This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
For some reason I haven't written for Jonathan's Coffeeblog for a few weeks, but I've been busy with other stuff, including much frustrating interaction with bureaucracies. However, I did watch a few movies during that time, three of which, by strange coincidence, all dealt with impassioned young people who were overreacting to nasty, overbearing "control freak" parents. Did I discover a new Hollywood obsession, a meme as it were, or perhaps an unconscious personal motive in the choice of films to see next: Into the Wild (in a theater), Transamerica, and Factory Girl (the latter two on DVD)? In the first of the three, a recent male college graduate resentfully makes a charitable donation of $24,000 given to him by his parents to buy a new car. He then disappears and goes on a grim journey, which he considers liberating, during which he works as a Dakota combine operator, travels with sympathetic hippy couple, tries life as a wetback (he abandons his ID before re-entering the US from Mexico), as a homeless street person and as a daredevil river kayaker. He becomes a surrogate grandson to a lonely old man, and finally tests his mettle alone against Alaska's Denali wilderness. The wilderness wins.
Based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, the film's premises are mixed and vague. The film is nevertheless interesting, extolling glorious old-school mythic themes with the help of superb high-budget Hollywood production values: the manifest destiny of the American West; the rugged individual who will not be fenced in; the wild land that refuses to be tamed or polluted to death; and the reincarnated wanderlust of Jack Kerouac in On the Road and Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Still, I could not help thinking, as I watched the tale unfold, that if the protagonist had ever been to Boy Scout camp or gone hunting with his father and learned how to dress a deer, the outcome would have been different. For him. The West is still the West, and a cowboy in any other guise is still a cowboy. Could that have been the premise of the film? Is the new Hollywood really the old Hollywood?
But what if the cowboy would rather be a cowgirl? That was the question asked in Transamerica, in which a male protagonist, uncomfortable with the gender he was born with, and grossed out by an outrageous cartoonish mother, decides that he can become a better woman than she is by undergoing male-to-female sex-change surgery. Just before the final operation, in which his "outie" is to be converted to an "innie," a male teenager contacts him, claiming to be the son he never knew about, the offspring of a brief romance with a woman who later died. The hero/heroine of the film, played brilliantly and fetchingly by Felicity Huffman, eventually learns that he can be a paren, and not a bad one, if not exactly either a mother or a father.
The third film, Factory Girl, addresses the Achilles heel of the great artist Andy Warhol, identified (correctly in my opinion) as the artist whose work inspired the art trends of second half of the 20th Century. Warhol, who could never stop trying to please his mother, who in turn would never accept him to be the homosexual that he was, engages in an intense relationship with a pretty Santa Barbara heiress named Edie Sedgwick, one of many children raised by a deeply disturbed father isolated on a huge ranch. Although Warhol worked with paint, photography (still and cinematic) and silk-screen printing, the medium that he mastered most effectively was the mainstream press and network television. And, yes,the art form that he perfected more than any other artist of the Pop school was the art of celebrity. Thus, he was irresistible to Edie, because he could, and did, turn her into a superstar. (Did Warhol invent that word? I think maybe he did.)
But Edie Sedgwick miscalculated. Knowing what everybody else knew, that Andy was gay, she took up with Bob Dylan, or someone very much like or close to Bob Dylan. That did not fit in with Warhol's plan to present her to his mother as the girlfriend that the mother had always longed to see. In the film, he does take her home to his mother; but after Edie became involved with Dylan, Warhol, who had easily made her into a superstar, changed her into a non-superstar, and then a nonentity. Edie died before she turned thirty. The whole Factory Girl story was true, or said to be true, by the witnesses and participants in the Warhol entourage, who are interviewed in the special features program of the DVD. (Bob Dylan did not participate in the special features and was called Danny Quinn in the Factory Girl cast.)
When I started writing this about Factory Girl I had planned to say that the film was not really about Andy Warhol, but about Edie Sedgwick. But thinking about it as I wrote, I realized that the film really was about Andy Warhol, with Edie playing the role of a tragic foil, just another pretty face, with a father who was, yes, a bad parent.
And while writing that I started to ask myself, was the film really about Andy Warhol? Maybe it was really about Andy Warhol's mother.
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