Jim Morrison & the Doors are still one of my favourite groups, and I still find a lot to enjoy, and to think about, in their songs - the nonlinearity and powerful imagery, the simple hypnotic rhythms, the occasional haunting melodies.
When Oliver Stone produced his film of the groups' rise and demise, I was fascinated when I watched it - as someone who was too young to have been there, it seemed to me that he captured the spirit and feeling of the times very vividly, even if he exaggerated the monstrosity of the depravity of Jim in the later stages of his career (as the surviving group members all insist). In some ways, I think - of course he exaggerated it, the whole Doors thing was about the exaggeration of emphasis, and how more appropriate to tell the tale.
Despite the fascination of watching it the first time around, it took me a long time before I brought myself to watch it again, because the end of the story is so ugly, and because the actor (Val Kilmer) did such a spectacular job of providing a charming, empathic, winning picture of Jim in the first two-thirds of the movie, that to watch him fall apart so completely, so self-destructively, was just too painful to sustain.
I seem to have developed a way around this now: I simply stop watching after two-thirds of the movie. A cheat, I suppose, to leave the story incomplete, but I know what's coming, and why suffer through it again? I'm not some neophyte that needs to learn the moral of the tale, after all. (and why watch any of it? well, because it is a lyrical, romantic, winning tale up to that point, and gives me great enjoyment).
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the cross fire of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger,
You legend, you martyr, and shine!
Hmm, I seem to have wandered off course somewhat.
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