This poem is about the movie "The Doors" about the band The Doors about the rectangular furnishings placed in the space between rooms.
An Oliver Stone Movie
Dominique Lowell
Work at Carl's Jr. or go on G.A.
He just took some acid in the desert one day
And woke up a rockstar
Of course he was tortured
He was an artist and a poet and shit
He's supposed to be tortured
And he'd have these visions
Of naked Indians and medicine men
Big ol bad Jim Morrison
He really thought he was a lizard
Poor ol tortured guy
and these journalists would drink his blood
In these weird ass satanic rituals
But boy oh boy that Jim could party
Damn he sure could drink
And he showed everyone his prick
And got arrested and got all fat
But he didn't give a fuck
He had a really fine bitchin girlfriend
And he smacked her around but it was cool
She could take it
And she understood
When she found him dead in the bathtub
I hate The Doors. The band, that is: lounge jazz meets drugs meets crummy third-rate poetry. I kind of like "The Doors" the movie. And I am an absolute fan of the doors that let me travel from outside to inside and back again. But this poem is pretty great - it really is a thumbnail sketch of the self-parody that is Jim Morrison. Frankly, at this point all anybody remembers of him is Val Kilmer out-lizarding the Lizard King.
This is also another problem with biopics, a genre I've ragged on before. You take a complex person, mythologize and lionize them, give a greatest hits blow-by-blow of the most tawdry and/or melodramatic spectacles in their life, and end with a teary-eyed farewell to someone "who gave so much to the world."
I hope the real Jim Morrison wasn't that one-dimensional. I'm pretty sure he was just a big a douchebag, but he was a complicated douchebag. On the other hand, making him more complicated would have meant the movie went longer, which is more time spent in the unpleasant company of Iceman pretending to be Mr. Mojo Rising. After all, he smacked us around but it was cool.
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