DVD “The Doors” bought from secondspin.com, as recommended by my Tsinghua classmate Mr. Dianarose, who is claimed to be a Doors fan since high school, ruined my Friday night peace.
What can I say? I’m supposed to say something instead of sitting back into my own deep silence…
There are a few moments in life when those lumbersome topics like death, desperate love, and unbreakable solitude block right on your way, force you to answer or to escape. This moment stunned me there for a short while, but as his fortune or misfortune, it certainly traced Jim Douglas Morrison, front role of The Doors, with this movie as largely his personal biography, for life long.
I stood up to make myself a yogurt drink with melted green tea powder, which was supposed to be healthy and nutrient as bedtime drink. A sudden absurdity revealed in the surroundings made me feel like laughing. Saggy drizzling Friday night, lavender bath, clay mask, green tea… isn’t that more a setting for something entertaining like “Sex and the City”? Why does mankind pondering on things detached from daily happy life like hurts and death? Why the question of “How do you know you are alive” to humbly living people never ceased?
As an abstemious fan of the Doors, science worker with logic and ration, I have listened to certain portion of their music, and known the story of Jim already pretty well. The movie startled me in the way of bringing up those questions all together again and suggesting possibilities of no-solution. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” The inherent young poet Jim with hope and ideals, the doors as possibility leading to enormous unknowns, ended up with not savior but individual legend and tragic hero. Chaos is the dropscene of effort for cleansing. Is that the destiny of those ingenious individuals, who doubted for us philistines and stood up for us questioning, to be cursed and forsaken?
My favorite song “riders on the storm” was put as opening credits in the movie, as a coincidence. To me it was like a tentative and vulnerable touch to the strange world, probably inspired by Munch’s “screamer” or “the murder on the avenue”. In the movie it was used to image Jim’s childhood, moving, isolated, haunted by conceiving of Shaman, the Indian magician standing with one’s soul. Popular “Light my fire”, “break on through” and “The end” appeared couple of times in different scenarios, and actually in the movie, the latter helped itself out of commercial prejudice and returned to its poetic nature. The ending credit “Roadhouse blues” is another of my favorites: revelry on half way, “the future is uncertain, and the end is always clear…” no metaphor, more direct theme than that in “The end”. If the first song was by a poet, the last was really by a rock star lost in alcohol and vanity, which was probably, a perfect interpretation of the life of our hero.
The only non-doors song in the movie, if I was not wrong, was The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”, as background music of chaotic Andy Warhol party, witness of Jim’s early drug experience and his coitus with Nico, transient VU female vocal. I viewed it as a certain tribute to that historically remarkable band. History is the most interesting haunting monster. With Nico born in Prague, the Velvets played an important role in Czech’s way of striving for artistic freedom and democracy. The band and the very song had been banned by then Czech communist government time after time. (As a side observation, I heard Faye Wong was forced to delete one song from her new album when it was distributed in mainland China, because that song contained the sensitive word “morphine”…) Several years after Jim’s death, the 4 members of the band were put in prison in Plague under the name of “disturbing the peace”, which actually became a trigger of Czech’s dissident movement and lead to a democratic government with Vaclav Havel, liberal writer, fascinating fan of VU and strongest advocator for their freedom, as the first elected and so called “Velvet President”.
Certain intrinsic features in revolution and rock&roll can always be in advertence. Every real rock star is a potential politician in the way that exploration towards one’s inner world – consciousness and sub-consciousness, will inevitably explode out as disbelief and desperation to this reality world. As Morrison declaimed to public: “we sing… death, love, and revolt…” Yeah, revolt… ‘cause freedom is even beyond the domain of love. Yet the same legend of the Velvets of music as a breakthrough to a new world will not befall on The Doors. The United States, even United States in the sixties, has been already a too free thus too elastically stable world, which absorbs and dissolves everything including revolution. It was no wonder that Jim’s most courageous sabotage was only public exposure. It was no wonder that this group of sixties, set up hunting for solitude yet retreated to curse the world of solitudes fabricated by themselves,
The trap came from within ourselves… so those young people, who listened to The Doors, screamed and took off tops for them, finally got fitting into business suits, two cars and a big house. They escaped. A few couldn’t. That was how poet and rock start Jim Douglas Morrison, born in a well-fixed Bourgeois family, after reaching for bounds of every aspects of life, alcohol, drug, sex… and not being able to find a refuge, died in his 27. The music was over.
There are certain bounds which define our world and our society, a big assumption which functionalize our happy lives. Jim glimpsed the limits and possibilities, as Einstein cast his eyes beyond Newton’s classicism to a world of relativity. But the efforts trying for infinity ended up with getting singularity – the equations are not well defined and you get no solution, if the assumption is broken.
So that’s it, babe. Give me your hand, the life of a contented scientist is ahead of us.
