VALHALLA

"Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind." - Jim Morrison

In Norse mythology, Valhalla is a great hall where slain warriors are welcomed by their host, the god Odin, who provides them with grand feasts and shelter in the afterlife as they prepare for their final battle: Ragnarök. Aside from the connection between his name and Norse mythology (a fitting parallel, given his Swedish ancestry on his mother’s side), it's hard not to see Val (a documentary about Val Kilmer) as a metaphor for his various battles in Hollywood, as well as his overall creative, personal, and medical struggles—akin, in some way, to those of his Norse predecessors.

In this disarmingly affecting documentary (which includes voice-over narration by his son, Jack, whose voice is eerily similar to his father’s), there’s a clip of Val in an interview with Inside the Actors Studio describing a dream in which he arrives in heaven and is enveloped in a warm embrace by an angel. It’s clear that, having lost his beloved brother Wesley at a young age in a drowning incident, Kilmer was no stranger to the concepts of mortality and immortality. There is something deeply touching about seeing the innocent joy and passion the two brothers shared in cine-reel footage—made with as much enthusiasm as the great directors of Hollywood—laying the foundation for the success that would come later in Val’s career. It’s that same passion that ignited my own dreams of making it in this crazy business, back when I’d see the covers of VHS tapes of Top Gun and The Doors lining the shelves of my local video rental store, Astrovision.

In one bizarre scene, Kilmer is on the set of the infamously problematic production of The Island of Dr. Moreau with his hero, Marlon Brando, who had long since abandoned what he believed to be the delusion of ambition—or Hollywood itself. The overweight icon asks the young actor to give him a "big shove" on his hammock so he can rock back and forth. This surrender, this abandonment of any pretense of needing to prove himself, could be seen as a form of liberation. But for Kilmer (a notorious perfectionist), it must have been painful to see a golden opportunity to share the screen with his hero squandered. And yet, his own path to letting go of similar illusions would come later down the line.

Being a movie star (and an especially handsome one at that) who suffered the indignity of a career-altering illness such as throat cancer, Kilmer’s vulnerability and honesty about his “afterlife” of sorts—when his career in the movies had all but run its course—is exceedingly moving. Of course, at the time of the documentary’s filming, Kilmer had not yet reached Valhalla; he was still in Hollywood—albeit a ghost (of sorts)—making a living off his past by attending comic-con conferences and screenings of his films from the days when he was at the zenith of the business. Echoes of Norma Desmond come to mind as he watches audiences at outdoor screenings of Tombstone and realizes that those days of youth are long gone. Here, he contends with the reality behind the screen: that all stars are mortal and will, inevitably, fade. Unlike Desmond, however, he displays a sober recognition of this irrefutable truth.

Val is a testament to both his work and his humanity.

God bless him.