"I Shot Andy Warhol" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL June 22, 1996 There's a first feature film by a new woman screenwriter/director, Mary Harron, at the Tampa Theater this week. Our listeners' interest will be heightened by the fact that Harron's debut is a film biography of one of the most infamous visionary radical feminists of the 1960s, Valerie Solanas. The other night in my feminist theory class we had a discussion about the misconceptions the general public harbors about feminism, thanks to Limbaugh and his ilk who paint us all as man-hating feminazis. So I was thinking, going into this film, "Great, just what we need to fan the fires -- a film about a radical feminist who went around shooting men. I wonder if this is a ploy by the conservatives to discredit feminism even more?" Well, the answer is, no, it's not (although I suppose there are those out there who will try to use it for those purposes). Instead, it's a very well-made, fascinating, and sympathetic view of the life of Valerie Solanas. Harron has worked very hard to make this film an accurate representation of the facts of Solanas's life and of the milieu in which she operated. It seems to have been very well researched and I appreciated this. Solanas had been, for me at any rate, a kind of shadowy figure from the '60s, about whom I really knew nothing except the title of her most famous work the "S.C.U.M. Manifesto" (S.C.U.M. standing for the Society for Cutting Up Men); I had even forgotten that she had shot and nearly killed the famous pop artist Andy Warhol. The only thing else I knew, thanks to an inquiry on the women's studies e-mail list (WMST-L), was that she had died destitute in San Francisco in 1989 of pneumonia. So besides being a very compelling and even enjoyable film to watch, I was glad to get some more information on who Solanas was and what brought her to her "fifteen minutes of fame," to turn a Warholian phrase. I'm also going to read "The S.C.U.M. Manifesto" (it's on the Web:http://wps.com/texts/SCUM-manifesto.html) to see if it's the witty and incisive critique of patriarchy the film makes it out to be in spite of its misguided prescription for social change (not just lesbian separatism but, apparently, doing away with men--if she was serious about it). From the portrayal of Solanas in the film (done brilliantly by Lili Taylor), there's no doubt that she was very bright, very disturbed, and had some pretty good reasons for hating men, if she did. The film begins at the moment in 1968 when Warhol is lying on the floor while Solanas is pulling the trigger on empty chambers, aiming at the head of one of his terrorized sychophants. The psychiatrist at the prison for the criminally insane relates what she knows of Solanas's life, thus getting the flashback narrative underway. She came from a dyfunctional family in Atlantic City, N.J. where her father abused her sexually and sent her away to boarding school where she had her first lesbian experiences. After high school, she put herself through the University of Maryland, supporting herself in her last two years through prostitution. She graduated in 1958 with a degree in psychology. During her studies she seems to have been particularly struck by the idea that, biologically, the male chromosomal structure is an under developed female, and that, therefore, males are biologically inferior to females. (Nothing but a reverse twist on the centuries old Aristotelian idea that females are defective males). Anyway, after college Solanas comes to New York, living on the streets, sleeping on roofs and anywhere she can crash, making her living by panhandling, turning some most peculiar tricks, and writing--a play, the manifesto, and possibly the beginnings of a novel for the most famous purveyor of porn at the time, Maruice Girodias's Olympia Press. Among her acquaintances was the male- to-female transgendered Candy Darling who hung out with Valerie and her other butch dyke friends in a Nedick's coffee shop in the Village. Then, through Candy, Valerie made it into the Warhol orbit with his collection of wild and outrageous, drug and sex obsessed, arty, and slumming high scociety types that hung out at Max's Kansas City and the "Factory" (recreated faithfully for the film with the help of the man who designed the original Warhol space). Solanas was on the fringes of the Warhol crowd but was never an insider; she wasn't a "beautiful person" and her obsession with her revolutionary ideas made her too serious, too weird even for them. Ultimately, as her obsession slides into paranoia and she becomes convinced that Warhol and Girodias are conspiring together against her to steal her work, she commits her nefarious deed. This is a sad but fascinating story. It makes it clear that Solanas's views ran parallel to those of some of her radical feminists contemporaries--there's a great scene of her watching the famous Miss American Pagent protests on television and repeating over and over again "I should be there, I should be there." But it also strongly suggests that she was a highly idiosyncratic loner, not a part of any organized movement. This film tries hard to treat both Solanas and Warhol with respect and compassion without demonizing or glorifying either. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.