Following the Warhol’s New York biopic thread, last night we watched I shot Andy Warhol the story of separatist lesbian feminist Valery Solanas’s time in NYC culminating in the title act, the shooting of Warhol.
This is one of my favourite movies about this period. Lilly Taylor is wonderful as Solanas, playing her just right – not so aggressive and paranoid as to be unlikable, but not as a victim of her own mental illnesses either. And Jared Harris’s Andy Warhol is great too, a less cartoonish impersonation than Bowie’s, but then, David Bowie can do whatever he wants and it’s still fabulous because he’s David Bowie.
The story follows Solanas and her various passions, from writing provocative short plays for performance in a lesbian dominated diner to penning the scum manifesto. Solanas ingratiates herself with Warhol briefly, acting in one of his films, before being excommunicated from the factory crowd on account of her paranoia and lack of social graces. Her relationship with Warhol is interesting however, considering that Valery advocates the extinction of all men and views the genders as two different species. She nonetheless respects Warhol, and sees him as her ticket to exposure (getting on TV) one way or another.
Solanas’s approach is both brash and naive. She targets Warhol because he is the most neon figure on her horizon. There is a tragic moment when, watching TV, she sees a feminist rally.
‘Those are my women’, she says, ‘I should be with them’.
Her fixation on the New York scene has prevented her from making contact with the growing on-campus women’s movement. There is a sense she graduated from college too early, was born too early. I wonder what form her art terrorism might have taken if she was in her 20s in the Guerrilla Girl’s NYC reign.
But there is also a feeling that, no matter what opportunities comes her way, Solanas’ paranoia and obsessiveness would prevent her taking full advantage of them. A publisher signs her for a two book deal which she begins to see as robbery. IN the film, she falls in with notorious anarchist collective Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers but can’t see them even as collaborators because of their gender. She formulates elaborate conspiracies in which her publisher, Andy and the New York art crowd in general are out to get her, repressing or stealing her work. She alienates all her friends and then she shoots Andy Warhol. After she is arrested she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.
When the cops ask her why she says she doesn’t want to get into it right now, there are a lot of reasons, it’s complicated. But then, who can be bothered explaining the patriarchy as it manifests in radical communities to a bunch of cops after they have arrested you?
In epilogue, everything seems to get pinned on Solanas. A text block tells us that Andy never really recovers from the shooting and dies in 1987 but fails to mention he dies, not from shooting related injuries but from a gallbladder infection. Candy Darling (sensitively portrayed by Stephen Dorf) has her death summed up in a sentence and scene in which cancer is linked with illegal hormone treatments, which is linked with Valery’s insistence that dressing in drag does not a woman make.
I can imagine there would have been pressure not to glorify attempted murder in this film. Lou Reed was certainly concerned about that, he refused to license Velvet Underground music for the soundtrack and famously advocated the death penalty for Solanas.
Still, unlike in Basquiat, I Shot Andy Warhol seems to be a more nuanced portrait of its subject. Perhaps this is because Solanas was a writer, and writing, unlike painting, in easily adapted to the cinema narrative. In I shot Andy Warhol, this takes the form of Taylor as Solanas, delivering sections for the real SCUM Manifesto to camera, in black and white Warhol screenshot style scenes interspersed throughout the story. Her delivery is cool, stylish, menacing. Her writing punchy and proud.
Director Mary Harron, a woman, a writer and a feminist was careful not to let the SCUM Manifesto come out of the film looking like the rantings of a lunatic. She doesn’t black out Solanis’ resonance, her punk attitude and her vision. In other words, she lets Solanis remain a person. In Harron’s narrative, there is no rise and fall, just collage. There is no need for Solanas to emerge from the film as a hero and so no need to hem her into the corner. To supply her with a fictional romance, to glorify or explain or neutralise her mystique.
After all, she shot Andy Warhol, how much more mythology does a gal need?
Girl and Gun 