[Im Hoon-gu's Philmusic] Jim Morrison and the Movie 'The Doors'

Poet Rocker Who Opened the Door of Existence and Escaped Reality

[Asia Economy Reporter Im Hoon-gu]

The year 1967 is recorded as the most brilliant year in rock music history. The Beatles released their ambitious work Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jimi Hendrix debuted with Are You Experienced?, and rock music’s iconoclasts Frank Zappa and Lou Reed formed groups and released Absolutely Free and Velvet Underground & Nico, creating new rock music in a direction completely opposite to the Beatles. In terms of cinema, it was as if Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo all came out in the same year.

And the melancholic Jim Morrison formed The Doors and released their self-titled debut album. Morrison, along with Robbie Krieger (guitar), Ray Manzarek (organ), and John Densmore (drums), formed a four-member rock band that was at the center of the hippie movement, anti-war protests, and revolutionary rock music shaking America at the time. However, unlike the hippie movement that only preached love and peace, Morrison showed a different side. He sang of hatred instead of love, violence instead of peace, resisting reality.

As a child, he was deeply immersed in Nietzsche and Rimbaud. He majored in film at UCLA and wrote screenplays (Francis Ford Coppola and Ha Kil-jong were his college classmates). He was also a poet. The secret of The Doors’ dark and heavy psychedelic rock music lies in his vocals and lyrics. Rather than singing, he seems to recite poetry or cast spells. His music, which denies reality and rejects authority, rushes toward an intended failure or predetermined frustration. At the peak of his popularity, he disbanded the group and flew away to Rimbaud’s land as if escaping, meeting a mysterious death.

After his death, Hollywood eagerly planned a film. His life, more cinematic than any movie, was an excellent subject for directors. Brian De Palma wanted to make a film starring John Travolta but was rejected. David Lynch, Philip Kaufman, and Martin Scorsese were mentioned, but the final choice was Oliver Stone. Rising in fame with Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, Stone was creatively exhausted while filming the Kennedy assassination movie JFK.

Director Stone cast Val Kilmer as the lead and began filming The Doors (1991). He finished shooting in just three months. He filmed the movie as if Morrison were singing. Ignoring film grammar and shooting freely, the film received harsh criticism. Because it was simultaneously shot with eight cameras at once and edited in one go, some scenes show the opposite camera, and even the boom microphone used for recording is visible. Stone didn’t care. He just let Kilmer run wild. The result was astonishing. Kilmer looked just like Morrison. Without this approach, how else could one show the life of a musician who opened the door to an era and escaped reality?

“The time to hesitate is over / No time to wallow in the mud / It’s only defeat anyway / Our love becomes a pile of firewood for burning / Come on / Light my fire / Set this night on fire” (from “Light My Fire”) Editor-in-chief keygrip@