Horse Girl, Mental Illness, Straight Whisky

Alison Brie’s Sarah in Horse Girl (2020) is an intriguing part for her. Effortlessly empathetic, Brie has always had an interesting presence, and no matter how crazy her character gets throughout, she never loses our sympathy. Rather, it’s an occasionally frightening look at what it's like to have your sense of reality slowly snatched away from you, where, to a certain extent, you know you’re losing it but can’t help but go down the rabbit hole. Beana does something interesting by taking us right into Sarah’s mindset. From the start, we know she’s an oddball, spending all of her nights at home obsessing over a cheesy drama called Purgatory. We know she’s sick, and in a daring move, for the last act, we experience the world wholly through Sarah’s fractured perspective, a unique approach to dealing with mental illness that has an unsettling, open-ended effect. As a result, the movie takes on a surreal, dream-like quality, bordering on sci-fi. Overall, it works pretty well, even if the occasional surreal touches from the perspective of other characters feel a bit out of place, as if they couldn't make up their mind whether they were making a serious film about mental illness or a surreal, David Lynch-style mindf*ck. Composers Josiah Steinbrick and Jeremy Zuckerman help build the bizarre tone of the film. Shimmering music matches tender moments. Droning sounds match Sarah's dream sequences. Elements of her mind bleed into each other illogically, which is visualized by editor Ryan Brown's experimentation to portray the way her mind works: subtle cuts and slow dissolve transitions create time and space lapses; ominous sound edits portend her deteriorating mental state. The final scene elicits more than one interpretation, and viewers can find closure in the established ambiguity, but they won't experience a neatly tied-up ending -- just as lingering mental illness will not offer a clear resolution. Source: www.popmatters.com

Interpretation by Imdb user Palange Music: It seems that many people think it's about mental illness, but there is one detail that they seem to overlook in the very beginning. If you watch the first few minutes, when they are talking about ancestry-like dna tests, you will notice that when the conversation concludes, Sarah walks away and Joan notices out the window that there is a horse in the parking lot - she catches just a quick glimpse of it and makes a strange face (about 2:30 into the film). At the end of the film when Sarah is walking her horse (which she took without permission) she walks past the shop and it shows the exact same frame and Joan's reaction to the horse being in the parking lot (1 hour 35 minutes approximately). If you look closely the same cars are in the parking lot and you can also see Sarah standing with Joan proving this is intended to be the same scene as the one in the beginning. This would mean she actually did jump back in time. To me this proves that she is not crazy and that it was intended to be a science-fiction film (time travel/aliens or unknown creatures, etc.) Source: www.imdb.com

In his essay “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” Greil Marcus writes of Jim Morrison, “Here’s this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.” As usual with Marcus we are not entirely sure what that means. One of the most infamous onstage jams was the fleeting union between Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison on stage at hip New York club Steve Paul’s The Scene in the spring of 1968, while Janis Joplin looked on. Peace and love wasn’t on the agenda when what should have been a supreme meeting of minds disintegrated into a chaotic brawl that ended with Joplin smashing a bottle on Morrison’s head. It sounds like Janis Joplin was just lying in wait because she felt Jim was being rude to Jimi Hendrix. Obviously Morrison could be crude, weird and obnoxious, but this just sounds like typical drunken stupidity on the part of all parties involved.

Danny Fields (publicist, Elektra Records): I was working for Elektra, which meant I was working for Jim Morrison, but he and I didn’t get along. I knew Jim was at The Scene that night, and Jimi Hendrix was always there. And I was a teenage boy who worshipped Janis, so I knew she was there as well. Janis’s hatred of Morrison, I don’t know where it started. But if you mentioned Jim’s name she would say: “That asshole.” She was not going to put up with what she thought was his childish behaviour, wherever she encountered it. Janis stepped on the stage and hit Jim over the head with the bottle, then she poured her drink over him. The three of them, Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix, started grabbing and rolling all over the floor in a writhing heap of hysteria. They were in a tangle of broken glass, dust and guitars. Naturally it ended up in all three of them being carried out. Morrison had been sending off danger signals from the moment he got there. He was behaving like someone from the sewers. Morrison was the most seriously hurt. Source: www.amazon.com

Dawn’s Highway (2019), a short story by Jim Cherry:

A phone booth stands alone, empty in the Los Angeles night, its dull plastic light an island, in the sea of neon fused darkness. a car pulls up to the curb and a lone figure gets out. The car pulls away, the figure walks to the phone booth closing the door behind him. The inside light pops on illuminating him, a silhouette in relief against the night. He takes a dime out of his black jeans, and picks up the receiver, he puts the dime in the coin slot, waiting for the dial tone. As the phone rang on the other end, his girlfriend picks it up. “Yeah, it’s me,” he says, his voice a soft conspiratorial whisper, “we just got back into town tonight.” Jim was walking down Sunset Boulevard, he’d been wearing the same clothes for the last couple of days, black jeans, t-shirt, boots, a dark welder’s jacket. His pants still had some remnants of desert sand in the creases and folds, he had other reminders of the desert as well, the cuts and bruises on his face. It had only been six months since he’d come down off of Dennis Jacobs roof, where he’d subsisted on acid. Under the summer sun he burned away a lot of ideas of himself and while the rest of the city slept he took notes at a fantastic rock concert in his mind, as he wrote down the songs he heard. No one, not even his friends had understood that. Most of the time, they only saw the Jim they wanted to see, the Jim they expected. A police cruiser drove past, one of the cops was looking at him, suddenly it screeched to a halt and the cops jumped out. “Are you Jim Morrison?” “Yeah,” Jim said defiantly, “who wants to know?” The cops pushed him against the wall of the nearest building and pat him down before handcuffing and putting him in the back of the cruiser. The cops hustled him through the police station and they threw him into an interrogation room, his hands still cuffed in front of him. Jim understood the game they were going to run on him and wondered which would play the good cop, and which would play the bad cop. “I’m officer Ellison and this is officer Hanson, we’re the investigating officers.” The suit jacketed cop said. “Investigating what?” “Do you know the whereabouts of one Phillip O’Leno?” Hanson asked, taking the lead. “Not really.” “He’s missing, we think he may have been killed.” “What makes you think I had anything to do with it?” The cop stared at Jim hoping the silence would intimidate Jim. Jim returned the stare. “Where’d you get all those bruises from?” “Some bikers didn’t like our long hair.” “Do you have a job?” Ellison asked in a softer tone, trying to break through the barriers Jim had up. “No.” “What do you do for a living, son?” Jim thought a moment, considering the audience. “Nothing you’d understand.” “We really don’t care about you kissing some Mexican girl,” Hanson said with a look of mild distaste on his face. “Why don’t you just tell us what happened out in the desert son?” Smiling, Jim asked, “What if life is nothing more than an act of remembering?” The cops looked at each other, perplexed by the question. “What if we’re dead already and just remembering this?” The two cops just looked at each other, “What if we’re just sitting around remembering life and telling each other our stories?” “What’re you talking about son?” “You know, like Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, Carousel.”

