by Greil Marcus
Looking at the Berlin Wall falling in 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay–cum–New Yorker cartoon “The End of History,” announcing that no longer would humanity be troubled by possibilities of change outside of fashion; to his children he bequeathed a life of peace, quiet, and acceptance. Neil Young, a member of Buffalo Springfield when they made “For What It’s Worth,” watched the same event and recorded a song called “Rockin’ in the Free World.” He already had a long road of oddness behind him. Depending on when you looked, he was addled, confused, quaint, and again and again, someone you hadn’t heard before. He’d pretended to be an Indian; he’d said positive, mysterious things about Charles Manson. He wrote and sang “Ohio,” a song about the shooting of students at Kent State in 1970 as thrilling as it was bitter; endorsing Reagan in 1984, he’d said, “You can’t always support the weak. You’ve got to make the weak stand up on one leg, half a leg, whatever they’ve got.” “Rockin’ in the Free World” was a statement he apparently felt was so crucial he recorded and released it twice, acoustic and electric, live and in the studio, in order to say that the free world was turning its back on freedom.
In the 1989 acoustic version, the audience is as present in the sound as the singer, violently ignoring the singer’s every violent denunciation of what his country has come to. As Young sings about a dead crack baby “who’ll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool”—if those lines aren’t rock ’n’ roll, what is?—the people in the crowd cheer, yell, stomp, raise fists, pump arms in the air: Free World! Alright! We won! They’re so excited that this Sixties person is right there, in the flesh: they can tell someone they saw him before he died. The audience sounds as if it’s tossing a beach ball back and forth as the guy on stage sings about the death of all he holds dear.
It feels terrible; it feels fine. The sound from the stage and the sound from the crowd say that for one interesting public person, nothing has been settled. That he’s standing in front of a big crowd playing an acoustic guitar to sing his song for people who are oblivious to what he has to say suggests that someday he might be standing on a corner with a guitar case open at his feet. It’s a promise that he’ll always shout, even if his shout won’t be heard, a promise that an unheard shout is its own power principle, precisely because in the world of pop culture what isn’t heard doesn’t exist. That shout is the tree falling unheard and thus the tree that never fell, until, years later, the echo shakes the world like an earthquake. Young acts out this paradox: he performs as a Sixties relic who is not a relic, whose best music is at once behind him and yet to be made. He insists it is still his place to describe history, to name it a betrayal and declare himself unsatisfied.
That is Oliver Stone with The Doors. Stone was in his mid-forties when he made the picture. Behind him were Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, all of them overstated, overplayed, overdone, powerful. He was a man obsessed with his place in history, and obsessed with proving to himself and to the world that he was part of it. He enlisted in the Army to fight in Vietnam because he was afraid he might miss it—that he might, in words the critic Leslie Fiedler wrote about the 1930s, miss “the mythic life of his generation.” 4 For Stone the past is present. He wasn’t there to see what the Doors did back in the 1960s, when they, his movie says, acted out the mythic life of their generation; he heard their music twisted by history, heard it on Armed Forces Radio and on bootleg tapes in Vietnam. The film is a denial that he missed it, a denial so loud it says one thing: I didn’t miss it, but you did.
That was the feeling in the ad campaign, with terribly hokey lines cut into radio spots over background Doors music: first the somber “The ceremony is about to begin,” then the call to action, “We’ve gotta make the myths!” That was the feeling in the interviews Stone gave to promote the film. “What does this movie have to say to a ’90s audience?” he asked himself in one, and he answered himself: “Freedom. Now. It once existed . . . But there’s a religious fundamentalism returning to this country. And people like me are going to be bonfires.” It was a heroic act to make this movie, he wanted you to understand; he was willing to be martyred for it. Six dollars and you could watch. The movie should have been awful. Instead it was terrifying.
My wife and I stood in line with scores of people in their teens and twenties. We felt cast out of time, waiting with people who seemingly wanted to claim as more theirs than ours what we’d once gone to see every weekend. I wondered why they had no culture of their own to rebuke us with. I felt the Sixties I hate: something unnamable, like the last unkillable remnants of a disease, a virus with no antidote, a disease of “Freedom . . . It once existed.” A disease of freedom then, cursing new generations not with their own St. Vitus’s Dance, some horrible new upheaval, but with a kind of cultural apathy, a sleeping sickness. What does it mean to pay to watch other people be free? What does it mean to pay to watch dead people be free? “All the National Lampoon parodies of the alternative culture have come true,” Elvis Costello said in an interview published the same month The Doors was released. “Now you really can get ’60s Golden Protest Favorites, a historical view which completely distorts that time. When you were 15 or 16 it was an enormously exciting time, and reading the magazines then you were really believing the sense that there was gonna be a revolution in ’68, and then this moment of it ‘not happening.’ Now there’s the ‘approved’ version, which is that it was some kind of nice outing people went through and then didn’t so much wise up as start feeling sorry for themselves during the Carter administration, and then got embittered and self-serving during the Reagan administration. These historical vandals are changing history, putting spin control on it even before it’s finished.” Reading the reviews, you couldn’t have expected anything different from Oliver Stone.
All I remembered of the Doors—all I remembered from the hundreds of times I played their first album, from the few times I played the ones after that, from the dozen times I saw them on stage—was the complex and twisting thrill of being taken out of myself. It was a sensation captured by Ian McEwan in The Innocent, a novel that ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in lines about what a young man felt in Berlin more than thirty years before, when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” when the song “spoke only of loneliness and despair. Its melody was all stealth, its gloom comically overstated . . . The song’s self-pity should have been hilarious. Instead it made Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow.”
This isn’t simply shown in Oliver Stone’s movie; it isn’t merely recorded, memorialized, wrapped up and presented to you in a neat package with a greeting card reading “Freedom . . . It once existed . . . Wish you’d been here.” It isn’t presented. It happens.
It happens in a nightclub when the Doors’ music is still inches away from them; it happens in concert sequences when Jim Morrison is a star whose best music is seemingly behind him, has been fixed—when, like the movie that exists in its ads rather than on the screen, the Doors were little more than an outfit selling a myth of freedom that already imprisoned them, imprisoned them as a pop group whose only recognized, concrete social role was to get one more hit.
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 Monke
es 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 ab
ove 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.”
