FILM AND ART

HOLLYWOOD ABUSES ANDY WARHOL

And I'm fighting back for Andy

By Joanna Jiyoun Lee

David Bowie is the best Warhol

Andy Warhol (1928 –1987) was a huge part of the Pop art movement of the 1960’s. Along with Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, he became famous for using pop culture images in his work. That included brands such as Coca Cola and Campbell's Soup (which was one of his favorite things to eat) and celebrities such as Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, and Marilyn Monroe. Warhol liked to portray these celebrities in brightly colored silk screens based on photographs. Some of his best-known work was in film. Chelsea Girls, considered highly innovative at the time, entailed two 16mm film projections that simultaneously show two different stories. The sound would be raised for one film, and lowered on the other film, creating a kind of strange blurring of the two.

But he didn’t just confine himself to painting, photography, and films, but explored sculpture and produced, among other things, the Velvet Underground’s first album, The Velvet Underground and Nico. For a while during the 60’s it felt like Warhol was everywhere and he essentially was. After his death, Warner Books posthumously published Warhol’s memoirs, which became a kind of art world bible. Regardless, a lot of people have problems with Warhol, the artist. But there’s no doubt that he has had a tremendous influence, perhaps the greatest influence of any post World War II artist in the 20th century.

And this has continued to be true after his death. He has been portrayed, really used, over and over again in the movies as a character, played by David Bowie, Bill Hader, Guy Pearce, and Crispin Glover among others. The question is why, and what does Andy Warhol’s character mean to filmmakers. When movie makers say, hey, I need Andy Warhol to show up, what are they thinking? Well, it turns out what they’re thinking is not about art, but business. Almost all Andy Warhol scenes in popular movies are about business and especially the business of selling art.

Men in Black 3

Bill Haver as Andy Warhol

Men in Black 3 is a 2012 comedy directed by Barry Sonnefeld and written by Ethan Cohen and Lowell Cunningham. Warhol is a minor figure in the film and is played by the comedic actor Bill Hader. In his few brief scenes we find out that Warhol is tired of being part of the “Men in Black” organization and wants to terminate his deal. He bargains with Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) to fake his death.

What’s interesting about these Warhol scenes is that the image of Warhol is about pure business and making a deal. There’s nothing particularly artistic about him and he seems to care very little about art. What he does care about is his own life style and getting as much out of the system as possible. As a goofy pop culture representation of Warhol, Men in Black 3 gets at the core of the Warhol image: everything is a deal.

In one scene we see Warhol at a party. The agents are seeking information about one of his guests who is a killer. Warhol’s response is one of total narcissism — “I’m so out of ideas … I’m painting cans and bananas for christsakes” — and he’s only willing to help if the agents end his undercover role. In other words, like always, the Warhol character is motivated by the deal. The end of the scene seals the deal with Warhol telling one of the agents, “You gotta fake my death, okay? I can’t tell the girls from the boys.”

Basquiat

David Bowie as Andy Warhol

Basquiat, written and directed by Julian Schnabel, is a strange 1996 bio-pic of the artist Jean Michel Basquiat. He struggles with drugs, identity, and fame in the go-go art market of the 1980’s, rising to incredible levels and eventually dying of an overdose. Basquiat was a star and part of Andy Warhol’s world, eventually collaborating with Warhol himself.

Like Men in Black 3, every Warhol scene in Basquait is about business and making deals. The first time we see Warhol in the movie, he is with Bruno Bischofberger (Dennis Hopper) at a restaurant. Basquiat offers to sell Warhol some decorated postcards and Warhol becomes obsessed with the price, how many he’ll buy, and whether he’s getting a deal. Again, as with all the depictions of Warhol, business is the primary occupation of art.

