My favourite moment in Oliver Stone’s exhilarating, grotesque, heroically ridiculous biopic The Doors isn’t even in the movie itself: it’s in the parody that appears during Wayne’s World 2, in which Mike Myers’s Wayne, having been visited in a dream by the ghost of Jim Morrison, relays his experience to the veteran roadie Del Preston, played by Withnail & I’s indelible geezer Ralph Brown. “Didn’t you think it was a trifle unnecessary,” reasons Del, who had the same vision of the Lizard King and his Native American guide, “to see the crack in the Indian’s bottom?”
The scene might goof on Stone’s film – in which Morrison believes himself possessed by the spirit of a Navajo man – on its wobbly mysticism, gonzo indulgence and rock ’n’ roll bacchanalia, but it also pays tribute to a movie that succeeds precisely because it leans into those very qualities. As an account of the 1960s West Coast icons who soundtracked the demise of the decade, The Doors is a film perfectly synchronised to its subject, staggering down the road of excess in search of a palace of wisdom, or maybe just the next whisky bar. And none of it would work, of course, without the electrifying lead performance by the late Val Kilmer.