Flashback: “Manzarek isn’t like you, he isn’t a poet, he’s a capitalist, he wants fame, money, power.” Jim remembered Felix Venable's words. “Felix, since you're not going to let me drive,” Jim said, “wake me when we get somewhere,” as he lay down in the backseat. The car pulled up in front of a roadside bar, it was a sun bleached, weather-beaten wooden building with a porch running across the front, there were some motorcycles parked off to the side of the building. “Wake up Jim, we’re here!” “Where?” “Somewhere.” Felix said. They went inside, it was cool, quiet and dark, despite the soft moaning of the jukebox. The bar ran the length of one wall, a little farther in and across from it was a pool table, sitting at a table were five bikers with their girlfriends. All the guys were dressed in leather jackets, white t-shirt, jeans, and biker boots. The girls were all dressed in low cut flowery blouses and tight pants. They all watched as the outsiders came in, Jim was the first to get to the bar. “What can I get for you?” The bartender asked. “Beer, por favor,” Jim said, smiling broadly. “We’re on a mission of discovery,” Jim chimed in smoothly, “looking for a new world.” “A new world?” the biker said, “you mean a new world like when Europeans came here and killed our ancestors?” “No, it’s like space, but instead of going outwards we want to go inward.” “You college boys are tourists slumming, looking to get high.” Phil and Felix turned to their beers, While Jim looked around taking in the surroundings trying to memorize everything about the place, he caught the eye of one of the girls. Her blouse was low-cut and there was the undulation across the top of her breasts as she walked, came up to the bar, ostensibly to get a drink. She sidled up next to Jim, and he started talking to her. The bikers started to notice and get agitated, the talking amongst themselves grew louder. Phil was the first to notice and leaned over to Jim, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea Jim.” “Why not?” “Well, for one,” Phil said, “you almost got us busted in L.A. when you jumped out of the car and kissed that chick.” “Phil,” Jim said innocently, “she was a beautiful angel, and I just thought I’d break the ice.” “That’s beside the point Jim, all those guys over there are getting upset.” Jim looked over at them, and roared, “Well, fuck them!” The bikers all stopped talking and the leader walked over to Jim. “You like my girlfriend, gringo?” “Who says she’s yours?” Jim questioned. “We’ll see who she leaves with.” “You like girls?” the biker confronted him. “Why? You want to fuck me?” Jim said in a mocking tone. “More like fuck you up.” The biker punched Jim, Felix jumped up and blindsided the biker and then there was an explosion of sound, as chairs crashed to the floor, and the bikers jumped on them. The bartender started yelling, “You’re not going to break up my bar!” Jim, Felix, and Phil jumped into the car, the tires spinning out a cloud of dust and rock in their wake. Jim was thoughtful and he didn’t want to expose himself, Phil would understand, but Felix would think him naïve and mock him. “I want to live a life without regret.” “You think that is possible?” the shaman asked, “for every choice you make you may later mourn what you’ve lost or suffer what you’ve gained.” 

Jim didn’t know what to say, ever since he could remember he knew what answers a teacher was looking for. He knew which buttons to push to impress a school teacher. The shaman said, “You can’t expect knowledge to be given to you.” “Why not?” “Knowledge is power you have to earn it and if you risk not using it wisely, it can destroy you.” “What will happen when we take the peyote?” Jim asked. “It will change the way you see the world.” “How?” Phil asked. “Each of you differently, what you fear is out there but you will also find the greatest joy.” “And afterwards?” Jim asked. “You will awake on dawn’s highway,” the shaman said, pointing towards the road. “What’s at the end of this dawn’s highway?” “No one knows what’s at the end of the highway, madness or bliss.” Jim looked enthralled for the adventure, Phil, hesitant, not sure if this was a trip he really wanted to go on. Jim looked to the sky, it was dark, and the moon was full and bright and held dominion over the desert. The music throbbed, he looked around and saw the concert in his head, clearer than he ever had. The scene was bent, curved, as if he looking through some other lens, there was a sea of people. The music pulsated through his body, it was scintillating, a scream came ripping through the atmosphere and he realized it was from him. Out of the darkness he saw a silvery spiderweb, he felt the prickling of fear at the edge of his consciousness, then some silvery nails pushed down out of the darkness and he knew he was in a coffin, he told himself not to be afraid if he let the fear in it he couldn't return from his trip. “What about all those aphorisms you’re always spouting from Nietzsche and Rimbaud? Aren’t those your rules?” “I’m beyond that, man. Nietzsche and Rimbaud are just signposts in the wilderness, they tell me I’m on the right trail.” He is already missing the horizon, thinking they should have lingered on the beach. They are in West Hollywood now. Vegetation contending with sidewalks, palms leaning in over cornices. Billboards obstreperous, affronting the senses. “Nietzsche gave us Zarathustra. And then the lights went out. He went mad.” Jim looks now over at his friend. “Oh come on, Jim.  You’re not mad. Just back off on the booze.” Smiling now, but eyes widening, Jim's stare is vacant: “Madness begets madness.” That stare unnerves him. The flatness of it, as though James Douglas Morrison had turned into pure ice at the center of hell. In his movie mind, Jim saw the final scene of the sensuous wild west for a turned-on generation, in disconnected images with the mind choosing the order, creating its own context. As he neared The Whisky he could feel the music thumping through the walls, the doors. He walked in and was swallowed by the music. Source: medium.com

Straight Whisky (2004) by Erik Quisling & Austin Williams: With varying degrees of success, Quisling and Williams reconstruct 40 years of hip-shaking, altered consciousness and groupie-love at Sunset Strip nightclubs Whisky A Go-Go and its sister establishments the Roxy Theatre and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, in an attempt to bring to life the L.A. music scene since 1964. Focusing on random events meant to emblemize the Whiskey ambiance and demonstrate its cultural impact, the authors chronicle the club from its early Tinseltown days to the Black Flag riots. The list of acts that have graced the stage of Whisky is a veritable who's who of rock, with compelling tales of Jim Morrison passed out back stage. Williams recounts the time Charles Manson dropped by the Whisky just days before the mass killings at Benedict Canyon, harassed a waitress and was thrown out by the owner, Mario Maglieri. Central to rock 'n' roll history, the Whisky was a place of raw, untethered emotion, debauchery and mayhem. As Henry Rollins claims in his surprising foreword, "When you think about who's been at the Whisky, it reminds you that LA actually used to have some culture. Now LA seems just to be sort of a cultureless wasteland. But back then, there was a real scene. Something worth real documentation." Source: www.amazon.com

Mario Maglieri, who presided over a rock ’n’ roll mini-empire on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood at the Whisky a Go Go and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where he nurtured generations of musicians with encouragement, food and tough love, died on May 4, 2017 in Los Angeles. The Whisky a Go Go was opened in 1964 by a former policeman named Elmer Valentine, who soon asked Mr. Maglieri, a friend from Chicago, to help run the club. It became a critical part of the Los Angeles rock scene. For a time, the Doors were the house band. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin also played there. So did Led Zeppelin, the Byrds, the Who, Otis Redding, the Turtles and Neil Young. The Beatles demanded to visit the Whisky when they toured the United States in 1964. Mr. Maglieri understood that some needed a free meal at the nearby Rainbow Bar and others a kind word. “I don’t think it was innate in him to love rock ’n’ roll people,” Lou Adler said in a telephone interview. “But being around it for all those years, he just took a fatherly, grandfatherly, feeling toward these people. He loved those kids with problems, like Jim Morrison.” Mr. Maglieri told The Los Angeles Times in 1993 that he had warned Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, and Janis Joplin to straighten out, without success. Jim Morrison, Mr. Maglieri said, “was a good boy” who “would look at me all goofed up. I couldn't help liking him for his lack of guile. The reprimanding I gave him didn’t do any good. Too bad he’s not alive. I’d give him a spanking. When The Doors were the house band, I saw Morrison two or three times a week. He was drunk or stoned but he could talk. A bit pathetic, but Jim was a good kid. His girlfriend Pam, a redhead looker, danced as a go-go for a while, but Jim got jealous and he told her to learn to cook instead." In Pamela Courson, Jim Morrison finally met his match. In many ways, she was as bizarre as he was, always looking for something exciting, something special. While Pam entertained a fantasy of one day settling down with Jim and living a normal life, she must have known the reason they thrived together was because both were tormented souls." -Straight Whisky (2004) by Erik Quisling & Austin Williams

"I will never be untrue/Do anything you would want me to/Never stay out drinking/no later than two (two thirty...)/I will never treat you mean/and I won't cause no kind of scene/Tell you all the people/all the places I have been/I will always treat you kind/try to give you peace of mind/Only you tell me that you love me/one more time/Now darling/please don't be sad/Don't run off like that/when you get mad/Cause if you do you gonna lose/the best friend that you ever had/That's no lie/I will never be untrue/Do everything you want me to do/Bring all my loving/all my money/bring it all home to you." -"I will never be untrue" (1969) by The Doors, written for Pamela Courson.