The second Warhol scene is with Basquiat after he has become somewhat famous. He’s complaining to Warhol that people are calling him “Warhol’s mascot,” a “primitive, a monkey boy.” Basquiat is worried about getting lost in Warhol’s shadow. Warhol’s response is what you would expect from the Warhol character in any of these movies: “The state of art, Jean, is business.” As Basquiat descends into fame and drug use, the movie depicts Warhol as less an artist and more of a business opportunist.

The Doors

Crispin Glover as Andy Warhol

The Doors, the 1991 drama directed by Oliver Stone and with a screenplay by Randall Johnson, portrays Warhol as a serious drug user, abusing marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. Copious drug use is rarely a sign of intelligent decision-making (on or off drugs), but again the Warhol character is a proud and shrewd businessman.

In the film, Jim Morrison is seen standing at the bar throwing back double shots of vodka and orange juice. He is the 23-year-old singer of rising rock group The Doors, who are halfway into their third gig at the club. In his new black leather suit, his tea-coloured hair falling in angelic ringlets about his face, Morrison appears exactly as the historical figure is remembered now. Looking on is Pop artist and underground film-maker, Andy Warhol, who has been obsessively in thrall to Morrison since he first clapped eyes on him some months before.

In 1967 in New York City, at a party thrown by Warhol at The Factory, Morrison meets Nico (Kristina Fulton), a sometimes singer with the Velvet Underground and Warhol himself (Crispin Glover). Warhol gives Jim a telephone that he claims can be used to speak with God. Later, at their hotel, Jim cavorts in the elevator with Nico, while his girlfriend Pamela (Meg Ryan) staggers around in a drug-induced funk.

Warhol wants Morrison to appear in one of his films, naked and surrounded by Warhol’s Factory ‘girls’, some of whom are not girls at all, but drag queens. Morrison begins an affair with Nico and the film portrays their relationship as just another way that Warhol can use Morrison. It’s a curious moment: Morrison’s hedonism gets somehow translated into Warhol’s calculations. But as we have seen with all the Warhol portrayals, the belief is that Warhol is always manipulating and has an eye on the bottom line of the accountant’s ledger.

Studio 54

Andy Warhol as Andy Warhol

Studio 54 is a 1998 docu-drama directed by Matt Tyrnauer and casts Sean Sullivan as Andy Warhol. For a brief moment in the 1970’s, New York’s Studio 54 was the coolest and the kookiest club in town. Co-founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager hit the right moment, at the right spot, in the right city to create a pop culture sensation. Riding the 1970s wave of personal freedom and sexual revolution, it was the place to be seen. And Warhol always wanted to be seen.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the way the Warhol character creates what one might call “mutual understandings” between people and parties so that they come to beneficial agreements. An interesting example of this comes when Warhol brings new members to the club, specifically Liza Minnelli and Truman Capote, and has half-naked waiters serve them. The filmmakers seem to suggest that Warhol intuitively understands what people want, gets it for them, and then frames it as a kind of deal in which he benefits. It might be the most vicious of the Warhol characters, except for his portrayal in Factory Girl.

Factory Girl

Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol

Factory Girl, a 2006 film directed by George Hickenlooper and written by Captain Mauzner, is about Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Millers), a rich socialite who moves to New York and becomes one of Warhol’s so-called superstars. The image of Warhol in Factory Girl is one of pure decadence. He’s a druggie, abusive, but, most importantly, in the art game for his own good.

There’s a moment about midway through Factory Girl, the latest in-depth rehashing of Sedgwick’s life and Warhol’s career, when the movie suddenly goes from being merely very bad to being truly revolting. The setup is Sedgwick, a lovely but unhappy girl from a wealthy but unhappy family, comes down to New York from Boston in search of attention and the excitement of the art world in the 1960’s. She finds both in Warhol’s studio: Andy has started making films and Edie is photogenic. He turns her into an underground star, and she finds a place in Warhol’s coterie of drag queens, drug addicts, gay men, hustlers, fashion mavens, socialites, and assorted hangers-on.

