Before I saw this program, I had seen Oliver Stone's "The Doors" in which I found the "account" of Jim Morrison's death in Paris, France in 1971 not an account so much as a disjointed, abstract tableau, devoid of drama of any kind. (It seems that Stone made a deal with the estate of Pamela Courson, Morrison's junkie girlfriend, so as not to implicate her in Morrison's death, in exchange for the rights to use Morrison's dubious non-lyric poetry, of which her estate bizarrely has custody.)
According to this re-enactment, Courson did indeed have more to do with Morrison's death than merely finding him dead in the bathtub. The night he died, she shared with him her own stash of heroin, which Morrison was not used to doing, and which he snorted as if it were cocaine, even though this is not a good way to take heroin (if one is going to take it at all) if one is not use to it. (This is consistent, however, with claims by those who knew him that Morrison disliked needles.)
I had also read Patricia Kennealy's memoir about Morrison, "Strange Days" (1992), which gives a non-eyewitness theory about his death that nevertheless confirms Courson's giving Morrison drugs but also reports some facts not mentioned by this TV account, even though a couple of alternative theories are mentioned by the program. For example, in the official version, Courson telephoned Alain Ronay, with whom Morrison had spent part of the previous day, and he called the paramedics. According to an alternative account mentioned by the program, she called her drug dealer first. Kennealy suggests that Courson called Ronay, who did more than call an ambulance; he orchestrated a clever deception. But was there a deliberate deception or a series of lucky (for Courson) errors?
Ronay himself (http://archives.waiting-forthe- sun.net/Pages/Articles/jims_last_days.html) confirms that there is a little truth to every alternative version of events. He admits to deceiving the police, but suggests that the police were, simultaneously, suspicious and yet remarkably obtuse.
The deception or mistake involved the authorities not picking up on two facts: that Morrison 1) had illegal drugs in his system and 2) was one of the most famous rock stars in the world at that time. The documentary reenactment only picks up on the first error, explaining that Courson had flushed drugs down the toilet, the medical examiners decided not to do an autopsy, and they decided there was no need to go beyond "heart failure" as the official cause of death. The second deception was that Morrison was initially tagged as "Douglas James Morrison" instead of "James Douglas Morrison", which scaled back the odds of anyone thinking that this might be a celebrity death, deserving of a full autopsy. The documentary does not deal with this at all, instead showing only the U.S. State Department's death report on Morrison, which does give the deceased's name correctly.
According to Kennealy, these were not errors but clever deceptions perpetrated by Ronay. Without them, Courson might have gone to prison. The other possibility, of course, is that the deception was too improvised to have worked without the error of the investigators, which is what Ronay seems to admit in his own account.
The documentary provides insights into Morrison's health problems at the time of his death. The program reports that Ronay said Morrison had chronic hiccups, physical weakness, and a tendency to stumble. We are told that the 27-year-old singer had been an alcoholic for more than ten years. Shortly before his death, he threw up blood in the bathtub and was bleeding from the nose and mouth (either related to snorting heroine or other, underlying conditions?).
These medical details might point to chronic alcoholism in an advanced stage, despite his young years. Snorting heroine, of course, did not help. But there is an additional possibility that the documentarists don't consider and that an autopsy might have proved: pulmonary embolism. That could cause hiccuping and the other symptoms. Heart failure could result from an embolism.
Stylistically, this program is a bit heavy-handed. It spends more time on Morrison's sensational career than on his last day. When it does tell us about his last day, it keeps reminding us in overly colorful ways that Morrison is going to die, end up dead, cease to write any more songs or poems, or do any more drugs or alcohol, etc. Being curious about the facts surrounding his death, I found this program informative if not conclusive.