At first sight Trash is unmistakably a very good film; re-seen, it has sections at least when it looks like a great film. What it takes on along the way is subtlety and density; far from being improvisatory and hit-or-miss, like most of the films by the Warhol group, it proves on examination to be, like Flesh, very tightly plotted, scrupulously constructed to make even the smallest passing comment pull its weight in the overall dramatic argument. In this the two films are defiantly the work of Paul Morrissey, who emerges in them from a period of anonymity as general cinematic odd-job man of the Warhol factory to make films which are not only highly personal but in several vital respects the antithesis of Warhol’s theorising about the gratuit, impersonality in filmmaking, and the beyond boredom principle.
The true subject of Trash is presented neatly, as a sort of formal statement of theme, in the opening sequence, during which Geri Miller (the girl who was considering having her breasts inflated with silicone in Flesh, and has now apparently done so) tries everything she can think of to excite Joe Dallesandro, who remains resolutely, and not too concernedly, as unaroused by her manipulation as by her elaborate go-go dance. Geri is worried in an almost maternal fashion about Joe; the trouble, she says, is the drugs he takes. Why can’t he trip on sex instead: it’s cheaper, nicer and a lot healthier. Can you trip on sex? asks Joe. Of course, says Geri; isn’t it great when you come? No, says Joe; it’s over.
The comment resounds through the rest of the film, one way and another. Behind practically everything that happens and is said there is a quiet, almost suppressed anguish over the evanescence of experience, the search for something that lasts, and the retreat, most evidently in Joe’s case, into drugs as a deadener, as something which, in removing the desire for everything more lasting than the next fix, removes also any capacity, physical or mental, to do or experience anything else. (In this respect, incidentally, the film should be, from the censors’ point of view, one of the most evidently moral on the subject of drugs; and their arguments for refusing it a certificate, based almost entirely on its drug aspects, seem more than usually ludicrous, indeed totally incomprehensible.)
In each of the major sequences of the film the themes stated at the opening are restated with variations. In all of them the basic situation is that characteristic preoccupation of the Warhol group, first clearly presented in
My Hustler, the way that apparent communication often shows itself when examined to be merely the bouncing of one’s own feelings off someone else who happens to be around at the time. In this case, because of his complete impotence, in every sense of the word, Joe is the sounding-board for other people’s fantasies. There is the crazy lady who carries round a bag full of toys and is searching desperately for LSD, which she is against all reason convinced Joe must have concealed somewhere on his person. There is the rich young wife who finds Joe trying half-heartedly to burgle her nearly empty apartment and nurtures hopeless fantasies of rape. There is even the man from the Welfare who does not really connect with anyone else at all, pursuing relentlessly his fantasy of the silver Joan Crawford shoes and their self-evident suitability for conversion into a chic and unusual lamp.
But above all there is Holly Woodlawn. Holly, needless to say, is one of the Warhol drag queens. And it really is needless to explain: first time round one may be intrigued at the outset by the problem of what exactly she is, but before long one accepts completely that she is what she says she is, a woman. It does not matter what she was born as and may still, for all we know, anatomically be. She is a woman giving a performance, and a performance which is by any standards mesmeric. Apart from Joe, she is the only recurrent character in the film; he shares a room with her, and is the object of her concern and often exasperated resentful affection. We see her gathering junk, with and without Joe’s assistance, and in a very funny, very sad scene in the first half setting about seducing a high-school lad who is desperately eager to establish his own complete sophistication and has been dumb enough to think he can buy some grass from Holly (which is not what he gets at all).
The character gradually builds, though, and comes into her own in the final scenes, when her sister’s pregnancy gives her the idea that she and Joe will impose on the Welfare as parents-to-be. Unfortunately she comes home one day to find Joe attempting (ineffectually, of course) to ball her sister, and launches into a really great scene of entirely illogical recrimination. After which comes the terribly funny scene with the man from the Welfare, broken up finally when the cushion she has stuffed under her sweater drops out in a moment of mobile fury. She and Joe are left exactly where they were at the start, with no money, no prospects, and no chance of communication even on the most elementary, physical level; yet, for however much or little it may count, with each other.
It is in these final scenes that the point of Morrissey’s method really shows itself: they resume and pull together the film and build dizzyingly to a succession of climaxes, and to the final anti-climax, with complete certainty and economy. In them Joe is, as he has been established, the still, dead centre round which other people’s passions revolve, while Holly is the dynamic element. And while what she says and does is often fiercely funny, she does bit by bit acquire her own dignity. Morrissey’s treatment of her is masterly. How far what he elicits from her is properly speaking a performance could be argued at length, quite fruitlessly; what we get is what nearly all cinema ultimately is, the physical embodiment of private dreams. And it works here so immaculately because the people are so scrupulously respected in their quite possibly crazy integrity.
Paul Morrissey’s is a cinema of complete human acceptance: however odd the characters are, they are never patronised, never made fun of, never presented as material for a quick camp giggle. The angle of regard is the most important thing in Flesh and Trash; the fact that the technique is in its own way stunning seems pretty incidental. Indeed, essentially it is incidental – Morrissey belongs to that select band who make films in such a way that the film becomes a transparent envelope, through which we can enter, telepathically, their minds. And the experience is, as they say these days, mind-blowing.
John Russell Taylor, Sight and Sound, Winter 1971/72
Trash
Directed by: Paul Morrissey
©/Production Company: Score Movies
Production Company: Factory Films
Presented by: Andy Warhol
Produced by: Andy Warhol
Screenplay: Paul Morrissey
Director of Photography: Paul Morrissey
Editor: Jed Johnson
Sound: Jed Johnson
Cast
Joe Dallesandro (Joe)
Holly Woodlawn (Holly)
Jane Forth (Jane)
Michael Sklar (Mr Michaels, welfare investigator)
Geri Miller (go-go dancer)
Andrea Feldman (rich girl)
Johnny Putnam (boy from Yonkers)
Bruce Pecheur (Jane’s husband)
Diane Podlewski (Holly’s sister)
Bob Dallesandro (boy on the street)
Sissy Spacek (girl at bar) *
USA 1970©
110 mins
35mm
A BFI National Archive print
*Uncredited
The screening on Thu 9 Apr will be introduced by Jaye Hudson of TGirlsonFilm
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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