Oliver Stone: Chasing the Light, Making The Doors

A new intimate memoir by the controversial and outspoken, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter about his complicated New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with in-the-moment details of the high and low moments: We see meetings with Al Pacino over Stone’s scripts for Scarface; his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface. Chasing the Light is a true insider’s look at Hollywood’s years of upheaval in the 1970s and ’80s. It will be released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (July 21, 2020)

“Everyone got the demon in here,” Mickey says in Natural Born Killers. “It feeds on your hate. Cuts, kills, rapes. It uses your weakness, your fears. We all know we’re no good pieces of shit from the time we could breathe. After a while, you become bad. You know the only thing that kills the demon, Wayne? Love. That’s why I know that Mallory’s my salvation. She was teaching me how to love.” Stone's work and his critiques of the way white men have gone about making this country constantly summon James Baldwin, who wrote, “People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.” We see this most glaringly in Stone’s white heroic depictions, like the hero of Platoon, realizing that he has to pick a side and kill the representative of “the machine.” We see this in the hero of Wall Street selling good fathers, including his blood father, to get in good with Michael Douglas. We see it in the hero in Born on the Fourth of July, buckling under a superior officer’s pressure to lie about battlefield atrocities, then rising up years later to oppose the entire war effort. 

Stone's greatness is his audacity, which lies partially in his talent as a skilled storyteller, but mostly in his ability to explore and exploit his moral mediocrity while standing utterly unafraid of looking at how bad, bad, bad our nation has made you, him, and me. Although he is in many ways very far left by Hollywood standards, he is also not the most enlightened person when it comes to feminism, race relations, homophobia, and the like. He struggles with terminology, and like most straight men of his generation, he tends to go into a rhetorical defensive crouch when interrogated about his language and beliefs. Here and there you’ll see lines that are redacted instead of deleted. No one will ever know who requested the redactions—a lawyer working for Abrams Books; my editor or a copy editor; Oliver; me—or what, exactly, is hidden under the redaction lines, but I wanted them to have a presence on the page, even if you couldn’t actually read them. You should think of these blackened lines as spirits cut down during the battle to get this book published. In 1969 Stone wrote his first (still unproduced) feature-length script, Break, an expressionistic piece that turned the war into a psychedelic interior journey, equally influenced by European art cinema, and the rock and roll that made life bearable for soldiers in the bush. Stone sent a copy of the screenplay to Jim Morrison, who was eking out his final days in Paris; his favorite sergeant in Platoon Elias, is a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol infantryman, whom Stone described as having a Morrison-like face and a dreamy, mystic quality. 

After NYU, Stone obsessed over the war while he wrote spec scripts, worked odd jobs in the East Coast film scene, and drove a cab at night. In 1976, Stone wrote the first draft of a screenplay titled The Platoon—a more straightforward account of his experiences than “Break,” filled with journalistic details and savage violence, and anchored to a blank-slate hero not unlike Crane’s Henry Fleming. In 1986, Stone finally got to direct Platoon which is set in the sixties, and its story of a young US Army infantryman (Charlie Sheen) morally torn between a stoner Jim Morrison/Jesus figure (Willem Dafoe) and a ruthless leather-faced, alcoholic redneck (Tom Berenger). Chris is noble, naive, doomed: an innocent abroad, coming of age in hell. 

Stone, who sent his first feature-length script “Break” to Morrison right before the singer’s death and modeled Platoon’s Elias on him, has said that The Doors is his fantasy of the rock star as an embodiment of Dionysian fearlessness—a dream figure who carried the emotional arc of the sixties counterculture within him, moving from utopian rebellion and feral boldness to booze-soaked depression, withdrawal, and oblivion. As a film stylist, Stone shares Morrison's interest in breaking away from convention, and at times he frees his movie The Doors from the usual Hollywood formulas, gliding through time and space with exhilarating, psychedelic ease. Stone is less inventive at scene-by-scene storytelling, though. Pamela Courson is depicted as saying hostile things to Patricia Kennealy, when by all reports their interactions were polite. What Stone found particularly compelling about Morrison emerges through such a motif as he studies his hero as doomed not just by internal failings, but also by the specific flaws of his society. Just as much as Nixon represented to Stone both the beauty of America in his capacity to rise from straitened youth to national captaincy—and its dark flipside in his resentment and paranoia—Morrison likewise represents a spiritual America doomed to be tortured by a materialistic age where hedonism is offered as substitute for liberty.  

Deleted Scenes on The Doors DVD — These extended scenes are introduced by Oliver Stone who regrets removing some of them from the final cut: Pamela and Jim are on a plane to New York talking about how they would like to die. Another scene showing Ray and Dorothy Manzarek's wedding, followed by Pamela and Jim shopping for their dinner. Also, Morrison in a motel room crying in company of a groupie. What ruined Jim Morrison? The film, at times, dares to make the outrageous suggestion that he died for his audience's sins. One of Mr. Stone's most effective tricks is to fade out the sound entirely at one crucial moment, as Morrison becomes fatally out of touch with his audience. Perhaps Morrison is symbolic of the death of the artist in a society bent on war and destruction. 

—Steve Wheeler: What are your thoughts about the Stone movie? 

—Frank Lisciandro: "I found it to be intolerable. Oliver Stone did not want to know who Jim Morrison was and he did not come close to capturing the essence of Jim. The film never presented the quiet, sensitive, extremely intelligent human being that Jim was. He wasn’t frantic and manic as he is portrayed in this movie. Jim had a sensational sense of humor and that is what is entirely lacking in the Stone film. The guy was hilariously funny and he would make himself the butt of jokes. I never saw Jim lock someone in a closet and set the room on the fire. I couldn’t even imagine him doing anything remotely like that; this was absolutely not in his nature or personality. He was not a violent person. If Jim needed to get back at you, he would do it with words, and he could be devastating that way. Jim loved to laugh and he was not shy about laughing at himself either. He had such humility that he would do that. Yes, he did some crazy things on occasion, but he was also a warm and sensitive person a vast majority of the time. There’s a balance that you don’t find in the movie and that imbalance totally eliminates the real Jim Morrison from the screen.”

—Steve Wheeler: We did interviews with Morrison's closest friends, bandmates, managers, and others over the years. People thanked us very much for searching and exposing the truth, and not the usual unrealistic, ignorant, garbage gossip people are presented 99% of time. I do find it sad that Stone refused to show any of Morrison's good sides. Even Danny Sugerman, not one to shy away from spewing myths and salacious rumors about Morrison, admitted: “It’s Oliver Stone’s version of Jim. There is some truth within it, but it’s not the truth, and it contains numerous fictionalized accounts and considerable exaggeration.” Robby Krieger: “Oliver was only interested in the self-destructive, brooding personality so he was focusing on that aspect of Jim. We were always complaining that the script was too dark, and that’s why Ray bailed on the movie. Oliver did make Jim into a caricature. I mean Jim could be a little freaky from time to time, but not all the time like the movie would have you believe.”

