Before Todd Haynes on The Velvet Underground, there was Tom DiCillo on The Doors, in the form of 2009's newly revived When You're Strange. It comes as something of a surprise to discover that the indie spirit behind 1995's no-bullshit Living in Oblivion was this into a group like The Doors (man), but it's nothing compared to the disappointment this viewer felt upon witnessing a filmmaker proceeding to guzzle down several quarts of Morrison-brand Kool Aid. To quote Johnny Depp's low-energy, too-cool-slash-hungover-for-school narration: "Morrison is both innocent and profane... a rock 'n' roll poet... dangerous and yet highly intelligent. No-one has had this exact combination before." Well. Tempted as one is to blow immediate and deafeningly loud raspberries at all of the above, let me instead be generous and concede that Strange is probably the best film that anybody could make about a band that would otherwise only have endured in the form of student-dorm posters and a mockable Oliver Stone movie. Set against the documentaries of many hours made about The Beatles, Dylan, even Status Quo, these 85 minutes really do tell you all you need to know about The Doors. Between all the grainy archive footage you could ever hope to see of the band noodling away in concert, DiCillo makes a few choices of his own. These are mostly montages of Seventies nipples and bushes, and a framing device recreation of beardy hitchhikers racing into the desert upon hearing of Morrison's passing; the (hardly watertight) idea is that this narrative was always speeding this way, that Morrison's career trajectory was only ever a death drive. Not for the last time here, we run up against a fundamentally po-faced, humourless, late-adolescent idea of pop, and there's only so much a motion picture can do with it.
A litmus test is provided early on, with a snapshot of the Billboard chart that saw "Light My Fire" (6'30" in its original cut!) installed at #1 when The Association's in every sense preferable "Windy" (2'54", ironically) was at #3. Come out on the wrong side of that juxtaposition, and you can only snort at such soundbites as drummer John Densmore's claim that The Doors were exactly the right band to combine rock 'n' roll with jazz (as if rock 'n' roll wasn't enough in itself), and the revelation that Morrison's Lizard King poem was originally going to occupy the entire first side of an album, until the label bosses intervened. (The Doors: a band so awful they have you siding with management.) Mostly, it's the usual goggle-eyed tripe about Morrison being a poet-messiah-Lizard King-godhead, barely stopping to examine the copious hints he might also have been a grotesquely indulged, barely sober bore with a most Sixties tendency to treat women offhandedly at best. (A reminder: your narrator for the evening is Mr. Johnny Depp.) The performative controversies are duly noted, inviting interpretation as either proof of anti-establishment credentials or the kind of shock tactics bands resort to so as to distract from the tedium of the songs: the F-word that got them fired as Whisky A Go Go's houseband, the singing of the word "higher" on primetime TV, Jim getting his winky out to stick it to The Man. I feel obliged to point out there were bands from around this time and place - the Beach Boys and the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas and the Monkees, Thunderclap Newman and The Lovin' Spoonful - who were unabashedly pop, devoid of comparable pretension, and who would be a whole lot more fun to listen to and learn about. Move on, boomers. Move on.
When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors is now showing in selected cinemas.
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