‘I Shot Andy Warhol’ Fires Blanks: 1990s Indie Cult Film Is Now Fatally Dated

The IFC Center is currently hosting a revival of “one of the great indie debuts of the 90s,” Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol” (1996). The 30th-anniversary revival dovetails with an overview of Pop Art at the Guggenheim Museum, “Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now,” as well as a related show at Ki Smith Gallery, “Edie 66.” Edie Sedgwick, or at least a simulacrum thereof, serves as background decor in Ms. Harron’s picture, portrayed by an actress who remains curiously uncredited. But there Edie is, earrings and all.Readers will, I hope, forgive a critic for dusting off post-modernist cant like “simulacrum,” but Ms. Harron’s movie is, itself, in need of a damp washcloth and a firm once-over. “I Shot Andy Warhol” hasn’t dated well. The irony is that a 30-year-old movie that covered events from 30 years before its making comes off as trebly esoteric, its presumed verisimilitude revealed to be utterly synthetic. Neither camp or “meta” can redeem the spiritual void at its center. Then again, what else might one expect from an entertainment predicated on Andy Warhol? There are scholars who will argue that a Pittsburgh-born mama’s boy, who made a career of blandly fetishizing consumer culture, is a figure on a par with Charlie Chaplin, Louis Armstrong and Ernest Hemingway. But that’s only if you believe that the cynical undermining of high culture is commensurate with high culture itself. Warhol took a meagre artistic incongruity and ran with it, repeatedly and to diminishing aesthetic effect, straight to the bank. An artist likes to make a buck, but Rembrandt, Warhol most certainly was not.Ms. Harron, along with screenwriter Daniel Minahan, based their screenplay on a 1992 book edited by Jeremiah Newton, “The Letters and Diaries of Candy Darling.” Born James Lawrence Slattery, Darling is likely best remembered as the subject of two songs written by Lou Reed, “Candy Says” and “Walk On The Wild Side,” but is also considered a progenitor of the trans movement. How or why Darling befriended Valerie Solanas, the “I” in the title of Ms. Harron’s movie, is a question. The latter felt that drag queens were “insecure about being sufficiently female and [end] up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.”Politics may make for strange fellows, but so, apparently, does running in avant-gardist circles. “I Shot Andy Warhol” is the tale of a damaged and deranged woman who found her place in history, not as a playwright or polemicist as intended, but by attempting to murder the doyenne of Pop Art. As portrayed by Lili Taylor, Solanas is a tough-talking, low-rent gamine given to conversational tics seemingly culled from the Bowery Boys. Documentary recordings of Solanas testify to the accuracy of Taylor’s portrayal, but that doesn’t make the performance any less difficult to bear.Ms. Harron attempts to embody the anything goes mise-en-scène of 1960s Manhattan and, to her credit, underline the crass and, ultimately, dangerous exploitation of fragile psyches by Warhol, played by Jared Harris, as well as the unremitting narcissism of those that willingly capitulated to his wiles. Still, the director can’t help but make Solanas a hero, intermittently presenting her in black-and-white segments that place a romantic cinematic gloss on spurious theorizing and mental illness. Some rebels do have a cause, but what is the measure of their character should those causes prove irredeemable?As it is, the author of “S.C.U.M.,” an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men,” is transformed by Ms. Harron and company into a more substantial figure than she could otherwise claim. Even the most lax of moralists will end up scratching their heads over that peculiar achievement.

‘I Shot Andy Warhol’ Fires Blanks: 1990s Indie Cult Film Is Now Fatally Dated

‘I Shot Andy Warhol’ Fires Blanks: 1990s Indie Cult Film Is Now Fatally Dated

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