By Leo Dagianti.
When I listen to The Doors, I feel like I am transported to a desert with a half-drunk bottle of whisky. Everything is hazy. There is a feeling of frenetic nothingness backed by cynicism. It evokes the thinking man’s detachedness – I am here and I am alone and there are answers to be found at the bottom of this bottle. Their work contains a distinctly masculine air, rooted far deeper than the simple fact that Morrison is a man. Considering the central role that activism played in the creation of The Doors’ music, as well as their personas as proto-punk contrarians, there seems to be a disconnect between the essence of the masculinity and how that is portrayed throughout their lyrics.
The American Man of the time was a bread winner; white collar starched and stiff, duty was seated as his central concern. This duty extended to a variety of realms, from duty to family through to duty to country. It is important to note that at the time of The Doors recording their self-titled album, the Vietnam War had been raging for 11 years. There was anger brewing amongst the American youth, and it was no longer targeted solely at the military. The anger began to strike against the generation before, who were seen as having stood idly, watching the war rage. The sentiments of the Beat Generation were still alive and well: rampant drug use, freed sexuality, uprooting of gender roles. The subversion of masculine duty was total masculine liberation. On the Road by Jack Kerouac distils this ideology into its purest form – the story of a man who leaves his familial responsibilities behind to venture, uninhibited, into western America. The story involves a cocktail of mind-expanding drugs, poetry, close male relationships, and promiscuity. Every page of it feels like it is sticking its tongue out at the generation before.
That isn’t to say that the new man forgot those who came before him. The spaghetti western narrative of the great frontier, of exploring something new and creating a vision of life from scratch, was central to the allure of the Beat generation. They still echoed the themes of dominance that their predecessors held dear, preferring dominance over the constraints of the human mind rather than over nature. This was intoxicating to the counter-culture youth of 60’s America, who came to idolise these artists and in turn a masculinity that lauded the ideal of freedom from the lethargy of suburbia. The freed man was one who took charge not of the family but of himself, who manifested his own destiny.
In William S. Burroughs’ book, Queer, we are given a glimpse of Beat life in New Mexico City in the 50s – one that carried many of the typical tropes of hedonism and detachedness. Burroughs himself was a vision of a Beat man: he was on and off of heroin for a number of year and wandered between cities with his wife, who he accidentally shot and killed in 1951 while drunk. The protagonist of the book, Lee, seeks peyote after receiving word that it holds the potential for mind control. Much like Burroughs, Lee is rarely sober and regularly detached from reality. The book, initially set in a small quarter of Mexico City, rarely makes reference to any part of Mexico. Lee eats at an American diner, watches French films and talks about Rome. There is an isolation even from the place where he has chosen to isolate himself. That isn’t even to mention the cynicism with which he regards everyone in his life, and how this only serves to tear him apart from reality further. To a modern audience, the book reads as an indictment of the freedom seeking Beat generation more than a praise of it.
To label the Beat authors as purely hedonistic is to ignore the anti-establishment roots to their ideology, but their methodology often held a selfishness highlighted by the way ideas of masculinity that emerged in their writing. Masculinity to the Beat generation became reactionary: a boy’s club of men dedicated to rebelling against what their dads tell them is right.
Here, we can distinguish between Morrison’s work within The Doors and the somewhat misguided sentiment of the Beat Generation. Whilst a disciple of the Beat authors, Morrison’s masculinity holds political action at the centre of its ethos. The son of a Navy admiral, Morrison’s own paternal rebellion was always characterised by anti-military sentiment. After telling his father of his plans to go into music, his dad told him that he should do something worthwhile to society. This dismissal grossly underestimated the political impact that The Doors’ work would have. Their music incited vicious anger at the paternalistic forces of the Johnson administration, who held power during the peak of The Doors’ popularity.
Their music, whilst speaking of an isolation and depression so deeply reminiscent of that espoused by the Beat generation, became a call to arms in a way that the Beats failed to bring to fruition. It is this, to me, that makes the Doors such an incredible band. The perfect balance of detachedness and despondency matched with real political change. The lyrics are far from defeatist, far from fatalistic. Morrison comes off as an inebriated messiah of sorts, leading people towards a world that is truly different, truly better.