About halfway through Factory Girl we get the point. Andy Warhol,
played by an emaciated Guy Pearce in white make-up, is interviewed by an
obsequious journalist who mentions the fact that Warhol’s art movies are
being referred to as “pornography” by the mainstream establishment.
“I know,” says Warhol, deadpan and seemingly concerned, before adding, with
genius comic timing and just the tiniest hint of ironic cadence. “Isn’t that
great?”
It’s a delicious throwaway moment, but it’s also the point at which Factory
Girl ceases to be a movie about its titular heroine and Warhol acolyte
Edie Sedgwick and instead becomes one that’s blatantly enthralled to the
legend of Warhol himself. For, despite all the media noise about the “It
girl” turned actress Sienna Miller and the battle to get the tragic life of
Edie Sedgwick on screen, Factory Girl really ignites only when
Pearce’s Warhol is in the frame.
Which may, of course, be due to the fact that this particular Warhol is indeed
a wicked creation, part withering wallflower, part full-tilt superbitch, but
all ego. Yet, alternatively, it may reflect some ineffable allure at the
heart of Warhol himself, something innately modern and compelling about his
persona. For how else can you explain a familiar public character who’s been
immortalised on film seven times since 1991, by actors as diverse as Crispin
Glover (in The Doors ), Jared Harris ( I Shot Andy Warhol )
and David Bowie ( Basquiat ), and yet somehow remains novel and
curiously enigmatic every time we encounter him?
“Andy’s brilliance was in the fact that he made banal things, like Brillo
boxes, fascinating,” explains George Hickenlooper, the director of Factory
Girl . “And since he himself — with the wigs, the glasses, the look —
was as much the art as the art he was creating, he had the ability to make
that seem fascinating too.” With Factory Girl , Hickenlooper
gamely grapples with the self-created Warhol legend and provides it with a
flesh and blood back-story. In other words the film highlights the role
played by Warhol’s overbearing mother, his troubling skin disorder (courtesy
of a childhood bout of St Vitus’s dance) and his ambiguous relationship with
his own homosexuality. Thus, where Glover’s Warhol is simply odd, Bowie’s is
whimsical and Harris’s is brooding and creative, Hickenlooper’s hero has a
blunt biographical reality that’s rooted in a specific time and place —
namely the Factory in 1965.
Of course, Hickenlooper pulls no punches in his portrayal of an opportunistic
and self-obsessed Warhol, one who manipulated Sedgwick and then callously
abandoned her in her drug-addled moment of need. It’s a depiction that has
opened the movie up to charges of outright Warhol-bashing. “I was interested
in portraying Andy at that particular moment in time,” Hickenlooper
explains. “Because he eventually became, as all icons do, a caricature of
himself. And yes, we’ve had some criticism because we portrayed Andy in a
very particular way. But this is exactly what he was like in 1965. He was
petulant, petty, jealous and very much like an adolescent. And I was
interested only in the emotional life of Andy, and not in his iconic
status.”
Jean Wainwright, the Warhol expert and author of the forthcoming
decade-in-the-making tome The Andy Warhol Tapes , disagrees. “He was
so much more than that,” she says. “With Edie Sedgwick he was dealing with a
character who was gradually, because of her drug addiction, going out of
focus. I’ve got beautiful tape recordings where Andy’s talking to Edie about
a magazine interview she’s about to do, and he’s being so genuine and
supportive of her. And you see that the dynamic between the two of them was
really quite proactive.”
Wainwright adds that without Warhol there to capture her beauty, to
immortalise her and cement her place in cultural history, Sedgwick might
have been just another tragic victim of drug addiction. She feels that it’s
a mistake to confuse Warhol’s enigmatic control of his own image and his
persona as a kind of petty tyranny. Instead, she says, you’re simply dealing
with someone who was assured and aware of his own place in popular culture.
“He was extremely clever at understanding how he could use himself in various
guises, how he could manipulate the media to become a brand of himself, like
a soup can was a brand,” she says. “But beneath that there was so much going
on that he didn’t reveal, and that’s what makes him really fascinating.
Because every time you feel like you’ve understood him he slips through your
hand like sand.”
Is the allure, then, of Warhol down to a kind of comic book superhero dualism?
Is he the Dark Knight of Pop Art, on the surface defined by iconic costume
and one-liners, while smouldering underneath with inexpressible passions? Do
actors line up repeatedly to play him because he is such an ostensibly blank
canvas over such a tormented soul? And does he have relevance to a
contemporary movie audience simply because he is a populist legend or
because there’s something very modern about his image-obsessed condition?
Wainwright suggests that the allure is based simultaneously on the work and
the artist, and the fact that in our brand-obsessed era they can both be
grasped and understood on a simple and instantly recognisable level. The
soup can and Warhol the artist are there for us to observe and appreciate,
she says. How far down into context and concept we want to go is ultimately
up to us. She adds that the rags to riches element of Warhol’s life is also
attractive and hugely relevant to a contemporary audience. “People love the
life he had,” she says. “It’s the Hello! story,
isn’t it?”
And that’s possibly the key right there. For what Warhol began in the Factory
in the early 1960ss, with his devotion to celebrity and to commercial
brands, has culminated in the near-hysterical branding and celebrity
overdrive of our contemporary age. Which undoubtedly makes Warhol more
prescient than ever, and more relevant with every new copy of Heat
that flies off the news-stand and every new home video that becomes an
international smash on YouTube.
But at what cost to his credibility as an artist? The Factory boy and fellow
iconoclast Paul Morrissey thinks he knows the answer. “Andy had no interest
other than getting up every day and getting his picture in the paper,” he
says. “His only interest was accumulating money.
“He was autistic, dyslexic, frightened, timid and had no artistic instincts.
He had a peasant’s sensibility that made him likeable and sympathetic, but
the notion that he had ideas and was able to do things was just crazy.”
Which isn’t very kind. But Warhol the brand and the chameleon might, one
suspects, have been amused.
In the frame: future artists’ biopics?
Tracey Emin Renée Zellweger retunes her English accent and wallows in
dirty laundry
Damien Hirst Pickled sharks menace Ben Stiller in Another Night at
the Museum
Chapman Brothers Quentin Tarantino directs Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck
battling zombie Nazis
Gilbert and George Ealing-style romp with Peter O’Toole and Leslie
Phillips