In the movie, there is a character called The Musician. He is everything that Warhol is not: a good, red-blooded American boy, a heterosexual, motorcycle-riding poet, prophet and paragon of anti-materialism and truth-telling. The character is obviously meant to be Bob Dylan, with whom Sedgwick might have actually had a brief affair. In short, he’s an insufferably smug prig, and it’s no wonder Dylan threatened to sue the filmmakers.

What makes the film kind of disgusting -- if you’re a Warhol fan as I am -- is the scene where Warhol is sitting all alone in his vast, cold studio. He is rapturously watching a film of Sedgwick that he’s projecting on the wall. The movie cuts back to Sedgwick and The Musician, and I realized at once that I wasn’t watching a film about Andy and Edie at all; I was watching an allegory of the Evil Fag, who battles with the Good Man for the soul of the Lost Girl. The Evil Fag, you see, is simply a failed heterosexual and frustrated. The Lost Girl is confused and lost; and the Good Man does his best to set her straight.

In Factory Girl, it all comes to a showdown. The Musician shows up at Warhol’s factory for a screen test. Warhol does his best to be accommodating to The Musician, who says things like, “No, man, don’t sweat it,” and then makes fun of Warhol’s work. It all goes badly. At one point, The Musician tries to pass a joint to Warhol, but he declines. “Do you smoke, man, or do just that faggy speed shit?” The Musician asks. He manages in one short sentence to sum up the film’s loathsome combination of sanctity, the sacred and hypocrisy. Luckily, one of Warhol’s cronies immediately replies, “Just the faggy speed shit,” the only line in the movie that made me smile.

It’s all downhill from this point. Edie makes the mistake of going back to Andy, but soon she’s been passed over for the next Factory Superstar, does a lot of drugs, moves to California, gets clean, and then suddenly ODs and dies. Let that be a lesson to you: The Evil Fag destroys women. The last thing Warhol says is “I never really knew her,” which sounds so much like what a betrayer would say.

I should be pointing out that Warhol was a great artist and a great filmmaker, that he made paintings and movies the likes of which no one had ever seen before, though you’d never know it from Factory Girl. I should be telling you that he was also, and not surprisingly, an exceedingly complicated man, that Edie Sedgwick, for all her beauty, was a suicide looking for an excuse, and that Bob Dylan was such a minor player in things that it’s bewildering to find him in this movie at all, and insane to portray him as Warhol’s equal.

And Finally, Warhol as a Person

Andy Warhol

As negative as the images and implications in all of these films are though, it will never be able to change the genius of Andy Warhol, and his permanent influence on art. Warhol saw the future in so many ways. He anticipated the way truth and fiction would get blurred. In most of his art, the fictional characters are slightly disguised to be actual or real people, inevertantly almost inventing reality TV in the process. And that is even before you get into the ways he saw marketing, consumption, and the production of art all changing. He saw an exciting future and embraced it.

The visual arts have traditionally been a refuge for marginal people: queers and misfits, fragile and disobedient people, the flamboyant and the terminally shy, some brilliant people, some shallow people, and quite a few con artists; and Warhol’s work was open to all of them. There’s a great deal more to art than that, of course; there’s hard work and vision and as much to think about as there is in poetry or novels or philosophy. But many of us first came to the art world because decades earlier Warhol had made it seem like a wonderful place to be.

Andy Warhol influenced art in many ways. He wanted art to be an experience for everyone, so he used everyday objects, celebrities, bright colors, and repetition. He wanted people to question why art was the way it was, and what counts as art. Warhol not only influenced art, but also a whole culture. He wanted people to look at society, fame and advertising in a new way. He wanted people to understand that if you see the world in a different way, you should tell that to people so they can see it too. Warhol's work was colorful, brash, and unlike anything that anyone had seen before. He wanted to merge popular culture and art, and he did just that, and changed the principles of art forever.

©Joanna (Jiyoun) Lee and the CCA Arts Review