Jim Morrison: “The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"Yeah, I missed out on the sixties," Stone admits. "I'm not angry about it, but I am saddened that I missed it—especially the healthy male/female relationships. I never had a coeducational existence. The sixties had this enormous sense of sexual liberation. Women started to come out of the closet and fucking was 'in'. It was stylish, fashionable. I missed all that, and the honest, open man/woman communication that came with it." Stone saw Jim and Pam's relationship as a great love story: "She may be basically a figure of innocence, but I see the movie character of Pam as a monster, too. She's very much a sixties child, not too thoughtful, not too intelligent. She decides to ride the snake with Jim, she can hold on and stay with him all the way out—till the point where she's willing to die with him. What I like in their story is that Jim had this loyalty, too. He stuck with her to the end. That's at the center of the movie. He really loved her. Morrison was even darker than we showed in a lot of ways—what struck me was his sadness and depression. I couldn't find the exact Jim. He's an enigma. Nobody could play Jim Morrison but Jim Morrison." —"Oliver Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

“Part of what made it easy to play Jim was that he was a brilliant actor. He acted a lot. He didn’t want people to know him and he presented something which prevented you from getting close.” -Val Kilmer

We're reaching for death on the end of a candle. We're trying for something that's already found us. Everything human is leaving her face. Soon she will disappear into the calm vegetable morass. Stay! My Wild Love! Earth Air Fire Water. Mother Father Sons & Daughters. Airplane in the starry night. First fright. Forest follow free. I love thee. Watch how I love thee. Shake dreams from your hair. My pretty child, my sweet one. Choose the day and choose the sign of your day. A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon. And we laugh like soft, mad children. The time has come again. Choose now, they croon. Beneath the moon. Enter again the sweet forest. Enter the hot dream. Everything is broken up and dances. Your milk is my wine. My silk is your shine. —Wilderness (1971) by Jim Morrison

Ray Manzarek: A lot of people didn’t care for Jim’s shades back in the day. My wife complimented him on them and he seemed stunned. He told her “Pam thinks they look too far out there.”

Alan R. Graham (ex-husband of Jim Morrison's sister Anne): Pamela Courson was so very close to Jim Morrison from the beginning because of her love for his poetry. She told him he was a real poet before anyone else did. In return for her love and nurture, Morrison let her deep inside of his heart. He needed this kind of love badly.

-Matt Zoller Seitz: Do you see a connection between The Doors and Natural Born Killers?

-Oliver Stone: Yeah, I think of it as a line. Filming Natural Born Killers was like being free again. I think The Doors is like Natural Born Killers. It’s in that line of film where with imagery we freed ourselves and allowed free associations. I rewrote Randall Jahnson's script. My concept was to set the story to the songs. The song would set the scene, like we did later in Natural Born Killers. There’d be a song that’d be the mood, and it was written. I'd sent Morrison a script of Break, which was my first script which I wrote when I came back, about Vietnam. It was very psychedelic. I thought Jim could play the soldier. He could play the character of me. It was quite a wild script. I didn’t hear back, of course. I’m used to that, I’ve been rejected before. 

-Matt Zoller Seitz: So he never contacted you?

-Oliver Stone: No. He died in ’71, so that would’ve been probably two years after I wrote the script. I thought Jim was serious, almost suicidal, all out for nothing. I think you see it in the movie, he takes no prisoners. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Would you die for me?’ It’s crazy stuff. When he left LA for Paris, he was finished with the band. I do think Paris was the beginning of a new stage but it got derailed. I think part of that, this is my opinion only, I can’t prove it, but I do feel that Pamela Courson had a drug problem. My feeling is that he was trying to help her, and kept up with her, and I think he overdid it. We weren’t allowed to depict her addiction, because her parents didn’t want to have any of that, but you can see in the film that she’s high. I actually had access to 120 transcripts through the kindness of Jerry Hopkins, who had collected them. But Manzarek, who I don’t believe ever saw Hopkins’ transcripts, was outrageous in what he said, and totally mean-minded. But the thing that really bothers me is that Manzarek, if you really go over Hopkins’s transcripts, doesn’t figure prominently, except as a musical coworker. He’s Jim’s colleague and all that, he's very important at the beginning, but after the first album you sense Manzarek was a complete opposite to Jim. Everything with Jim was freedom; Manzarek is control. Manzarek is the authority figure. Jim never really had a social life with Ray anyway. Manzarek was like an Iago figure to me. I probably made Morrison more dangerous than he wanted him to be, but I read those transcripts: what was going on sexually, his impotence, all kinds of issues. 

-Oliver Stone: He was an alcoholic with a capital A and he wasn’t that sex-driven as much as he was this idea of sex, and you know, Pamela’s a pretty straight woman, kind of boring in a way, [Redacted] But in other words, I don’t see Pamela as some exotic hippie chick. So Meg Ryan was not bad in the part, although she’s strange somehow. Pam Courson was a strange lady, but I find her to be kind of bland, and I think Jim liked that quiet quality of her. I think he was so outrageous that he wanted the opposite. In the film it wasn’t the way Pam really was, but she would probably be happy with Meg. I think we got away with Meg Ryan. Val Kilmer told me—he broke my heart—at the end of the shoot, he said, "You don’t know how to direct" at the last wrap party.  —The Oliver Stone Experience (2017) by Matt Zoller Seitz

Watergate's Exposed Secret Agenda, Oliver Stone's Controversies, Jim Morrison's American Prayer

Who in 1972 when Watergate broke could have foreseen that the scandal eventually would lead back to President Trump’s uncle John G.Trump, an eminent scientist at MIT in the 1940’s who was delegated by the government among other classified tasks with reading Tesla’s secret files after his death and investigating the UFO phenomenon and then into the next century to Donald Trump inside the White House in a titanic struggle for global control? Only one person foresaw this: President Richard Nixon who 48 years ago predicted that year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the whole planet and who 33 years ago predicted that Donald Trump one day would be president. Robert Merritt was employed by the police and the FBI in spying on the New Left, a task that ultimately led to his infiltration of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a bete noire of America’s right wing. That said, Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote in the Education Forum, “I mean has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Jim Hougan (author of Secret Agenda) agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”  

The work that Merritt did for the FBI dovetails with the numerous revelations of FBI illegal acts described in David Wise’s authoritative The American Police State published in 1976.  On June 8, 1972, the FBI terminated its CI contract with Merritt. He was still, however, employed by the MPD as a CI with Shoffler supervising him. What happened next is history as commonly accepted. Shoffler was parked in a police vehicle one block from the Watergate when Frank Wills telephoned the MPD about 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, of a possible burglary underway within the Watergate building. The MPD dispatcher alerted Shoffler to Wills’ call and he accompanied by two fellow officers who also had been in the police vehicle entered the building and arrested the burglars. Shoffler knew in advance that a crime was to take place. He had an obligation to report it to his superiors in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. Merritt had attempted to alert Sgt. Gildon in the Intelligence Division but he cursorily brushed him off. Shoffler then forbade him to have any further contact with Gildon on the matter. Shoffler, the consummate narcissist, dreamed of becoming a famous detective even if it meant creating a constitutional crisis that would lead to the destruction of the Nixon presidency and the defeat of America’s armed forces at war in Vietnam. 

Enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. Nixon responded that he was aware of a general plan to break into the DNC that had been authorized by the government agencies involved in the Huston Plan. He said he did not know any of the details as to who exactly would carry out the break-in. He said the purpose of the break-in was to gather evidence of a prostitution ring being operated out of the DNC that would be used in his reelection campaign. There was some further discussion about the planned break-in that was wrapped up when the President became quiet and thoughtful and then mused aloud, “I wish I could get a handle on this.”   

Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, was published to acclaim in 1984, I lost no time in buying a copy. I had been the original attorney for the Watergate seven burglars: Howard Hunt, Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez and Virgilio Gonzalez, having been retained as defense counsel by Hunt and Liddy who had escaped after the five other burglars had been arrested inside the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. When I checked the index I saw that my name appeared in the appendix.  “Among those who are skeptical of the Ervin committee’s investigation of the Watergate affair, there is a school of thought that holds that some Washington police knew in advance that the June 16-17 [1972] break-in was about to occur. Skeptics as politically disparate as H.R. Haldeman and Carl Oglesby point the finger of suspicion at arresting office, Carl Shoffler. Secret Agenda since its publication has been eclipsed by startling revelations that undercut much of its account of Watergate. For example, scholar Jim D'Eugenio recently wrote, “Has everyone read what Angelo Lane said? He was the chief investigating officer for the FBI. He even goes as far to say either Hunt or McCord tipped off the police. I should add, today Hougan agrees with that. He feels he was too mild on Carl Shoffler in his book.”

Why does Hougan feel differently about Shoffler today? One factor may be that Robert Merritt wrote a book that was published in 2010 titled Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up as told to me as the original attorney for the Watergate seven. Our book, which contains a number of documents from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, proves that it was Robert Merritt who tipped Shoffler off on June 2 of the plan to burglarize the Democratic National Committee on June 17, not Hunt, McCord or Baldwin. Nixon in the wake of the breaking of the Watergate scandal concluded correctly that there was no longer anyone inside the White House whom he could trust. Alghough he was a college dropout, Merritt had an I.Q. of 138. After six months the CIA told Merritt his services were no longer needed and they parted on good terms. But the whole venture had hooked Merritt on the idea of clandestine work for the government. In October 1971, Merrritt worked with the MPD Intelligence Division for about a year, and was transferred to the Washington, D.C. Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI assignment primarily dealt with targeting the Institute for Policy Studies and the Weather Underground, two organizations deemed radical and dangerous under the government’s COINTELPRO program. 

Merritt decided to bring to Nixon’s attention of the telephone conversation that he overheard while operating the switchboard at the Columbia Plaza Apartments. The conversation revealed that enemies of Nixon were aware of a plan to break into the Democratic National Committee on June 18 and that the break-in would result in the downfall of Nixon from the presidency. The meeting ended with the President telling Merritt that he would be summoned again to meet with him on an unknown date. Merritt’s final meeting with Nixon took place in the second week of July 1972, three weeks after Watergate broke. Merritt found President Nixon distraught with some tears rolling down his checks. Merritt asked Nixon why he was crying. Nixon pointed to an article about the Watergate case in the early edition of the Washington Post lying on top of his desk. He said he was being destroyed, and his presidency was over. He said that he had been betrayed by many in the White House who were motivated by power and money. He could trust no one. He said John Dean was a traitor and Dean had visited Nixon’s enemies on Capitol Hill before and during Watergate. Nixon also singled out by name General Alexander Haig, Carl Shoffler, T.D. (Shoffler’s police buddy) and Captain Edmund Chung as traitors. The President again acknowledged that he knew of the general idea of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee being planned under the Huston Plan but had  known nothing of its details. He expressed remorse for not taking more seriously the information that Merritt had provided him at their prior meeting. 

Nixon blamed the NSA, FBI, CIA and Military Intelligence for wanting him destroyed. The President spoke about the goals of his presidency that were now in jeopardy. He said it might be years before the historians would realize what he had hoped to accomplish, which was to assure the security and well being of Americans alive and those of future generations. He told Merritt that he was going to give him the letter to deliver to Kissinger. He told Merritt to remain quiet and not say a word as he read the letter out loud. Nixon said, “I took my order from above and have followed it to the T.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.”  Merritt never saw the President again. He remembers the occasion as one in which the president was distraught throughout.

As recounted in that posting President Nixon told Robert Merritt at their third and final meeting in mid-July 1972: “It was then at Nixon made a cryptic remark, apparently to emphasize the importance of the assignment that he had given Merritt. Nixon said, “I took my order from above.” Merritt was taken aback by the remark and asked Nixon what he meant. Nixon did not reply directly but instead declared that “the year 2020 would be cataclysmic not only for America but for the world.” Merritt asked Nixon how he knew this would happen. Nixon replied, “Think of me a prophet.” The coronavirus entered America’s consciousness in January 2020. Its impact has been horrific and the worst of it lies in the coming months. Nevertheless it does not fit the definition of being a cataclysmic event, which is one of violent change or upheaval, because soon a vaccine will be developed to deal with it. The real cataclysmic event will take place later this year. Actually it will be two events, the first immediately triggering the second. Source: www.amazon.com

Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s Jim Morrison preferred to skip school and visit beatnik hangouts in San Francisco. Two significant events had shaken America. First the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. This sensational event provoked spasms of American self-doubt about being beaten into space by the Russians. It began the so-called missile gap debate that later helped put John Kennedy in the White House. In the summer of 1960, something in Jim Morrison changed. Classmates remembered he seemed to undergo a change of personality. He appeared depressed and angry, and neglected his studies. Apparently he took no interest in the November presidential election—hotly debated in his politically conservative school—in which John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon. But Kennedy’s death occupied a dark corner of the Morrison psyche, making frequent appearances in notebooks and later lyrics. “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car” is one of the keystone images from both 'Celebration of the Lizard' and the song “Not to Touch the Earth.” On the same notebook page on which Morrison recorded the Kennedy assassination, he wrote the name of Aldous Huxley. Huxley had died at his home in Los Angeles on the same day Jack Kennedy was murdered. Oliver Stone's "JFK" reprised the circumstances and complexities behind that historic and fateful day: that precise instant when an entire civilization was forever changed. 

Kennedy's death established a milestone that American society had reached unknowingly. It became more significant the further away in time we got historically from that event. The assassination was a huge tragedy that created an inability for the nation to find firm footing after it had been knocked off balance. Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for “The Miami Herald,” wrote: "Whatever you think of the 60's one thing is undeniable: They tore us apart, ripped American society to pieces and threw those pieces in the air so they rained down like confetti, falling into new configurations, nothing where it used to be. It was an angry time—we are still sifting through confetti pieces, trying to find a way.” The events of the 1960's set up the impulse toward “psychic disintegration” we are now encountering in recent times.

Morrison saw what was happening to our souls as a society and reported as a witness to "the vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb," a nation possessed and frozen in time. JFK and Jim Morrison seemingly had in common health ailments and a sex addiction, but whereas the President had multiple liaisons with Hollywood stars (Gene Tierney, Marilyn Monroe, June Allyson, Arlene Dahl), Morrison juggled female journalists and groupies. Although often exhibiting a lusty attitude, Morrison was usually both mild-mannered and passionately inclinated with women. He liked to cite John Stuart Mill's quote: "Women are a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing." Inspired by the 60s tumultuous days, Morrison wrote “Peace Frog,” with innovative guitars by Robby Krieger. For Morrison it was a song not only of isolation but a complete rejection of what America had become that suggested an inevitable and violent end. He unconsciously intimated that mayhem in America would become epidemic. In the song’s opening line there is a chorus chanted in counterpoint. “She came” is the chorus that follows Morrison's opening warning, “There's blood in the streets, it's up to my ankles.” “She came,” has a dual meaning. It is an easy reference to sexual climax. But the phrase also refers to a line in the first break, “Just about the break of day, she came, and then she drove away, sunlight in her hair.” The sunshine in her hair is a brilliant image that might be just Pamela Courson. She is a fleeting, unreachable image when she leaves the city, and she remains beyond us, unobtainable, the queen of the highway, beckoning to us on the edge of town. 

