“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
Jim Morrison
As a biopic, Stone’s The Doors is an amazing combination of realism & formalism, light & dark, color, and Mise en Scéne. Firstly, the film has a mixture of both realistic photography by keeping the film to the surface of reality having minimum amounts of distortion but also has key moments of formalistic photography with distorted and stylized moments. Most of the movie is shot in a realistic sense. As we are following the timeline of the band and Morrison, a lot of the film are events like real-life moments and actions so it would seem fair to assume that these shots are reproductions of the surface of reality. It makes the movie seem unmanipulated because it seems so accurate to a real documentary that it seems as if it is real life. However, there are key moments where formalism plays a very important part. A scene that sticks out to me is when The Doors are performing “Not to Touch the Earth”. Throughout this concert performance, Morrison seems to become wrapped up in some sort of native trance, which we can see clearly. AS Jim begins dancing around the stage, we get a point of view from keyboarder Ray Manzarek. We began to see shadows of native Americans pop up around Jim, dancing in a circle with him. This distorts our reality because obviously, they aren’t there, nor are they real at all, but at that moment, it seems like everything there is happening. Even when we pan to the crowd, we see all these random people some looking like natives some concert goers all intermingled with one another, people dancing and undressing, there’s not a clue as to what is real and distorted in this scene. Another important aspect throughout the movie is the use of lighting. There are many good uses of both high key and lowkey lighting. Personally, I believe that the use of low-key lighting is most important throughout Stone’s film. The scene that stands out to me is the part of the film where Jim and his fellow Doors attend Andy Warhol’s party. This is an interesting scene because this is a whole new moment for Jim and the band. There is a new type of environment that their fame really has not taken them to yet. This type of mystery and eeriness of the setting is complimented well by the constant low key dark lighting and shadows that take up most of the background. We only ever see small flickers of light whether it be some candlelight or dimly lit ceiling lights. This scene itself has many interesting aspects of Mise en Scéne that play well with what is happening throughout it. I felt that the framing was very important to this scene. We begin to realize that the environment Jim is in and the people surrounding him are very weird and different from what he has been used to. As he walks through the party, the frame is constantly spinning around and tilting back and forth, showing us the distortion Jim is most likely feeling as he walks through this unfamiliar setting. Even when he approaches Andy Warhol, you would expect either Jim or Andy to take the center of the frame as the most important elements of the visual, but the frame continues to wander up and downside to side, showing me in a way that there is no real center point of this scene and that everything there is really just one big mess.
