describes the music as unique and strange and unfamiliar, rather than showing it to be.  In a discussion of the infamous concert that led to Morrison’s indictment for indecent exposure, the film shows footage of his walking through the crowd and chatting with the audience casually before going on stage, and the narrator explains (roughly): “Before the concert, he walks through the crowd, showing no fear … it is difficult to tell if he is giving something to the crowds or if he needs them, drawing emotional strength from their adulation.”  

About halfway through the film I began to wonder who was its intended audience - given the ability of the narrator to sap the life out of the mystery of Jim Morrison and the band precisely by explaining that and how their music and message were strange and unique, I wondered if the aim might be simply to clarify to those who never “got it, that, The Doors were an important band, and that their meteoric rise and downfall was something of a microcosm of the social changes around them.  The film is not quite a puff piece, and I appreciated that it worked hard to show that Jim Morrison had flaws and that he owed a good deal of his success to the ability of the rest of the band to support him.  One thing I did learn from the film was that the characteristic meandering style of some of the band’s longer songs (like “LA Woman” and “The End”) really developed from the band’s need to fill the empty spaces when Morrison was too drunk to keep going, and to build up musical momentum in a way that would excite him and get him back on track.  

In many ways this review may seem harsh - if the film had a different subject that could best be elaborated by a historical narration, then the approach of this film might be perfectly legitimate.  But to explain (repeatedly) that the strange really was strange, to point out that the revolutionary really was revolutionary, is to presume that the material has lost its life, and can no longer convey its own power.  The film ends on a joke, of sorts, with the narrator pointing out that (unlike many of their contemporary bands) none of The Doors’ songs ever became a car commercial: unlike many of their contemporaries, I guess, The Doors never sold out…  But when they’ve been packaged like this, with their allure and their ups and downs explained so neatly, does it really matter whether they sold themselves out?

Tags: doors, living in oblivion, rock, tom dicillo

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 12:56 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.