Dennis Jacob: Pamela said something I will never forget: “I feel sorry for Mary.” I knew it meant she was not threatened by the emergence of Mary Werbelow in Jim's life. That something had long been settled between Pam and Jim. A relationship deeper than either one of them had ever had before. I’d begun to suspect that something had been settled between the two of them – unbreakable except by death itself. Nietzsche once said: 'In the end what a woman wants is a warrior'. Perhaps the women who gravitated toward Jim Morrison were attracted to this quality. Morrison felt that women had a greater future perhaps than most men would have because most men were concerned with the accumulation of empty numbers. Morrison was the contemplative type, hardly the freak that popular consumption would have us believe. He was Apollonian in his life, and Dionysian on stage. He aimed at the heart of American Democracy. He believed in it. —"Summer with Morrison: The Early Life and Times of James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob and "Some Are Born to Endless Night: Jim Morrison" (2011) by Gerry Kirstein

Jim Morrison: "Most men chase power and control, but they miss the meaning of life. Women have a comic approach to life. They are noble creatures who carry on your name with dignity after you die."

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.” -Marcus Aurelius

Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) is the way most Americans learn about one of the most traumatic events in their recent history. According to Robert Brent Toplin, JFK has probably “had a greater impact on public opinion than any other work of art in American history.” Indeed, the movie remains a great source of pride for Stone, if not his masterpiece. Hollywood had been chasing the Jim Morrison story over the years. The Doors story had been pursued by eight directors: Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, and Francis Ford Coppola. "I read hundreds of transcripts from people who had known Jim," Stone said. However, Jerry Hopkins contradicts Stone saying there were roughly "less than 100 transcripts, and most were mine". Stone expounds: "It was like Citizen Kane in a way, because every one of these people had a different point of view. Still, the Doors script was always problematic. I wrote it quickly that summer 1989 in Santa Barbara. The script was written more as a tonal poem. The concept was that the movie was all in Jim's lyrics. I picked the songs I wanted and wrote each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song. The motivations of the characters were murky to some, clearer to others. I trusted to his lyrics to tell his tale. I tried not to put my rationalizations about his motivations. Jim looked at everything as an artistic creation. It's almost like he constructed his life in the same way as he would labor over a piece of poetry or a song. I think Morrison looked at his life as an epic poem, as if it were a long suicide note. He had sexual problems, he was an alcoholic in the severe sense in that he had a cut-off point, so he couldn't really enjoy drinking; for him it was an all-or-nothing affair. He couldn't even enjoy most drugs any more, he had to go beyond, into heroin. Everything got jaded." As 1989 drew to a close, Stone's second draft was completed and circulated among the concerned parties. Immediately, there were problems. When Morrison died, he left everything to Pamela Courson, including the rights to his poetry and his share of the rights to the music of The Doors. When Pamela died in 1974, all this went to her parents; after a series of lawsuits, it was now controlled jointly by Morrison's parents and the Coursons. The Coursons weren't at all pleased with Stone's script and tried to slow the production down.

The producers had already agreed not to portray Pamela Courson as having anything to do with Morrison's death (some believe Morrison accidentally snorted Pamela's heroin stash). Manzarek was equally unenamored of Stone. "Oliver Stone was over there in Vietnam and the hippies were back here smoking dope and practicing free love, and he was jealous. Oliver Stone is using the Doors to get revenge." Kathleen Quinlan seemed to enjoy playing the free-spirited Patricia Kennealy. The Kennealy character is a composite of different women who were part of Morrison's life and was originally named Annie O'Riordan, but later changed to Kennealy. "Meg was much more about control than Kathleen," Stone said. "Quinlan in dealing with the sixties seemed to understand it immediately and was able to work easily in that framework. I combined several women from Jim's life and by rights I should have used an alias for the name Kennealy because it's somewhat misleading." —"Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, And Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker" (1995) by James Riordan

John Haeny: "I would never say that I was especially close to Jim.  I actually rather doubt that anyone (besides Pam) was truly close to Jim. When I saw Jim with others he always seemed to be somewhat preoccupied and distant, caught up in his own thoughts, always wary of others. Jim was always warm and polite around me. From time to time we would sit on the desks at the back office at Elektra and have social chats. Over a very long career I have never been intimidated by any ‘star’. I always accepted them as normal people, respecting them as artists but never allowing them anymore than that. I think Jim sensed that in me. I did notice that in really intense situations when Jim and I were in the same studio control room we would exchange brief glances and quiet smiles. Although Morrison was essentially a lonely and tortured rebel, he was likable and engaging in all kinds of conversation.  Jim and I had about a half dozen meetings at my house in Coldwater Canyon to discuss and plan the project "American Prayer". Jim was always clear minded, softly spoken and exceedingly polite. Jim also left me his entire collection of notebooks so I could become more familiar with his work at a formative level. The time came when I heard through the grapevine that Jim had left The Doors.

I had always known that Jim considered himself firstly a filmmaker and a poet. His Rock and Roll life was an unexpected development that was thrust upon him. Now he felt tired of that role. After Jim’s death his notebooks were scattered to the four winds. I think there are still some missing, some sitting in private collections, other lost forever. I resisted every legal, civil and social pressure to give up those initial recordings, especially during the lawsuits regarding the estate of Jim. The Doors then attorney, Max Fink, threatened to send up the Sheriff to pick up the tapes. I told Max to go ahead and try. If he did I would deliver a pile of ashes and he could figure out if they were the ashes of the real recordings or not.  It was somewhat similar during the making of Oliver Stone’s film “The Doors” although with a bit less threat on display. When Oliver’s people contacted me to ask for access to the poetry tapes I simply said “no”. I felt Stone's portrayal of Jim was embarrasing, by the way. The estate of James Douglas Morrison was shared between Jim’s parents and the parents of Pam Courson, Jim’s wife. Individually I always found The Doors reasonable, even warm and funny. But collectively there emerged what I called “The Doors Mentality”. They would become aggressive, greedy, extremely distrustful and could easily become litigious. There were also a big stack of tapes known as “The Endless Night Tapes” recorded during an all night session at a motel room in Palm Springs. But, we had a problem.  Jim’s voice was buried in the roar of a cheap air conditioner in that Palm Springs motel room. We had to reclaim Jim’s story from those tapes. This was going to ultimately involve a trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. The brilliant and highly advanced work of Dr. Thomas Stockham of Soundstream helped us salvage that recording. Dr. Stockham had also created a highly complex digital restoration process called ‘Blind De-Convolution’. Eventually we had all our materials sorted.  Jim only occasionally titled his poetry and never dated them, creating a huge dilemma for us.  We had to discover a way to make order out of seemingly chaos. This was the single biggest challenge we faced during the making of the album. Source: johnhaeny.com

Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine

Friedrich Nietzsche described in his notebooks (which were published posthumously in The Will to Power) a choice between ‘active ‘ and ‘passive’ nihilism. One of his many aphorisms on nihilism was that it is the result of the highest values devaluing themselves. Values such as truth and justice can come to feel like they are not merely ideas, but that they have some supernatural power, particularly when we say: ‘The truth will set you free’ or ‘Justice will be served.’ When these values turn out not to have the power attributed to them, when truth turns out not to be liberating, we become disillusioned. According to Nietzsche, we can then become active nihilists and reject the values given to us by others in order to erect values of our own. Or we can become passive nihilists and continue to believe in traditional values, despite having doubts about the true value of those values. The active nihilist destroys in order to find or create something worth believing in. In epistemology (the theory of knowledge), nihilism is often seen as the denial that knowledge is possible, the stance that our most cherished beliefs have no bedrock. There are, however, several problems with trying to base morality on reason. 

