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I first felt the need to write a review of Jim Morrison's art film, "HWY,"
after I read two online ratings giving it a 1 and a 3 out of 10. It made me
realize that people are not understanding this film. To understand it, one
must keep in mind that Jim considered himself to be a poet above all, and that
after
Miami he was more than ever desirous to extend himself beyond music and
more into poetry, and breaking through further to new frontiers in film. His
vision and desire for film was to break on through and exceed even his best
and highest visionary work as exemplified in his highest artistic
achievements
in epics such as "The End" and "When the Music's Over."
In this artistic context we are given "HWY" without a knowledge of how much he felt he achieved of his vision in this unfinished work. Unless there are written records or friends with memories of his comments, we do not know how much he felt he accomplished in this piece. There is obviously genius in evidence here, but was it just an initial exploratory dabbling, or did he achieve 20% of what he envisioned, or 80%? While there is some legitimacy in the concept that he just wanted to take the camera and see where it took him, just as he liked to do in the improvisational sections of the concerts, there is nevertheless a direction and a carefully crafted element to the film as well. Interpretation of the film is not possible without some familiarity with the use of symbolism in art. In making "Wilderness, The Lost Writings of Jim Morrision," Lisciandro makes reference to the fact that he wanted to choose the poems that were accessible to the average music fan who was curious about the poetry. But this is obviously not adequate, because if we eliminate the deeper material, we only become familiar with Jim's work at its lightest and easiest and miss out on his deepest and most profound work. Thus with Morrison poetry being taught in college, there is need for a definitive and comprehensive book of all his poetry. Likewise, with "HWY" being somewhat difficult and inaccessible, it nevertheless needs to be addressed to fully understand the depth of Jim Morrison as an artist. In comparative literature we are taught that nothing exists by itself, but only in comparison to something else. So the first clue as the movie opens is that Jim is in the desert, but we are shown a waterfall. So, desert represents death, water represents life, and the waterfall, the fountains of life. When we first see Jim, he is immersed in water, a symbol of the womb, and his emergence from the water represents birth. Tribal music here, contrasted to civilized music later, suggests the birth of a shaman. We then see images of Jim basking in the joy of life, and then he undertakes a journey. One of the common complaints about the film are these long passages of shots of Jim's journey. There has been some comment that this is just Jim's working in the milieu of his time where these long passages were typical of art house cinema of the time. But it is more than that. The version of "2001 - A Space Odyssey" that was commonly shown was a shortened version. The first version released contained long, boring shots of the space ship traveling through space. Kubrick's intent was to illustrate the immensity of space and how long it takes to engage in space travel. This is based on Homer's "The Odyssey" where the same effect was used to illustrate the immensity of the ocean and how long it takes to engage in sea travel. But the audiences didn't get it, and so they had to withdraw the initial print and shorten it.
In "HWY," the lengthiness of the journey is also deliberate, but it serves
multiple and different functions. The first clue is to get you to
understand that this story is about a journey, so Jim had to make the
journey passages long enough to make sure you got the point. Any shorter,
and it would have looked like just another scene. More specifically, in
artistic terms, it is about the hero's journey. Since the days of the story
of Prometheus breaking on through to the other side to steal fire from the
gods and bring it back to earth to benefit mankind, the genre of the hero's
journey has always been about crossing the threshold to the divine and
bringing back something for mankind. This is what Jim does when he
breaks on through and brings his music and poetry back for our benefit.
