What is the reason for our desire to believe that Jim Morrison is still alive?

The singer died in 1971. According to a new documentary series, he faked his death to avoid the pressures of celebrity and is now living in secret.

There’s something inherently teen-age about admiring the Doors, particularly their lead vocalist, Jim Morrison. The rock group, which was active for only eight years, from 1965 to 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, 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 was fourteen years old, I started listening to the Doors. It seemed both serious and sexy, like if I was taking my first steps into a new and frightening adult world. This was music designed to evoke amazement and longing. Put another way—and I promise I don’t mean this negatively—this was music for virgins who had recently discovered sex.

In “Before the End: Searching for Jim Morrison,” a new three-part documentary now available on Apple TV+, filmmaker Jeff Finn recalls hearing the Doors as a youngster and believing the ominous noises were “Halloween music.” But he attributes the beginning of his true fascination with the band and its lead vocalist to his adolescence. “I was hooked,” he admits. The group’s music and visuals resonated to him, but so did the story of Morrison’s brief, turbulent existence, particularly his death, which has long been shrouded in mystery. In the spring of 1971, the singer decided to take a hiatus from the Doors to pursue his poetry—which he published under his full name, the more self-consciously mature “James Douglas Morrison”—and moved to Paris with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. Four months later, on July 3rd, Courson discovered his death in the bathtub of their Marais flat, and the singer was buried a few days later in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Morrison’s death certificate indicated that he died of heart failure, but Finn questioned this. Why wasn’t an autopsy performed? Who was “Dr. Max Vassille,” the physician who purportedly signed the certificate, and why could he not be located after the fact? Why was Morrison’s coffin sealed? Why was his American passport never returned? What about the singer’s alleged wish, as expressed by more than one acquaintance, to fake his own death and leave his onerous rock-star persona? Finn describes Morrison’s death as “a cold-case mystery” that “raises the question of collusion.”

Finn is not the first to question the official account of Morrison’s death. In his memoir “Wonderland Avenue,” Doors collaborator Danny Sugerman (who also co-wrote the best-selling 1980 Morrison biography “No One Here Gets Out Alive”) describes how admirers would detect the singer in areas as far away as Congo and the Australian outback long after his death. “Morrison, meanwhile, refuses to stay dead,” says Sugerman. Finn’s stated purpose in “Before the End” is to finally put these theories to the test and discover what actually happened to Morrison. “I’ve made it my life’s work to extract the truth from a fifty-year-old tale,” he tells me. Nothing if not determined, he says that “since I was eighteen, [I’ve been] searching for Jim Morrison, literally and figuratively.”

The biggest problem with “Before the End,” however, is that Finn lets the figurative components of his search to muddle the literal, and a viewer looking to learn some hard-and-fast facts regarding Morrison’s post-1971 whereabouts would most certainly be disappointed. Finn claims that throughout his decades-long study into Morrison’s life and death, he questioned hundreds of individuals associated with the singer—childhood acquaintances, family members, former lovers—and travelled across the country multiple times in search of clues and answers. Nonetheless, the series is a shaggy chronicle of teen-like hunger for insight and salvation, rather than a meticulous investigation.

The register of Finn’s voice-over narration might be our first indication that “Before the End” would not solve the case in the traditional 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 says early in the series, sounding like a person going to teach you how Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” syncs up perfectly with “The Wizard of Oz.” (In general, Finn uses hyperbole: the information he reveals with the audience are often “mind-boggling,” or have left his “mind reeling”; after hearing a specific shocking nugget from a source, he adds, his “jaw needed to be removed from the floor.”) This theatrical stoner vernacular is also visible in the documentary’s visual language, which comprises of shakily filmed source interviews, random street views, and presumably free-use archive footage, mixed with what appear to be iMovie effects and graphics. The series on Tim Cook’s streaming service has the amateur argot of conspiracist rock docs on a budget, often made by fans for fans on YouTube or Facebook. It claims to investigate the real truth behind Kurt Cobain’s suicide or Avril Lavigne’s supposed death and replacement by a double.

Finn originally became interested in the major allegation in “Before the End” after discovering it on Facebook. 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 photo Finn discovered when Frank followed the Facebook page Finn built for his ongoing documentary. Finn arrived to this notion as a result of a “absurd amount of growing coincidences” that had left him “dizzy.” Among these supposed shockers are the revelations that Frank, much like Morrison, is a lover of Baudelaire’s poetry; that both men appear 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 coloured co

Finn is dismayed when a doctor tells him that the blue ring around Frank’s brown irises is most likely caused by arcus senilis, a common ocular ailment in older persons, rather than coloured contact lenses. “You think you’ve got it lying right there, but then it’s always . . . you’re always just . . .” he stops off, showing an unbridgeable space between his two hands. Still, he forges ahead, even stealing a water glass that may contain Frank’s fingerprints and DNA. You might be able to tell by this point that what follows in Finn’s research does not give clear-cut answers, but as I watched the series, I realised that this may not be the most important factor here. Towards the end of the documentary’s third and final section, Finn meets with three of Morrison’s previous girlfriends to show them a recent photo of Frank next to an old photo of the singer. The women, all of whom are now elderly citizens, are first sceptical. “That’s the Jim I remember, right there,” one adds, pointing to a photo of the young Morrison. “Jim’s eyes were blue,” explains another. However, as individuals continue to look, their attitudes soften and they become more convinced. “How did you not just jump out of your skin?” asks the one who began off the most reluctant. “That could literally be Jim,” acknowledges the second. The third person begins to cry, overwhelmed. “After fifty years, the expert ladies each saw what I saw,” Finn claims. “A haunting resemblance between Jim and Frank.” As I watched, I couldn’t help but feel drawn in by what Finn sees and thinks. Wouldn’t it be great if Jim Morrison was still alive and living in Syracuse? Wouldn’t it be lovely if the horrible things we assumed had happened didn’t? Wouldn’t it be lovely to hang on to what we dreamt of as kids?