One such problem, as pointed out by Jacques Lacan in ‘Kant with Sade’ (1989), is that using universalisability as the criterion of right and wrong can let clever people (such as the Marquis de Sade) justify some seemingly horrific actions if they can manage to show that those actions can actually pass Kant’s logic test. Another problem, as pointed out by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1861), is that humans are rational, but rationality is not all that we have. Though we might say we want to be free and independent, such liberation can feel like a terrible burden. This was expressed for example by Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) when he described anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ that arises when we look down at what appears to us as the ‘abyss’ of endless possibility. Rather than letting ourselves feel powerless in a world that seems to have stopped caring, we should ask where nihilistic views of the world are coming from, and who benefits from our seeing the world that way. 

For example, as Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), we can certainly develop very complicated and very successful models for describing reality, which we can use to discover a wealth of new ‘facts’, but we can never prove that these correspond to reality itself – they could simply derive from our particular model of reality.  This leads to another problem, the problem of infinite regress. Any claim to knowledge based on some foundation inevitably leads to questions about the foundation of that foundation. Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, the revaluation of values, and the affirmation of life. He shifted allegiances: writing books, for example, in support of the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but later delivering blistering critiques of both. Not surprisingly, scholars range widely in their interpretations of Nietzsche: was he a poet or a philosopher? A nihilist, moral relativist, or Nazi sympathiser? A critic or a system builder? Anti-Christian or Christian? In the face of this complexity, Nietzsche offers an interpretive key: his references to dance (Tanz). 

Taken together, these references light a path that begins in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and wends through every major work into his final book, the posthumous Ecce Homo (1908). Nietzsche’s dance references call attention to the sensory education that he insists is necessary for creating values that ‘remain faithful to the Earth’. Nietzsche calls the effect a ‘magic transformation’: spectators’ sensations of suffering and terror yield to feelings of ‘metaphysical comfort’ and the notion that ‘life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful’. In Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche elaborates that all human symbolism – even music – is rooted in the ‘imitation of gesture’ at work in ancient tragedy. He writes that the human impulse to move with others ‘is older than language, and goes on involuntarily… even when the language of gesture is universally suppressed,’ as he observed among Christians of his day. When humans don’t learn how to move their bodily selves, Nietzsche insists, their senses grow dull. As Zarathustra exhorts: ‘You higher men, the worst about you is that you have not learned to dance as one must dance – dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you are failures?’ Source: https://aeon.co

"Everything is broken up and dances." —Jim Morrison

"Dance related metaphors are central to Nietzsche's philosophy; dance is a reminder about the work of overcoming oneself and to free oneself from anger, bitterness and despair." Jim Morrison was very influenced by Nietzsche. Although Morrison‘s work displays a strong Nietzschean influence, his early explorations with sensory perception relate more specifically to William Blake and Aldous Huxley.  The terror celebrated in Morrison‘s work goes beyond the Nietzschean acceptance of life‘s suffering. Morrison‘s familiarity with the poetry of Blake, as well as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, encouraged his attraction to darker themes. Although many of the nihilistic thoughts echo those of Nietzsche, Morrison‘s fondness for absurdist texts instills in him a preference for nonsense rather than rationality. Morrison suggests that the absurdity of the world enhances man‘s sensory perception and allows the world to be whatever can be created in the mind. Morrison confronts conflicting feelings of remaining in the role of the spectator or assuming the unpredictable role of the actor—a problem he will ponder often throughout his career. Morrison recognizes "self-deception may be necessary to the poet‘s survival." Jim Morrison‘s self-doubt extends beyond his abilities as a writer to his abilities as performer as well. 

Jim Morrison: “Nietzsche said once women are the loveliest swans in the world. He's wrong about women, though, they aren't fools.” He just laughed at some Philosophy Professors who wrote about Nietzsche. Like Walter Kaufman's chapter of his Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist  (1956) about “Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates.” “It's nothing but a lie,” Jim said. “It's not true.” I waited for his reaction. “That lousy Sophist,” Jim declared. “What an old ugly pederast. Socrates lurking in Greek law courts so he could pick up enough gift of gab to con innocent young men into the sack! They should have killed that fucker decades before the hemlock.” Jim wasn't going to be fooled by Kaufman. “He taught Plato a skeptical philosophy and utterly ruined him. Why? Because Socrates wanted to kill off the Greek religion – another Sophistry – a lawyer's rhetoric. And what happened? That poor bastard Plato takes a trip to Egypt. Ever read The Egyptian Book Of The Dead? It's nothing but a primitive form of the ‘allegory of the cave’, i.e. the love of the dead. Pure nihilism! These philosophy teachers – they can get rid of ‘God’, but they can’t get rid of Socrates? Why, it’s ridiculous.” Jim often favored the German culture over England's. Jim exempted the Irish, the Scotch, and the Welsh.“I never knew an Englishman I didn't despise," he said, "or an Englishwoman I didn't love.” Jim thought the class structure and behaviourism had ruined England: “It's a shopkeeper’s mentality. Survival at any price.” —"Summer with James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob

One of Jim Morrison’s most important lines is “weird scenes inside the gold mine,” a lyric from The End that metaphorically describes what he has found (weird scenes) and where he has made those findings (the gold mine). What T. S. Eliot called the artist's final destination “the still point,” Morrison would eventually use other expressions including “the gold mine,” “universal mind,” “the perimeter,” and “the only solution.” Each symbolizes the same illumination and ecstasy. In her 1968 Saturday Evening Post essay Waiting for Morrison, Joan Didion distinguished The Doors from their peers, saying, "The Doors are different. They have nothing in common with the gentle Beatles. They lack the contemporary conviction that love is brotherhood. Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death and therein lies salvation." In any case, Didion is quite perceptive in using the word "salvation," for it's one of the most important themes of Morrison. On the other hand, her lasting and oft-quoted characterization of the group as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex” is cute but extremely trite. Ultimately, Jim Morrison wasn’t primarily interested in sex, as his lyrics show. He is interested in timeless pleasures and treasures that go beyond the physical. Didion is regarded as one of our sharpest cultural observers, but her understanding of The Doors is quite thin. Sex and death are useful as starting points for getting into The Doors (and they have been endlessly cited as Morrison’s obsessions), but it is unfortunate that many critics remain stuck there. Going to a Doors concert was about participating in a Neuro Linguistic Musical Programming experiment that could go in unpredictable directions. Doors music is about what Joseph Campbell called “the soul’s high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God.” The Doors combined poetry, mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and tragedy.

Sex sells, and Morrison was certainly oozing sex in his persona. On the other hand, his lyrics took us far beyond sex to something timeless and ethereal. Yet his message was difficult to hear over the controversy and confusion. As the band attracted more attention, audiences hoped that Morrison would do something outrageous onstage. In the beginning, audiences came to the concerts to hear music. Later, audiences came looking for a freak show. Michael Cuscuna interviewed Morrison for DownBeat magazine and found a totally different person from the one he expected. Cuscuna writes that he was initially “dismayed at the prospect of encountering another rock ego.” However, he ends by saying, “in Jim Morrison, I found to my surprise a beautiful human being who, not unlike Charles Mingus, has been a victim of sensational publicity and harassment by silly journalists.” The crowds of rock and roll explorers became a mob of weekend voyeurs who came not for adventure but to see a freak show. The audience no longer saw Jim Morrison as the poet who used stage theatrics to communicate. They now wanted Morrison to “do his act.” Robin Richman said of The Doors that “their music has no meaning, only mood.” Such a comment is entirely ridiculous and condescending. Richman’s piece appeared in Life Magazine in 1968 and essentially told America that Morrison’s lyrics weren’t worth paying attention to. As another scathing example, Dave Marsh wrote in 1979 when he was an editor for Rolling Stone that The Doors were the most “overrated group in rock history.”

