This Is “The End”: A Video Exploration of The Doors’ Existential Epic

If you had bro­ken up with your col­lege boyfriend and he told you that he writ­ten an 11-minute song about you while on enough LSD to kill a horse, would you want to hear it? Or would you block his num­ber on your phone?

Or maybe because said boyfriend is Jim Mor­ri­son and the band is the Doors and the song is “The End,” we’ll let it slide, because whether or not you think Jim’s lyrics are super deep or super­cil­ious, the groove is unde­ni­able, four small fur­ry musi­cians gath­ered togeth­er in a stu­dio and groov­ing on a raga, con­jur­ing up East­ern mys­ti­cism with West­ern instru­ments.

In Polyphonic’s explain­er video on “The End,” he pulls apart The Doors’ mag­num opus, the clos­er to its 1967 debut album, ana­lyz­ing the song in real time as it unspools. (There’s a few moments where Poly­phon­ic and Mor­ri­son are vocal­iz­ing at the same time—we rec­om­mend turn­ing on cap­tions).

The girl­friend in ques­tion was Mary Wer­be­low, Morrison’s steady in the ear­ly ‘60s before he chose the path of putting his poet­ry to music. The Werbelow/Morrison cou­ple had to die for the Doors to be born, in a sense, and Mor­ri­son start­ed the lyrics as a good­bye song, a stan­dard pop trope at the time. (There’s a very touch­ing, rare inter­view with Wer­be­low here). But Mor­ri­son took it in anoth­er direc­tion, we could say.

“The End” might be the first musi­cal exam­ple of the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre. Defined by Noah Segan and Adam Egypt Mor­timer when talk­ing about film, the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre “uses dream imagery, para­nor­mal ideas, or the hor­ror genre to express the emo­tion­al dra­ma of heart­break.” Segan and Mortimer’s def­i­n­i­tion deals only with film, but Mor­ri­son does the same thing with song, a lit­tle over ten years before the films they dis­cuss. “The End” is a breakup song that breaks down the psy­che like LSD, send­ing the injured par­ty back to basics, and into a uni­verse of arche­types. Things are dying. Things are being reborn. There’s a blue bus which is call­ing us, and that is either a ref­er­ence to the Solar Boat in Egypt­ian mythol­o­gy or a ref­er­ence to the San­ta Mon­i­ca bus sys­tem (accord­ing to one wag in the com­ments). Or hey, maybe it is both, because Mor­ri­son is tap­ping into some­thing here, much like James Joyce cre­at­ed lay­ers of myth with­in the quo­tid­i­an. (Mor­ri­son achieves this by walk­ing back­wards into it, how­ev­er.)

Poly­phon­ic gets into the song’s Oedi­pal Cliff Notes sec­tion, describ­ing how it all came flum­ing out of Mor­ri­son on stage, the band hav­ing dragged him to a gig at the Whiskey a Go-Go after he con­sumed “10,000 mikes” (i.e. 10,000 micro­grams, about ten full dos­es) of LSD. A few days lat­er the “kill your teach­ers, kill your par­ents” riff was com­mit­ted to tape, this time also on LSD.

For all its pre­tense the song still works. And though Mor­ri­son nev­er did rec­on­cile with his girl­friend, the song did find its soul mate when Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la used “The End” as the open­ing to Apoc­a­lypse Now, anoth­er work of art that drained the life force from its cre­ator. There are no real cov­er ver­sions of “The End,” and there are no films past Coppola’s that can use it with­out irony. It exists like a totem, to be found and puz­zled over.

(But because this is late cap­i­tal­ism and every­thing is ter­ri­ble, Polyphonic’s segue into a spon­sor ad at 11:46 is some­thing won­drous to behold in its per­verse beau­ty. Be warned, my only friend.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Doors’ Ray Man­zarek Walks You Through the Writ­ing of the Band’s Icon­ic Song, “Rid­ers on the Storm”

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

A Young, Clean Cut Jim Mor­ri­son Appears in a 1962 Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­mo Film

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.