Rider of the Sky
The late Val Kilmer was unlike any other male heartthrob to emerge from the post-”Brat Pack” era, as he successfully made strange, transgressive performative choices within populist material. Although Tombstone, Top Gun, and even Heat represented the best of what studio filmmaking could look like, Kilmer’s methodical approach to characterization had more in common with Marlon Brando and James Dean than Sylvester Stallone or Emilio Estevez. Kilmer wasn’t given the chance to immerse himself within transgressive cinema until his star wattage had faded in the early-21st century. The one exception is Oliver Stone’s musical biopic The Doors.
Although music biopics have become a mainstay at the American box office in light of the success of Bohemian Rhapsody, A Complete Unknown, and Straight Outta Compton among others, the genre wasn’t absent in the years before The Doors made its debut; Sissy Spacek’s performance as Loretta Lynn in The Coal Miner’s Daughter earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress, and other ripped-from-the-headlines biopics such as Bird, La Bamba, and Sweet Dreams had also been successful. However, to approach a figure like Jim Morrison presented a more difficult feat, as a considerable segment of the population had grown up aware of his presence. There were never biopics of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones for this reason.
What made The Doors an interesting deviation was that Oliver Stone examined Morrison’s life as a moment in history, and not a vapid celebrity “tell-all story.” Stone had courted mainstream favor after his Vietnam films Platoon, Salvador, and Born on the Fourth of July resonated with the American public, despite being released at the height of Reagan-era patriotism. Stone may have found it to intertwine his progressive ideas within narratives that were either fictional (Wall Street) or too obscure to attract any significant pushback (Talk Radio). As evident by the historical inaccuracies within the film, The Doors aimed to capture the essence of Morrison’s character and influence, rather than provide an encapsulation of his most significant accomplishments.
Stone framed Morrison as a dark fulfillment of the American dream, as he was attached to a larger-than-life destiny in the vein of Charles Foster Kane or Michael Corleone. Any suggestion that Stone’s intentions were objective are erased within the opening sequence, in which a young Morrison has an encounter with the spirit of a Native-American wiseman, who seems to have prophesied his spiritual reawakening in Venice Beach. Morrison’s most famous tracks are only briefly touched on: Stone is more fascinated with his infatuation with his self-proclaimed alter-ego, “The Lizard King.”
Kilmer and Stone understood that the rare glimpses of Morrison that the public were aware of represented only a fracture of his true personality, and to simply become his doppelganger would be dramatically inert. Kilmer had broken out with his goofy, self-aware performance as an Elvis Presley-esque rockstar in the spoof Top Secret!, and would later commit the second half of his career to the work of Mark Twain; he was capable of a more authentic portrayal. Kilmer’s version of Morrison was a philosophical daredevil, whose inability to restrain his indulgences was a result of his anti-authoritarian sentiments; Morrison’s death is treated as an inevitability, not a tragedy, as the suggestion is made that he was too ambitious to allow himself to age into irrelevance.
The Doors is an oddly overlooked gem within Stone’s filmography, in large part because it was released within the same calendar year as his defining film. JFK may have played even faster and looser with the facts than The Doors, but Stone’s conspiracy-themed epic ended with an outreach to its viewers; with the confirmation that Kennedy’s death was part of an elaborate plot to impede the will of the American people, Stone ensured that his audience felt as if they were “in the know.” Comparatively, The Doors made no effort to explain Morrison’s motivations, despite the clear suggestion that he was held back by an unimaginative public. Those that loved Morrison’s music may not have wanted to hear that they were part of the problem, and those that were already opposed to what he represented weren’t going to leave the film with any more sympathy for his early demise.
Although The Doors’ intention was to be as uncomfortably confrontational as Morrison, Stone has never denied that he is a dramatist at heart. Morrison’s volatile performance of “The End,” delivered with lewd provocations to the agitated audience of the Whisky a Go Go, is the perfect encapsulation of his ability to conduct the emotions of a crowd. Similarly, a hilarious scene in which Morrison’s refusal to censor himself during a recording of “Light My Fire” on The Ed Sullivan Show used the audience’s knowledge of the musician to create comedic tension.
The rejection of The Doors didn’t harm Kilmer’s career; just a few years later he’d strap on the Batsuit to play Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever. Nevertheless, Kilmer may have made more commercial plays like The Saint and The Island of Dr. Moreau in an attempt to shoehorn subversion into films that audiences were already interested in, as a more adventurous project like The Doors was fated to only suffice a niche crowd. Yet, The Doors has aged as one of the best films within its genre; in the end, Kilmer got the last laugh.