For one reason or another, dozens of critics who have been listening to The Doors from the very beginning haven’t the slightest knowledge of what Morrison was all about. Really. They are entirely keyless when it comes to grasping Morrison’s vision. In his review of the doc When You’re Strange, Stephen Holden called Morrison “faintly ludicrous” and “a charismatic male pin-up strutting about in leather pants. He started out with psychedelics and ended up a burnt-out drunk. As a case study of a self-destructive performer consumed by his own mystique, he remains in a class by himself.” Tom Robbins summed Morrison up in July 1967: "Sexual in an almost psychopathic way, Morrison's richly textured voice taunts and teases and throbs with incredible vocal control and the theatrical projection of a Shakespearean star." Bernard Wolfe, sent by The New York Times Magazine as a replacement for Robert Gover to do a hatchet job on Morrison, eventually published in Esquire magazine his 1972 essay: Jim Morrison: Slamming the Door in the Woodstock Nation. Morrison had befriended Wolfe over the course of time, and despite Wolfe’s overall lack of insight, his article is full of witticisms. On the sex and death themes that have been endlessly worked over by critics, here is Wolfe’s question and Morrison’s response: "What transcendence did you have in mind, death through sex or sex through death?" Morrison replied in jest: "The first on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, the second on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays." 

  

Morrison never explicitly identifies just what "the other side" is, but he gives us a good idea of what it isn’t. The first stanza ("You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day / Tried to run. Tried to hide. / Break on through to the other side") puts it somehow outside the eternal cycle of day and night. Morrison’s “other side” is atemporal, outside of time. The second verse ("We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there / Can you still recall the time we cried? / Break on through to the other side") indicates that the other side is beyond ordinary pleasures or treasures. "Arms that chain, eyes that lie / Break on through to the other side" negate the physical as the ultimate treasure. He desires something other than sex. The gate symbolizes the passage. Many critics have assumed that the other side is simply death. Within the context of the album, however, and especially in view of End of the Night, which in a sense completes this song, it becomes clear that the other side refers to something positive rather than negative. Morrison’s notion of death is actually one of rebirth. Morrison's "death theme" is a "rebirth theme." Morrison once discussed Light My Fire with Bernard Wolfe, saying its theme was “liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death.” End of the Night in a sense complements Break On Through. However, by comparison it is a very gentle and melancholy song. The message is stated at the outset, "Take the highway to the end of the night" and “take a journey to the bright midnight.” The highway and the journey are one and the same, both lead to "the end of the night." This destination of the "bright midnight" involves "bliss" and "light," unmistakable symbols of joy and euphoria. "Sweet delight" is somehow involved; this positive experience is then set against the contrasting "endless night." The darkness has come to an end. One critic contends that the song is about "irredeemable alienation," but the words support the opposite view. One of the themes of The End is internal travel. Morrison sings “there’s danger on the edge of town.” Danger here refers to one of the three core elements of the hero’s journey: overcoming the obstacles. Morrison tells the listener to "ride the king's highway" and to "ride the highway West." In between is the line "Weird scenes inside the gold mine."

The placement suggests that "the gold mine" is somehow associated with going West. This passage is an invitation to encounter what Morrison called the “dark forces,” symbolic of obstacles that must be defeated on the journey to liberation. We next encounter the image of "the blue bus," which is said to be "calling us." When he says “the West is the best,” he’s not talking about California, he’s talking about the mythological West, which is very much of a landmark within that whole hero’s journey, to reach his Shangrila. When he says “The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on,” Morrison has stopped singing and now he’s talking, and he’s also going into third person. So he’s transformed himself into a character, and he’s commenting on this third person, the killer, and he’s talking. And then later he says he took a face from the ancient gallery, so he’s putting on this mask. In concert, when Jim Morrison sang this song, he would sometimes put his hand over his eyes as if to symbolize a mask, so he’s speaking through a character, not in the first person. The End is an invitation to "ride the highway West," "ride the snake," "take a chance at the back of the blue bus." Somehow, these essentially identical commands tie in with the recurring apocalyptic motif of "the end", "the only solution." The End is also about liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death. When the music subsides, Morrison sings “the end of nights we tried to die,” indicating a final ending. The song is a cogent, anti-Freudian prescription for salvation emanating from deep and authentic psychoanalitical knowledge. Freud misinterpreted and distorted the Oedipus myth to suit his own purposes. Morrison summons up the Oedipus Complex in order to challenge its very foundations, not to act it out.  That is Jim Morrison speaking in the role of a character. When critics say that Jim Morrison wanted to violate a taboo, that is completely misreading the lyrics. What is going on here is that the treasure that Morrison’s talking about in terms of the gold mine and go confront the danger in order to win the treasure, that treasure has to do with an anti-Freudian view of the world in terms of what’s possible for liberation. And it’s an anti-Oedipus Complex view. 

Bernard Wolfe wrote, "What an ingenious formula: Morrison did resurrect something in the paved-over human potential, something at least assumed to be there, fantasy freedom, fantasy sex, fantasy departure, through the trick of escaping from the human realm or going through the motions of escape.” Despite the occasional darkness, from the haunting eeriness of End of the Night to the chilling visions in The End, Morrison’s overriding images are beautiful and positive. He ultimately emphasized light over darkness, but light cannot be achieved without first conquering dark and dangerous obstacles. Morrison was ultimately a “light-bringer and emissary of the light.” And Morrison, when you look at a song like When the Music’s Over, right after he screams out, “We want the world and we want it now,” he says, “See the light. Save us, Jesus, Save us.” And the light, meaning love, the sun and the dawn, are the prevailing themes in The Doors, not the dark, the night, the chaos and the abyss.

Many critics focused on Jim Morrison's sex-appeal and 'bad boy' persona. Critics like George Will and Stephen Holden never got beyond their absurd impressions of Morrison as shallow sex symbol. Frank Lisciandro, Morrison's close friend, has written that a deliberate misinformation campaign about Morrison began while he was alive and is still operating today. Most of Morrison’s supposed exploits are, in Lisciandro’s view, a complete fabrication. "I asked him once how he dealt with all the trashtalk. Jim counseled me on the importance of growing a duck's back, so the vitriol rolled right off his back." Although Jim had many adventures, he was a gentleman. He called the groupies 'groovy ladies'. As Eva Gardonyi explained to Lisciandro, "Jim knew these girls who danced at The Phone Booth, the go-go dancers. He did know all the girls in there, he liked them and he respected them. He thought that these girls were honest. He had a real empathy for them." The list of vitriolic anti-Morrison critics is long: Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, George Will, Timothy White, Stephen Holden, Caryn James, Stuart Maconie, Richard Williams, Dwight Garner, Steve Heilig, Leonard Cassuto, Alex von Tunzelmann, even Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus occasionally. Marcus dissects the performance of The End at The Singer Bowl in 1968 where Morrison is in front of a cacophony of screaming and abusive fans, as a “bizarre, ugly seventeen minutes.” —Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine (2017) by David Shiang