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When You’re Strange

Director: Tom Dicillo, $34.95

Reviewed by Joshua Maule

02 May 2011

2:07pm Monday, 2nd May 2011

Jim Morrison's band mates vamp on a blues groove as the drug-induced singer casts his body to the ground again and again. A mass of crazed fans watch, and are held off the stage by a line of police officers who seem unsure whether to help Morrison. Is he performing or possessed?

The scene is a fleeting moment in 'When You're Strange', a documentary chronicling The Doors' very short career, but it couldn't sum up their anti-authoritarianism any better.

Such is the film's motif: the lewd alongside the restrictive.

First there is Morrison's stuffy upbringing with a father in the military. Then there is his estrangement from his family (they discover the The Doors' first album when someone suggests the man on the cover "looks like Jim"). Then there is Morrison's decision to include the word "higher" when performing 'Light My Fire' on the Ed Sullivan Show; after promising he wouldn't. And this is to say nothing of his public exposure and advances on another man's girlfriend.

As narrator Johnny Depp says: "To Jim, obedience is suicide."

The documentary is a tumultuous ride through the psyche of the would-be revolutionary who had nothing in particular to say. It is a dramatic and tragic portrait of a man who at times seemed to want to escape the limelight and retreat altogether. His foray into poetry, for instance, was a search for the "pure".

But the film's greatest success is its attempt to unlock motives - those of Morrison, his band, and his fans. To be sidetracked by Morrison's unpredictability would be a mistake. Instead, we should reflect on what drove him and why he had the hearing he did.

Morrison offered his generation quasi-freedom - from expectations, boundaries, and conservatism - in much the same way Eminem has in ours. For Morrison however, such freedom was never attained. The flashes of release he achieved for himself and his hearers were not anything near complete. And for Morrison, it ended in a bath tub in 1971.