One of the reasons it's so difficult to evaluate this movie is that it's hard to tell exactly how much of herself Lili Taylor is putting into the role of Valerie Solanas, the author of S.C.U.M. Manifesto and some kind of play called Up Your ***. I haven't seen much of Taylor's other work, only `The Haunting,' in which she was overwhelmed by banal lines and overbracketed by too much morphing Victorian woodwork and clanging iron. Here, her performance is outstanding but the part is again limited by the fact that, when you come right down to it, Valerie Solanas is not a particularly likable person, despite occasional flashes of wit, perhaps uninentional on her part, written into the script. She's self obsessed, narcissistic, really truly paranoid, all engulfing, uninterested in others except insofar as she can use them, grating in every way, and ultimately she does what so many other persons dissatisfied with what God has given them do: she shoots somebody famous. Her psychiatrist tells us that she was born in Atlantic City and was abused as a child. Well, enough is enough, when it comes to abuse. We have only the writers' word for that, by way of Valerie's psychiatrist, by way of Valerie, one presumes, without being able to know the actual source of the allegation, let alone its truth. If anyone claimed that they had had an encounter with a UFO during childhood, they'd be ridiculed. But all one has to do is make the claim that he or she was abused, and they get sympathy. Sometimes the claim, no matter how tenuous, can even help keep you from being convicted of a murder you admit you committed, as happened in the case of the Menendez brothers. Everyone seems to claim they were abused as children, from Marilyn Monroe to Roseanne Barre. Maybe the time has come to get rid of the left-over Freudianism that argues that such a tragic event has life-long consequences and helps us understand why the abusee's life now resembles a fouled anchor. Do you know what happens in Samoa when a man or an older boy molests a young girl? The girl's family come over and beat hell out of the man. Eventually the bruises heal, the incident slips insensibly into the past and is forgotten by all concerned parties, and life gets on with itself. Valerie is an abrasive person. But her grating personality serves a purpose. People notice you when you're a pain in the neck, even if you're homely, disorganized, and not especially intellectually distinguished. It can give you a nice warm glow to have people pay attention. And if your ranting demands don't succeed, you can always shoot someone well known. Then you can go immediately to the police and stake your claim before someone else jumps it. The film contributes to our understanding of how such a mind works, though the producers and writers may not have intended that, but it doesn't add an iota of sympathy to my feelings about Valerie. I worked as a research scientist around the fringes of the artistic/drug subculture of New York during the late 1960s and met a lot of people whose company I enjoyed, and whom I respected and admired, even losers. I wouldn't have wanted to be in her presence for five minutes. She did get one thing right, though. Males may not be `biological accidents,' as Valerie puts it, but at conception we all do start off as females, and we stay that way unless we get a shot of androgens during our embryonic development. Those of us who do, become males. So Genesis is wrong: ontogenetically, Eve precedes Adam. But then, so what? There are entire species of whiptails lizards in the Southwest whose populations consist entirely of parthenogenic females; now if life were only that simple for humans, but of course it's not, and Valerie got that wrong. Wrong too are the arguments that Valerie was a proto-feminist. Betty Friedan was way ahead of her, and before Betty Friedan there was the anthropologist M. F. Ashley-Montague, author of a well-regarded book entitled "The Natural Superiority of Women." Ashley-Montague's first name was Montague. As a man, of course, he doesn't get much play in Friedan, let alone The SCUM Manifesto.
Review of I Shot Andy Warhol
