The World is a Vampire

Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction is a 90s grunge nihilist vampire movie. It follows protagonist Katherine, played by Lilly Taylor, as she labours with the more soul scraping elements of her philosophy doctorate. Like how do you reconcile yourself with a world that is not willed, and what exactly is possible after the holocaust? Like most humans trying to answer these questions, Kathy finds herself feeling a bit ‘blah’.

It is lucky then that any chance for finding a true humanism is dashed forever when a vampire drags her into a back alley and bites her, beginning her transition into the undead, where shit is much simpler.

Despite a history of genocide, Kathy is at first shocked by this specific violence done to her person but as the blood lust takes over her neurons she begins to see it differently. Vampires have no trouble with Niezche. It’s easy for them to see themselves as ubermench even if they can’t bear to look in the mirror. It’s will to power. Your will or theirs.

In the early stages of her addiction, Kathy stalks the street of New York with an empty fit and steals the blood of the homeless. She lures her college professor back to her house with the promise of sex, and then keeps him doped up on heroin while she drains her. She puts two marks on the main vein in felt tip: in and out. I like this ironic reversal of the descent into drug addiction story. The needle is the cleanest, least seedy way to get a fix. Junkies in too deep will bite off their piece and come up dripping and sticky.

Soon Kathy’s feeding on her study-buddies and besties as well as teen hood-rats from the corner. A trapped friend stands by Kathy’s mirror and dabs a rag at her wound, lamenting what on earth could make a person do something like this.

But for Kathy, both a Vampire, and a burned-out grad student, it’s not her indifference that should be shocking but rather any person’s astonishment.

Ferrarra’s vampires of New York have a cunning line they tell their victims before they feed – just tell me to go away, really, like you mean it. This is the line that the vampire who turned Kathy uses and the line she repeats to all her victims. It’s a cunning parody of victim blaming culture which may well find its routes in Schopenhauer and his ilk or in Calvinism. Is the victim simply a person who failed to fight their urge to surrender and be drawn in to another’s sin? But when we see a shot of Kathy, pinned, cradling an infant’s shoe there is no trace of remorse on her gaunt face.

The film looks great. High contrast black and white. A real 90s look. There are lots of tight shots and faces obscured by shadows and jacked up contrast. There are lots of line grabs from the history of phenomenology. Especially with grimy, vampire Kathy marching round in army boots and outsized sweater.

One night, out on the prowl, she meets a fellow creature played by Christopher Walken, who tries to trap her in his art loft and clean her up. Starve her into some kind of cultured vamp. Walken has been fasting for years. He found his strength through Satre, couldn’t face being a slave to his addiction. He has a job. He even defecates. Which begs the question – are these the spoils we starve for? Kathy sticks with her nihilist slogans. They go down nicely with the heroin. Its not cogito ego sum but dedito ego sum, Kathy remarks in candle light. I surrender therefore I am.

After escaping Walken, Kathy finds her own high ground in cynicism. Sure, she finishes her doctorate. She matriculates into the void. Hands in a treatise that the philosopher’s word is meaningless without praxis. She hosts a party with all her friends and victims. She stands as if to give a speech.

“Let me thank you all for coming here to help celebrate the conferring of my doctorate. And let me share with you a little of what I learned along the way…” Then she rips the throat out of the Dean and drains him completely.

All her previous victims join her toast and the room becomes a collegial blood bath. This is my favourite scene in the movie. It’s artful, ecstatic. But it also really resonates with my own graduate experience. When you prepare to write a dissertation you learn to suck the life out of being. Reduce it to language, to thought, to theory. Suck the old thinkers dry. Eat their corpses and try to reconstitute something someone else might snack on from the excrement.

Kathy’s thesis found that there was no meaning without the verb. Action is all. So if you are going to be a parasite you better really FEED.

Unfortunately for the vamps – they overindulge and end up with nasty belly-aches. Kathy is rushed to hospital for transfusions and wakes up in a different headspace. Now she is thinking about Jesus and resurrection. She wants to confess her sins. After all that materialist philosophy, the rituals and mysteries of religion must be a sweet relief.

Following resurrection though I don’t know which Kathy is dead. The Vampire or the graduate student? Which was more the more potent nightmare or are they version of each other? Who walks from the grave stone smiling, in shit clothes? Is it still dedito ego sum? And if so to what do we surrender? The meaninglessness of  reason? The inevitability of religion and moral relativism  The purity of addiction, to smack, to blood and to evil? Or, more nightmarishly by far, is what we surrender to some kind of resigned middle ground? A job in a small liberal arts school perhaps, a socialist boyfriend and maybe a kid or two?

No one ever claimed that the bourgeoisie was impossible after the holocaust.

Do all the nihilist 90s vampires have to either bite it Cobain style or move into the bland 2000s with smug resignation?

Kathy thinks that decades, epochs, their attendant attitudes and events are beside the point. Our history is always with us. We are everything we ever were. “What then, will stop us spreading the blight in ever widening circles?” she asks, but proposes no answer. And she is smiling, when she leaves the cemetery.

S.C.U.M on Screen

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?