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Essay on Oliver Stones, "The Doors"
Spanning the years 1966 to 1971, The Doors is Oliver Stone's interpretation of the life, death, and passion of the rock group The Doors' lead singer, Jim Morrison. Carolco Company approached Stone to direct a filmed version of The Doors after having bought the rights to the band's story and music. Stone agreed to the project as long as he could both write and direct the film. Financed with a $30 million budget, Stone's version of The Doors is ostensibly Jim Morrison's story. It begins with Morrison's youth, when he was a film student at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), moves through his development as a singer-songwriter, when, along with Ray Manzarek, he formed the group The Doors, covers the group's rapid rise to fame, and documents Morrison's self-destruction through drugs and alcohol until his death from an overdose in a Paris flat in 1971.
Stone's interest in the project may have stemmed from his fascination and strong identification with Morrison. Stone, in his own words, considered Morrison "a shaman," explaining, "He was a god for me, a Dionysian figure, a poet, a philosopher."
Like Chris Taylor of Platoon and Ron Kovic of Born on the Fourth of July, Jim Morrison suffers the confusion arising from an unending war, experienced this time not from within a combat platoon but from the stage of a rebellious rock concert arena." However, despite the disillusionment of the Vietnam era, according to The Doors, Morrison, like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and others, represented society's continued searching half cynically and half hopefully for a new Eden, a restored Camelot, a cleansed vision that would allow Americans to "see things as they truly were," instead of "through a glass darkly." (Jim Curtis, 1987)
From the perspective of perennial philosophy, The Doors' Jim Morrison represents the prototypical.....