For an introduction to this concept, Joseph Campbell has published some
excellent work on this matter. For a brief treatment, see:
For a more thorough treatment, see: So, while I already gave away the ending (did you catch it?), as they say, the journey is often more important than the destination, so let's see what else is here. The film is called "HWY," but is subtitled "An American Pastoral." This is another exercise in contrasts, the bleakness of a highway and the beauty of nature. Perhaps that is why Jim insisted the movie is called "HWY," not "HIGHWAY," because something is missing besides the letters. The sirens sounding over the highway shots on the opening credits suggest an invalid authority is a contributor to the bleakness of man-made society. So the next function of the journey passages is to give a sense of the beauty and serenity of nature. It is important that this section was long in order to build the sense of serenity and beauty to form a strong enough contrast to the bleakness of the highway and city sections. So we are done with that; let's move on to the highway section. It starts out with Jim's hitchhiking, but no one picks him up, a sort of bleak commentary on man's inhumanity to man. As an aside, the scene of Jim getting out of the car in the sand adds another element of commentary. It seems he just found the car that way, since it is already buried and looks like someone had to do some digging to get a door open (oops! trying to open a door and break on through?! - it's hard work!), and his rage on breaking the windshield seems to indicate that he didn't find anything in it. Maybe a commentary on those who try to find fulfillment in cars? It's empty, there's nothing there. Then Jim arrives at the accident scene with the dying coyote. Tourists pass through like he and his family in his childhood. A frightened dog reflects his statement that he felt fear for the first time. In the shamanism section of "Break on Through," Riordan and Prochnicky state that after the hero breaks on through to the other side, an animal guide often accompanies the hero on his journey, which agrees with Joseph Campbell's work, as I recall. The shamanism section also discusses the importance of intense drumming, and as the camera zooms in on the coyote, the drumming reaches a fever pitch, and when the coyote gives his death scream, Jim also screams with the madness of its spirit entering him. The other point in the shamanism section is that two of the three modes of the spiritual creation of a shaman occurs with the shaman's encounter with death, either his own near-death, or in an encounter with another's death. At this point Jim begins to use a technique of using double iterations to illustrate meanings. For example, on the theme of an animal guide, we have first the dead coyote, then we have the soundtrack feature a song about a "strange black bird," "circling over me," "gonna set me free." On the theme of an encounter with death, first we have the dying coyote, then we have the driver of the Mustang that he killed. On the theme of a guide, again we have the song about the bird, then we have Jim reading a map to illustrate guidance. The question arises, why did Jim kill the Mustang driver? Obviously Jim is not the killing type, as reflected by his discomfort with the song, "Tell All the People." So what is he saying here? The explanation, which doesn't come until the end of the film, is that he couldn't deal with what the driver was saying. This is an indirect reference to the Oedipal theme, indirect because it makes no reference to it and it contains none of the other overtones. It is simply a continuation of what has previously been explored about the significance of killing father meaning destroying all that is within you that is untrue and was imposed upon you from without. On the other hand, if you look at the film as a whole rather than taking this scene in isolation, then the entire work can be seen as Jim's Oedipal statement, with the nature scenes of the first half being about the goodness of the mother, and the man-made portions from the highway onward representing the negative things imposed upon the earth by a society dominated by fathers. Continuing the technique of double illustration, the madness and mental derangement in the creation of this shaman is illustrated first by the madness of killing the Mustang driver, and secondly by the madness of whirling the Mustang in circles. Once he settles down, the journey of the shaman continues. As he begins to approach civilization, we see humanity through the shaman's eye, which is a view endowed with vision and wisdom which is more profound than our mundane views. So look and watch what the divine eye has to reveal to you about humanity. As he arrives in the human habitat zones, there is a variety of music styles to reflect the diversity of humanity in the double illustrative technique again. Further analysis could probably be made of each type of music, but two are of note. We first see the poor black section with its black gospel and blues music which were early forms important in Jim's musical development. This music, this zone, is that of suffering humanity, that part of humanity which has feeling and soul. As he approaches the affluent white area, the music changes to emptiness of Sinatra's "My Way" and cerebral, cultured, but empty and cold classical music, illustrating the lovelessness of the Establishment that the love generation rebelled against. When he arrives at his destination, he reveals the motive for the killing, and talks about it in detached matter-of-fact tones, as though it were nothing. Of course, if it were not a literal killing, but rather the purging of that which is within, then actually it is nothing, except to himself. I am not sure what to make of the scene on Jim walking out on a roof ledge. Most of the accounts of this behavior of Jim's seem to take it as a crazy and foolish antic. But for it to be included in his movie right at the climax seems to indicate that it had more significance to him. Perhaps it was no more than a part of his feeling about the importance of deranging the senses to break on through. This would harmonize with the quest for sex and LSD in the closing scenes. The final scenes are of the night life of LA and the night club scene. This is where the shaman gives the fire he stole from heaven to the people of the earth, where Jim Morrison worked with The Doors in night clubs to bring his vision to the people. One interesting vision precedes Osama bin Laden by 30 years. He said he got the inspiration for the September 11 attacks by watching TV scenes of buildings being destroyed by bombs in the middle east and thought how wonderful it would be if America could experience cities being bombed. In the closing scene we hear the sounds of bombs falling on Los Angeles like they were falling in Vietnam. This is what the film says to me without knowledge of anything Jim or those who worked on it with him have said about it. Perhaps these people have information which would change some of these perspectives. Maybe some would say this whole article is nonsense. But to all those (another thing I learned in college) even the academics have an answer: the artist receives inspiration at the feet of the Muses, and even the artist himself does not perceive or completely understand everything he is receiving!
John Kolak is a graduate of the Department of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. The Doors was the first LP he ever purchased in junior high school, making him one of those teenagers that surprised Ray when he said he thought they played to intellectuals. What he forgot was that even intellectuals were once teenagers! After 30 years away from the Doors, he has finally renewed his subscription to the Doors resurrection.
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