Beyond the Multiplex

"Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film": The man who created the world we live in, damn him

I have long maintained that the most important cultural figure of the 20th century was Elvis Presley, and that the devolution, for better or worse, of Western civilization into what critic George Steiner calls the "post-culture" is not a matter of Auschwitz or the Bomb but rather of "Hound Dog." Ric Burns' new four-hour documentary on Andy Warhol, which will play in New York for two weeks before its two-night broadcast on PBS, causes me not to abandon that view, perhaps, but to reconsider it.

In trying to rescue Warhol's real history -- if that isn't a laughable concept -- from the myths and the wigs and the starfucking and the parties and the Velvet Underground records and the inscrutable surface of both the work and the man who produced it, Burns has accomplished something both remarkable and reassuring. Remarkable because this is a compelling film, blending astonishing historical images with long-winded talking-head interviews, in vintage Burnsian style, and reassuring for almost the same reason. Even a phenomenon as vaporous, as self-erasing and as intentionally devoid of content as Andy Warhol can become the subject of an earnest, often beautiful and occasionally flatulent biopic by one of the Burns brothers. What will they do next? A movie about God? A history of oxygen?

No one should mistake "Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film" for a work of neutral, objective, critical inquiry. I don't think that's a problem. To make any kind of reasonable film about someone whose friends, colleagues, family members and artistic executors are, in many cases, still alive, and whose work is surrounded by a protective institutional bureaucracy and still covered by copyright, Burns needed to get maximal cooperation. So big-ticket Warhol intimates like fashionista Diane von Furstenburg and art dealer Larry Gagosian are on board as executive producers. Nearly all the intellectual heavy lifting in the film comes from interviews with writers and critics sympathetic to and friendly with Warhol, most notably Dave Hickey, Wayne Koestenbaum, Bob Colacello, Stephen Koch and Donna De Salvo.

Bias is only a problem when you're trying to conceal it, and perhaps the price for getting to see all this extraordinary archival material in one place is listening to narrator Laurie Anderson intone endlessly about the revolutionary brilliance of every Warholian brain-fart. In any case, the more you watch "Andy Warhol," the more you are reminded that any possible criticism you might want to make of Warhol is in there all along, intimately tied up with the things that made him an important artist.

Wasn't Warhol just a cynical opportunist without any original ideas of his own, an ingenious commercial artist and celebrity-obsessed social climber who became famous for capturing, distilling and reflecting back at us the brightly colored packaging of the pop-culture universe? Well, yes. Other than the word "cynical" (which I would agree is inadequate to capture Warhol's combination of naiveté, solipsism and ruthlessness), even Warhol's most avid defenders would probably accept everything in that sentence. The Campbell's soup cans were not his idea, and neither were the paintings of Marilyn. All he did for the Velvets was give them a place to play and score drugs; his avant-garde films, whose merits are hotly debated among art-heads to this day, essentially involved turning the camera on and watching what happened.

Even as Burns signs on with the official Warhol hagiography -- the film anoints him as the most important artist of the 20th century, and the only possible response is that it depends what you mean by "important" -- he doesn't turn away from various possible indictments of Warhol, as a man and an artist. During his years of maximum influence and importance, Warhol was a notorously cold fish who stood by impassively as one after another of his Factory coterie destroyed themselves with drug abuse (Edie Sedgwick was only the most celebrated).

After he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, as Robert Hughes has written, Warhol's "lines of feeling were finally cut; he could not appropriate the world in such a way that the results meant much as art." His last 15 years of life, at least, were spent in a Studio 54 haze of celebrity worship and anesthetic industrial production, during which he became a camp follower of the Shah of Iran and then (after the Shah fell) Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Hughes rightly mocks a late series of prints titled "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," which featured images of Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein and Sarah Bernhardt. (That's without even mentioning Warhol's brief career pitching Puerto Rican rum, or his "Love Boat" guest appearance.)

But Burns and the wide circle of Andy's acolytes he draws upon are able to make the vividness of Warhol's revolutionary period (from about 1962 up to the Solanas shooting) seem real again, and almost as shocking as it was the first time. Those soup cans and Marilyns are taught in every art history class now, right after Picasso and Matisse. But Warhol, for all his refusal to speak about his own work with any intellectual rigor, was the first serious artist to understand that the culture that produced those guys was breathing its last rattling gasps, and that "high art" was a subset of pop from now on.

Famous as he was, Andy Warhol was never as famous as he wanted to be, and therein lies the pathos of his story. If he revolutionized the art world by selling the image of hipness and celebrity -- principally and ultimately his own -- he could never quite escape the relatively tiny demimonde of New York bohemia, with its art critics and art dealers and art-history textbooks, and become an honest-to-God celebrity. The first half-hour of "Andy Warhol," documenting the childhood of a poor, painfully shy, effeminate and extraordinarily talented boy from Pittsburgh -- who suffered from St. Vitus' dance (and perhaps from a mild form of autism) and whose Polish-Slovak immigrant parents could barely speak English -- will break your heart.

Andy's older brother, a stolid, balding fellow named John Warhola, tells us in his old-school Pittsburgh accent that when their mother was recovering from a devastating cancer operation in the late 1930s, he had to feed Andy lunch every day for months. The adored youngest son of the Warhola clan came home to their cramped two-room apartment each afternoon and heard the latest news about Mama's convalescence. John would fix him a sandwich, and heat up a can of tomato soup.

"Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film" opens Sept. 1 at Film Forum in New York. It will air on PBS' "American Masters" series as two episodes, Sept. 20 and 21. (Check local listings.)

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