White at Sundance-- Day 2: Slamming The Doors Movie

With his seventh Sundance appearance, Tom DiCillo made his doc debut with When You're Strange, a problematic profile of The Doors. Sundance programmer David Courier prefaced the screening by reading a note from DiCillo disclaiming the claim that a film by and starring band head Jim Morrison that figures throughout When You're Strange was a reenactment. (Apparently, a distributor had stormed out of an earlier screening because of that misperception.). The film, which depicts a bearded Morrison wandering and driving on a desert highway, works fairly well as a structuring element, although the scene of Morrison turning on the car radio to hear a report of his own death was what probably raised hackles with the No Reenactment movement--and struck me as hokey creative licensing on DiCillo's part.

What irked me most about When You're Strange is its abundance of factual inaccuracies, particularly in DiCillo's ham-fisted attempt (he wrote and delivered the narration) to yoke the artistic and commercial success of The Doors to the cultural zeitgeist of the era. One jaw-dropper: According to DiCillo, the Vietnam War ended in 1972, some three years before it actually did; in addition, the Kent State massacre occurred after Jimi Hendrix died, when it actually happened five months before; the youth, peace and love movement that partly defined the Sixties came to a symbolic end not at Altamont, which is never mentioned in the film, but at the Isle of Wight Festival, where fans tried to crash the concert by tearing down a fence (The Horror!); the demise of The Doors ushered in more insipid music from the likes of the Monkees, who had actually broken up-and gone off the air-- long before The Doors had.

Although DiCillo was given a treasure trove of footage--rehearsals, concerts, home movies--from the surviving members of The Doors, he constantly muddles the chronology of the narrative (although, to his credit, he eschews the shopworn talking heads device). In one scene, it's 1969, and The Doors are struggling to make their album The Soft Parade, amid Morrison's alcoholic binges and increasingly erratic behavior, then it's 1967, when Morrison is arrested in New Haven , Conn., after taunting the police on stage. Later in the film, we see The Doors performing at the aforementioned Isle of Wight concert in 1970, which prompts DiCillo to revisit 1968, since, ooops! he forgot to mention what happened that year!

When you have as unreliable a narrator as DiCillo, the accusations of reenactment are beside the point. But he strode to the stage for the post-screening Q&A, seemingly in a dither about the charges, and showed his annoyance at an audience member who questioned the validity of the Morrison film. Earlier, he asked the audience, "Was there inaccuracy in what you saw?" Well, I kinda like facts, and I consider it my job to check them. Maybe David Byrne was right when he sang, "Facts just twist the truth around," but I like to think that facts lend a bit of truthiness to the process.