Jim Morrison, Oliver Stone, and the Quest for the Sixties

Tischler | Jim Morrison, Oliver Stone, and the Quest for the Sixties Barbara L Tischler Teachers College, Columbia University Jim Morrison, Oliver Stone, and the Quest for the Sixties Jim Morrison's (Val Kilmer) performances mesmerize audiences while his defiant behavior causesfrequent run-inswith the law. 38 I Film & History Oliver Stone as Cinematic Historian | Special In-Depth Section Who "owns" the Sixties? This is hardly a frivolous question because, as the millenium approaches, the decade recedes into the realm oflong-distant memory for most Americans. While analysts, including professional historians, continue to generate a steady output of '60s books and articles, new research that enahnces our understanding of this complex period takes a long time to "trickle down" to teaching, textbooks, and the everyday world. The passage of time, along with the imperatives of the same commercial culture that many 1960s activists decried, dictates that many ofour images of this important period come from sources outside the academy. In the 1990s world of sound bytes and infomercials, we know what we know about the 1960s from advertising images, musical re-makes and fashion revivals, PBS and CNN documentaries, retrospectives of events such as Woodstock, the memories of those who "were there" — and, of course, feature films. Oliver Stone is not the only purveyer of sixties images, but he is certainly among the best known American writers and directors who has chosen to present his personal history and that ofhis country on film. In doing so, Stone walks the line between history and art, often blurring the distictions of the former in order to achieve the latter. Historians and audiences can applaud his efforts while pondering whether what they have seen is "true" and the extent to which truth contributes to or is incompatible with art. Ifhistorians are concerned with revealing the truth (or at least pieces of the history puzzle that might lead to a greater degree ofunderstanding), filmmakers devote their creative attention primarily to visuality, emotionality , and, inevitably, marketability. In Stone's sixties films, the concerns of the filmmaker predominate over those of the historian, which necessarily lurk beneath the surface. If Oliver Stone were simply a popular creator of cinematic images with little or no concern for representation beyond a visual concept, professional historians could cede the sixties to him, at least in commercial terms. But Oliver Stone is a cinematic historian, and the power ofhis images on film renders the question of ownership important. Stone's sixties films force audiences to consider their own relationship to the Vietnam war, the presidency and assassination ofJFK, and the culture that became popularly identified with sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Stone's films also encourage historians to contemplate the extent to which his work as an artist contributes to the historian's search for understanding of the era. In 1991, George Will wrote in a Newsweek review of The Doors that "The Sixties are now nostalgia , kitsch junk among the clutter in the nation's mental attic."1 For this commentater cum curmudgeon , sixties culture is not worth owning and whatever legacy the decade has left us is not worth very much either. The political and cultural radicals who are still energetic enough to cause trouble for a now complacent and comfortably conservative society are a pain in the national neck—they remind us with shrill voices that the United States has a radical political heritage and that the emergence ofpowerful civil rights and Black Power movements, the founding of chapters of Students for a Democratic Society on hundreds ofcollege campuses, the recognition of the power ofyouth culture, and the declaration ofa new feminism all represented a flowering of that tradition. In short, for Will and other conservative commentators , sixties liberalism is fit only for the historical scrapheap—along with love beads, peace signs, bell bottoms, and roach clips. Mr. Will's comments notwithstanding, historians, the thousands of students who flock to classes on post-World War II America to learn about what they feel they missed, and Oliver Stone disagree. Historians conduct ever more prodigious research using myriad sources to paint an ever more complex picture of the legacies of the period, many students hope to recover a...