It was with slight curiosity that I received from Jim Morrison's own hand a film magazine edited in New York by Jonas Mekas which contained an article: Notes on the Auteur Theory. I read every line of it and handed it back to him with a great deal of amusement. “Listen, Jimbo, what Andrew Sarris doesn't understand is that he's not the only one who watched films on television between 1950 and 1959. I saw them, too, in that period when I was in Pasadena, California. And I have a very different reaction to them.” “A lot of those directors had been short changed by Establishment Film Critics,” said Jim. But what I'm getting at is that Sarris didn't write about these obscure directors back in the early Fifties because he didn't have a theory for them. It's the French that provided him with one called the auteur theory. And when he got it, he very conveniently discarded what didn't fit it. Once he thought that Odd Man Out (1947) was the greatest film ever made. Then he dumped on it because the French didn't like it. “Odd Man Out actually is one of the greatest pictures ever made,” Morrison asserted. “But what's this theory all about, Jimbo?” I ticked it off on my fingers, “the myth of individualism. At bottom, all this French stuff is actually Cartesianism, formal non-contradictory logic.”
At the start of modern feminism, 1968 or ’69, Morrison may have read Germaine Greer’s or Kate Millet’s books. “You gotta understand,” he said, “the women around here seem cheerleaders and the men voyeurs.” “Venice West?” I asked. “No. I mean the West in general. What we got in California is the remains of a frontier experience.” Jim continued: “In America, women like to preen, like in the film Duel In The Sun. Consequently the Jennifer Jones character is a kind of exhibitionist. Men, on the other hand, recede into the darkness. The relationship between the sexes in this Golden State is that of a peep show. Think about it. It’s the beginning of a Matriarchy.” Jim grew silent and moody again. At that point he wanted to find his Ariadne.
“Phosphenes!” said Jim in wonder. “Miniaturize a cathode ray camera into the 'magical spectacles' of Tales of Hoffman and with the simple expedient of inserting fiber optic wires into the man's brain these phosphenes could illuminate the three dimensional coordinates of objects and energies in the so-called 'real' world.” Jim then added: “Ever read Lewis Thomas? There's a book called The Lives Of A Cell; it says, in effect, that we live by light; snatching electrons at the precise moment of excitation by the attraction/repulsion of solar photons, snatching off the energy released at each leap and storing it up like a living battery. Quite a job to sustain this work for, say, a couple of billion years without being prone to chaotic drift and randomness. He claims it is nearly a mathematical impossibility. They say God is dead, so how did this happen?” I was silent at this barrage of facts. His face was deep in thought. “Do you know when education ended in this Country? Some say it was in 1912. That's when the American Educational Association formally renounced the teaching of the Classics as the mainspring in Secondary Schools. I guess John Dewey took over. And then behaviorism. John Watson, the first behaviorist, went into Advertising,” Jim explained, nodding in the direction of the Film School beyond Westwood Village. “Somebody said, 'This isn't a film school, it’s a division of neuropsychiatric.' Trouble with that place is nobody was crazy enough. You go through a realm of despondency, darkness and madness, and it builds to an unendurable climax.” “Most of people gets bought and paid-for in the end,” I finally admitted. “Think so?,” countered Jim after a while: “If that is true, my price is way too high.” —"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob
Danny Fields had connections to Andy Warhol’s crowd (Edie Sedgwick crashed with him for a while), which helped him get into the back room of the Max’s Kansas City. Fields brought Jim Morrison there, in 1968, an occasion that did not go well. Sedgwick intuited that Warhol’s gayness was incidental. More fundamental was Warhol’s frustrated narcissism, in a permanent state of unfulfilled desire. Warhol invited Jim Morrison a few times to the Factory, but Morrison was not too interested in joining his insane coterie. Warhol looked at Edie Sedgwick and saw Marilyn Monroe. The physical resemblance between Marilyn and Edie was striking, can’t-miss: the eyes that went wide, wider, widest; the smiles that gushed; the skin that glowed palely, pearly. Marilyn and Edie shared, too, an ability to elicit a response from practically anything with a Y chromosome. Marilyn, in words of Pauline Kael “turned on even homosexual men.” Danny Fields, a close friend of Edie’s, testifies, “Being gay was never an impediment to being in love with Edie Sedgwick. She made everybody feel hairy-chested. It was clear that she was the female and you were the male.”
“Edie was incredible on camera—just the way she moved. The great stars are the ones who are doing something you can watch every second, even if it’s just a movement inside their eye.” Andy was a cold man, a man whose fondest dream was automaton-dom (“I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”), yet, you can hear how infatuated he was, how far gone. The deadpan mask had slipped, exposing the human face—warm, eager, heartbreakingly boyish—underneath. Andy loved to watch, and he loved watching Edie best of all. You can feel the pleasure he takes in her most casual gestures and expressions. He adored her.
In Beauty #2 his inquisition is an attempt to strip her bare emotionally, get inside her, penetrate her secret, private place. In other words, it’s a violation, but it’s also an attempt at intimacy, and thus an expression of love. Just as her submission to the violation is an expression of her return of that love. Edie's romance hit its peak during a madcap trip to Paris in April of ‘65. She lost faith in what she and Andy were doing (“These movies are making a complete fool out of me!”) and she’d had her head turned by another guy, Bob Dylan. Andy was actually heartbroken. He was the odd man out in a love triangle, a bad situation for a normal person, hell for one so terrified of feeling. It’s unclear if Edie and Dylan’s relationship developed into a romance. Allegedly, Edie Sedgwick and Jim Morrison shared hugs and kisses at the Castle in July 1967. Edie would end where she began: Santa Barbara, California. On November 16, 1971, Edie Sedgwick overdosed on barbiturates, same as Marilyn Monroe. Source: www.vanityfair.com
No comments :
Post a Comment