There’s something that has always struck me as undeniably teen-age about loving the Doors, and particularly its lead singer, Jim Morrison. The rock group, which was active for only eight years, from 1965 until two years after Morrison’s death, at twenty-seven, in 1971, offers an irresistible proposition to the excitable pubescent mind: flagrantly poetic lyrics chock-full of copulation and death and madness, scored by the haunting sounds of an organ, and sung by a black-leather-clad bad-boy crooner who was “so cute that no woman was safe,” as the essayist Eve Babitz once wrote. When I began listening to the Doors as a fourteen-year-old, it felt both important and erotic, as if I were taking my first steps into a new and dangerous adult world. This was music meant to arouse wonder and yearning. Put another way—and I swear I don’t mean this negatively—this was music for virgins who had just found out about sex.
In “Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison,” a new three-part documentary now streaming on Apple TV+, the director Jeff Finn recalls hearing the Doors as a young child and thinking that the eerie sounds were “Halloween music.” But he pegs the beginning of his real obsession with the band and its lead singer to his teen years. “I was hooked,” he says. The group’s music and imagery spoke to him, but so did the tale of Morrison’s short, tumultuous life and, especially, his death, which has always been shrouded in some mystery. In the spring of 1971, the singer decided to take a break from the Doors to pursue his poetry—which he published under his full name, the more self-consciously grownup “James Douglas Morrison”—and decamped to Paris with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. Only four months later, in the early-morning hours of July 3rd, Courson discovered his body in the bathtub of their Marais apartment, and the singer was buried a couple of days later at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Morrison’s death certificate stated that he had experienced heart failure, but Finn had questions. Why was no autopsy performed? Who was “Dr. Max Vassille,” the man who allegedly signed the certificate, and why couldn’t he be found after the fact? Why was Morrison’s coffin sealed? Why was his American passport never recovered? And what about the singer’s purported desire, commented on by more than one friend, to fake his own death and shed his burdensome rock-star persona? The story of Morrison’s end, Finn tells us sonorously, is “a cold-case mystery” that “raises the question of collusion.”
Finn is hardly the first to cast doubt on the official narrative of Morrison’s death. In his memoir “Wonderland Avenue,” the Doors associate Danny Sugerman (who also co-wrote the best-selling 1980 Morrison biography “No One Here Gets Out Alive”) recounts the propensity of fans to spot the singer in places as far-flung as Congo and the Australian outback, long after his passing. (“Morrison, meanwhile, refuses to stay dead,” Sugerman writes.) Finn’s professed intention in “Before the End” is to finally put these speculations to the test and investigate what really happened to Morrison. “I’ve made it my life’s work to extract the truth from a fifty-year-old tale,” he says. Nothing if not single-minded, he notes that “since I was eighteen, [I’ve been] searching for Jim Morrison, literally and figuratively.”
The main issue with “Before the End,” though, is that Finn allows the figurative aspects of his quest to cloud the literal, and a viewer who’s hoping to find out some hard-and-fast facts about Morrison’s post-1971 whereabouts will most likely be disappointed. In the course of his decades-long investigation into the singer’s life and death, Finn says, he has interviewed hundreds of people connected to Morrison—childhood friends, family members, old lovers—and crisscrossed the country several times in the hunt for clues and answers. And yet the series is less a document of careful sleuthing and more a shaggy chronicle of teen-like longing for revelation and salvation.
The register of Finn’s voice-over narration might be our first clue that “Before the End” will not be cracking the case in any conventional investigative sense. “Join me as I dive down into the Morrison rabbit hole, but I can’t guarantee you’ll make it back with your sanity fully intact,” he intones early in the series, sounding like a guy who’s about to show you how Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” synchs up perfectly with “The Wizard of Oz.” (Generally speaking, Finn tends to traffic in hyperbole: the details he shares with the viewer are often “mind-boggling,” or have left his “mind reeling”; after hearing a certain surprising tidbit from a source, he says, his “jaw needed to be removed from the floor.”) This melodramatic stoner’s vernacular is evident, too, in the visual language of the documentary, which consists of shakily shot source interviews, haphazard street views, and seemingly free-use archival materials, sporadically overlaid with what look like iMovie effects and graphics. Despite the somewhat surprising nature of the series’ offering on Tim Cook’s streaming service, it has the amateur argot of conspiracist rock docs on a budget, often made by fans for fans on YouTube or Facebook, with claims to investigate the real truth behind Kurt Cobain’s suicide, or Avril Lavigne’s supposed death and replacement by a double.
Facebook, too, is where Finn first came to pursue what becomes the main claim in “Before the End.” Morrison, he believes, did not die but is, in fact, “hiding in plain sight” in Syracuse, living out his life as a bald, white-bearded maintenance worker named “Frank,” whose picture Finn initially spotted when Frank followed the Facebook page that he created for his in-progress documentary. Finn has reached this hypothesis, he tells us, thanks to an “absurd amount of growing coincidences” that, he says, have left him “dizzy.” Among these supposed shockers are the revelation that Frank, much like Morrison, is a lover of Baudelaire’s poetry; that both men seem to be baritones; that Frank appears to be connected to some of Morrison’s friends (in one of his Facebook pictures, he poses with the Doors drummer John Densmore, though Densmore isn’t interviewed for the series, and, for whatever reason, nor are any other Frank and Morrison mutuals); and that his apparently brown eyes might be colored contact lenses, which Finn suspects he uses to conceal the original blue of his—Morrison’s—eyes.
When a doctor tells Finn that the blue ringing Frank’s brown irises is probably not the effect of colored contact lenses but is, instead, likely a symptom of arcus senilis, a common ocular condition in older adults, the director is disappointed. (“You think you’ve got it lying right there, and then it’s always . . . you’re always just . . .” he trails off, indicating an unbridgeable gap between his two hands.) Still, he continues to forge ahead, and even steals a water glass that might carry Frank’s fingerprints and DNA. You might be able to guess by this point that what follows in Finn’s investigation doesn’t exactly yield open-and-shut conclusions, but as I watched the series, it began to occur to me that this might not be what actually matters here. Toward the end of the documentary’s third and final part, Finn meets with three of Morrison’s former girlfriends in order to show them a current picture of Frank side by side with an archival picture of the singer. The women, all senior citizens by now, are skeptical at first. “That’s the Jim I remember, right there,” says one, pointing to the image of the young Morrison. “Jim’s eyes were blue,” says another. But after a while, as they keep looking, they soften, becoming more convinced. “How did you not just jump out of your skin?” says the one who started out most reluctant. “That literally could be Jim,” the second admits. The third begins to cry, overwhelmed. “After fifty years, the expert ladies each saw what I saw,” Finn says. “A haunting resemblance between Jim and Frank.” As I watched, I felt myself wanting to be swept up, too, in what Finn sees and believes. Wouldn’t it be nice if Jim Morrison were still alive and living in Syracuse? Wouldn’t it be nice if the bad things that we thought had happened actually hadn’t? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hold on, just for a moment longer, to what we dreamed of when we were kids? ♦
