Edie Whoever
We watched "Factory Girl" last night. It's supposed to be the story of Edie Sedgewick, an It Girl back in the 60s, but it's really just a fart in the direction of Andy Warhol.
NOT that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that after renting "Fur", the story of Diane Arbus, I've come to realize that movies about specific people are really just movies about A person, SOMEbody, ANYbody, EVERYbody. I mean, once you've fictionalized the life of Diane Arbus, it's pretty much a done deal that the next biopic is gonna be a biopic like McDonald's milkshakes are milkshakes.
But it's ironic that we rented "Factory Girl" just at a time when I realized all art isn't - because the film is really an expose (computer, insert accent ague over the "e", please) of how art becomes valuable which in turn makes it art.
Yup. Rich people buy it, thereby giving it value, then they sell it - thereby giving it more value. And so on and so forth and more of the same, etc etc until it's so valuable, the best thing is to donate it to an art gallery as a tax write-off.
It was quite the revelation. Also, it occurred to me during the movie that Money + Time = Art. And, Rich Layabouts + Doing Nothing = Hollywood Cultural Touchstone. I mean, there was Andy Warhol selling his prints to Edie Sedgewick's Mother and her friends, thereby giving his art price tags that could only go up. It's all about resale, baby, and rich people decide what the mark-up's going to be when they put their investments back on the market to sell to the next rich person.
What a racket, eh? Art - ya gotta love it. I am rich, therefore, what I buy has value added.
Meanwhile, poor Edie just got addicted to drugs and died. You feel sorry for her, too, because she seems like a fun sort of useless parasite, although at one point I said to my viewing companion, "Gawd, these people are pretentious assholes. I mean, who else but a bunch of rich kids could afford to hang out at The Factory with Andy Warhol being no talent pretentious assholes? No wonder they all died young. They had lots of money and nothing to do but take drugs and hang out partying. It's not so much sad that they died young as it was inevitable. What else were they going to do?"
Sadly, Edie's end loomed in sight not long after she got cut off from her Daddy's money. Tough love is what pretty much killed her, although the movie blames her death on Andy Warhol - who apparently never paid her for her work in his movies, such as it was and they were. I think the idea was to portray him as her Daddy, except without the sex.
So yeah, I'm not saying she didn't have a hard go of it, I'm just saying Paris Hilton she weren't.
Which brings me to Paris Hilton because, as we watched the movie, I realized, "Hey, Paris Hilton is a rich heiress, too, except she no longer needs her family's money. For a rich heiress, that's pretty independent of her, I think. She could get addicted to heroin, etc and probably be able to support her habit. If she wanted to, I mean."
And it's true. Contrast Edie with Paris and you'll see what I'm driving at. Edie was pretty much just a model, as was/is Paris - but Paris makes sure she gets paid. Edie continued to rely on her Daddy's money and when she got cut off, that was it - she died. She was the It Girl with a heroin habit and no way to support herself.
Harsh, eh? What kills me, though, is how The Factory and Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgewick and the whole lot of that crowd became a cultural touchstone. All they did, afterall, was be dependently rich and hang out being assholes. The art blows. I don't even think it's art (although, my new theory is that all art isn't, so, you'll have to go from there to arrive at my tangential theory that pop art by any other name is garbage). It's pretty obvious that the prints were just prints and that if it weren't for Edie Sedgewick's Mother and her friends, Andy Warhol would have died an obscure and unlamented asshole.
Instead of just an unlamented asshole.
Still, "Factory Girl" is worth renting just to see the unbelievably unbelievable portrayal of Bob Dylan as something less than a pretentious asshole, himself. That the actor seems to be channelling a million Elvis impersonators to play Bob Dylan simply adds to the overall "acting tour de farce" quality of the movie. But maybe I'm getting old because the scene where he pushes his motorbike into the lake to prove to Edie that he's not like her, that material wealth doesn't mean anything to him, that channelling his talent into achieving social justice is what life's all about for him, well, I turned to my viewing companion to opine, "Yabbut, he can just go buy a new one, so all it proves is that he's a spendthrift."
I dunno. Either they aren't making movies like they used to, or people's lives are getting more banal with every Hollywood treatment. Which is to say, specifically, that the only reason there's a movie about Edie Sedgewick, apparently, is because Andy Warhol was so jealous of her fleeting relationship with Bob Dylan (who totally shows him up to be a desperate wannabe loser freak) that he cast her out, thereby killing her quickly, rather than slowly.
NOT that Bob Dylan doesn't have a hand in her death by dumping her right after they have sex. "How does it feel?" indeed.
Murderous pricks.
