Val Kilmer: From Voice of God to Rock Legend
Val Kilmer (left) and director Oliver Stone on the set of The Doors in 1991 – Photo: Rolling Stone
“I tell you we must die. I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die,” Jim Morrison’s classic Alabama Whiskey plays in the Doors biopic, right when everything was just starting for the band: the fame, the contracts, the teenage adoration.
The legendary Jim Morrison, founder of The Doors, died in 1971, at the age of 27. Twenty years later, director Oliver Stone made a biopic about him, considering everyone from Johnny Depp to Tom Cruise, from John Travolta to Richard Gere for the role. The role eventually went to Val Kilmer, “the most under-recognized leading man of his generation,” as Roger Ebert put it.
And when you consider that it was Kilmer who voiced both God and Moses – from the child of Israel accidentally raised by an Egyptian pharaoh to the spiritual leader of the ancient Jewish people crossing the Red Sea – in the animated classic The Prince of Egypt, you can only marvel at how this same man could move from a biblical legend to a wild, unruly rock legend, indulging in pleasure and ecstasy.
Val Kilmer’s last appearance on the silver screen was in Top Gun Maverick.
In the first time Val Kilmer sang in The Doors, singing with the other members during a home rehearsal in front of his girlfriends, he sang: “Yeah, you know that day always destroys night, and night always divides day.”
Kilmer’s voice radiates an aura of mystery, both primitive and hypnotic, both sage and angry, leaving the audience speechless: has Jim Morrison come to life and possessed Kilmer?
The actor is the real Jim Morrison in every scene: when he stands on stage in ecstasy, almost losing control and begins to tell a story with the taboo color of the Oedipus complex; when he participates in magic games with his lover; when he does not compromise with any institution, boldly goes live to sing “indecent” lyrics, determined not to change a single word; when he incites a debauched party, turning rock into a spell that captivates young men and women yearning for freedom.
There was no need to resort to the sophisticated, modern voice mixing techniques that are often used today to help contemporary actors play the roles of the past, such as Austin Butler playing Elvis Presley or Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury. Kilmer used his real voice, and even the surviving members of The Doors sometimes couldn’t tell what was real and what was fake when they heard him sing.
Val Kilmer’s version of Batman in Batman: Forever – Photo: Warner Bros
Jim Morrison has been dead for more than half a century, and Val Kilmer – who portrayed him – is no more. In the final scene of The Doors, Oliver Stone placed footage of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where so many once-brilliant people are now left with only ashes: Balzac, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Bizet, Édith Piaf… – all people who did not succumb to life but still succumbed to death.
It is true that all humans must die, but to borrow the verses of Jim Morrison: “Death turns us all into angels, gives us wings. Where once there were only smooth shoulders, now they are as cold as crow’s claws.”
The loss of Val Kilmer thus makes us nostalgic for a bygone and distant Hollywood era, when actors had few resources or technology to rely on other than themselves.
But like all the ironies in this world, with a beautiful voice, Val Kilmer in his last years suffered from some illnesses that gradually took away his voice and to speak, there was a time when he had to plug an electronic voice box into his throat.
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