"I Shot Andy Warhol"

Laurie
I shot Andy Warhol
Djerassi, October 21, 2007


Director Mary Harron aims for the fragmented, verité of Warhol’s films. Lili Taylor plays Solanis, and watching her I was returned to the period of 1966 to 1968 in which the film is set. Solanis shot Warhol in ‘68 after appearing in an improvised scene in I, a Man. It’s recreated in the movie, Solanis teasing a hustler in a stairwell about having a squishy ass. Taylor plays her as tough, grandiose, and deranged—but also funny and poignant. There are people who declare they are geniuses—Gertrude Stein comes to mind—and then they produce enough work to qualify for recognition. What might Solanis have become if she’d been less nuts and had had money? Why she was nuts isn't clear, although in a voiceover a psychiatrist who treats her at the mental hospital where she’s consigned for three years reports she’d been sexually molested by her father. An actor playing him briefly appears tending bar—or maybe he owns the place in a rough part of Staten Island or New Jersey—looking shell-shocked when his daughter, handcuffed in police custody, appears on TV.

Harron is tender toward the down-and-out street girls of the lesbian world. Even after Stonewall, they won't be welcome in many quarters, even by the fledgling women's movement. NOW founder Betty Friedan will be outraged when Ti-Grace Atkinson, NOW’s newly elected president, pays Solanis a solidarity visit in jail. I remember being at the meeting where the controversy exploded and not fully understanding what was going on but realizing it represented a split between an old way of doing politics, where you try to look kosher to the media, and a more raucous approach—in some ways modeled after the freedom of Warhol’s aesthetic—where you do politics as an in-your-face throw down, not caring whom you offend, counting offense as a plus.

Taylor wears floppy pants and loose jackets, camouflaging her slender body to look more formidable. She's a hustler, an aggressive panhandler prowling the East and West Village. In one of the most revealing scenes, she approaches Warhol at Max's Kansas City. She's been made a pariah at the Factory for staging a violent fit when she isn’t paid enough attention to, and she stands on the margin of the group who are seated at a long table, a clique of intimates who will make no place for her. She hops from foot to foot, wanting to poke them and also will them to invite her to sit down, which she knows they will not do. She’s hardened and softened by the rejection. She has steeled herself to it a long time ago, but she can't control the impulse to beg and she thrusts creased, mimeographed copies of her Scum Manifesto at them, which they refuse the way you would shrink back from a pushy derelict on the subway, hoping they won't brush you with their stink.

She asks Warhol for money, because he has said he will pay her $25 to appear in a film, and she smiles and says okay, she'll do it, and asks for an advance. He says, in his canny droll drawl, which makes him sound dimwitted and shrewd at the same time, he says, “Valerie why don't you get a job?” And she says, “I can't do that, I'm an artist,” the implication being, Don't you recognize my role, my status as a writer?, which is what she calls herself. She is appealing to him: Don’t demean me by saying I have to work at a job. I'm destined for better things. He’s weary of her. He likes people who work, preferably for him, and he asks around if anyone has money, and no one offers it, and so he withdraws a crumpled five dollar bill from his pocket and extends it to her so she will go away, and she takes it with a mix of shame and triumph on her face.

She has the odd good luck to panhandle Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press, which has brought out the great works of illicit literature—Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Candy, Naked Lunch, among them. She asks him to pay her fifteen cents to say a dirty word, and he's amused, takes her to lunch and gives her a dollar for the thirty minutes of conversation they exchange. In time he offers her a contract to write a novel based on hustling, for she also turns tricks with bored ease. He will publish a book if she will write it, and that is the gun to her head.

What happens when you are not a genius and someone says, I will encourage you, I will engage you, all you have to do is the work? What happens when you have no experience of working, which means slowly finding out what you have to say? The gap between wanting and being feels like it's going to blow your head off.

Up till now, Solanis has been appealing in her over-the-top butch irreverence and street-rat energy, but she begins to drown. She becomes paranoid and stalks Girodias and Warhol. She thinks men are out to get her, and some are, but not these two. These men make the mistake, for their own safety, of engaging with her. She goes to shoot Girodias, but he's away when she calls, so she continues on to the Factory, which is easy to penetrate, and she shoots Warhol and another man I'd forgotten was there. She puts a gun into Andy's chest and pulls the trigger, murderous ugly. What has made her do this we can’t know, but the act cancels out—at least in the moment—everything that’s come before.

At the end, slender books with orange spines are stacked on a table, Girodias having published Scum Manifesto. I remember coming upon a Penguin edition in a kiosk on a Greek island. I read it on a boat and thought it clever, Solanis’ understanding of the sexual double standard as something as clear as the ruler’s nakedness in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Why couldn’t everyone see it? It was one of two books in English I could find. The other was The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, a mystery I enjoyed as well.