Factory Girl
Directed by George Hickenlooper
The new biographical film Factory Girl has nothing to do with Iraq or the unintended consequences of the welfare state or the place of America in the world. It’s about an heiress-model-socialite-addict named Edie Sedgwick, who died of a drug overdose 35 years ago at the age of 28, having accomplished nothing. Nonetheless, Factory Girl is the most neoconservative movie ever made–a vision of Hell called the 1960s ruled by a devil incarnate named Andy Warhol.
This is a loud, jerky maelstrom of a movie that tries to keep its audience disoriented and off balance, as though we were naive visitors from Ohio brought to a happening at Warhol’s notorious silver-painted loft in midtown Manhattan and given a glass of cheap red wine spiked with LSD. Director George Hickenlooper wants us to live through the temptation and surrender of Edie Sedgwick to Sixties debauchery as though we were Edie–a defenseless little girl without immunities of any kind exposed to a series of moral and spiritual illnesses and succumbing to every single one.
The carrier of the disease is Warhol, whose childlike affect is a clever mask that allows him to manipulate, tease, enchant, torment, and control his hangers-on, New York society, and the art world. No one has ever pursued fame and fortune as nakedly as the Warhol we see in Factory Girl, and yet because he behaves so freakishly, the world assumes his hunger for riches and headlines is somehow an ironic commentary on them.
What happens on Warhol’s watch? He mass-produces his Brillo boxes and his silk-screened portraiture. He makes deliberately awful movies, some of them pornographic (this being a time when pornography was somehow considered both liberating and hip). And he hosts a 24-hour party fueled by drugs. Edie appears in the movies, helps him sell his art, and does the drugs with crazed abandon.
Warhol, played by the Australian actor Guy Pearce as a first cousin to Hannibal Lecter, falls in love with the 21-year-old Edie–not because he wants to sleep with her (Warhol was gay), but because he has the impossible desire to transform himself into her. (In this respect, maybe he’s less Hannibal Lecter and more Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs who wore the skins of his victims.) The real Edie Sedgwick was a heartbreakingly gorgeous sylph with a Mayflower pedigree and seemingly limitless financial resources, and the British actress Sienna Miller is an eerie Edie replica. And when she begins to move away from Warhol because she’s fallen for Bob Dylan (here called Billy Quinn for legal reasons), he tortures her psychologically and then simply cuts her off. At which point, she spirals ever downward toward her demise.
Factory Girl doesn’t blame Edie’s collapse entirely on the excesses of the 1960s. It states as fact what may only have been Edie’s amphetamine-driven fantasy–that she was sexually abused by her father Fuzzy–and suggests that she might have been doomed from the start like her brother Minty, who committed suicide. But those are things Edie only discusses in Factory Girl. We don’t see them. What we see is the Warhol whirl, and it’s as frenetic and bleak as a Bosch canvas.
The message here is clear: Edie Sedgwick was killed by the sybaritic decadence of the decade in which she lived, and by the steadfast refusal of the cultural world to rip the mask off the charlatanry of Warhol and his fashion-catalogue counterculture. You’d have to go back in time and sample some of the writings of another Podhoretz to find a more damning portrait of Edie Sedgwick’s era.
I am not an admirer of Andy Warhol’s, and I hate the 1960s as much as anyone on the right. But I have to say that Factory Girl stacks the deck. By all accounts, Edie Sedgwick was no ingenuous ingénue, but rather a young woman with a colossal personality who dominated every room she entered. The word George Plimpton used to describe her was “enchanting.” She was memorable long after her death not because of the depth of her victimhood but because she was the sort of person who seduced others into taking care of her. There is none of this in Sienna Miller’s exhausting performance. Her Edie is simply a hyperactive poor little rich girl with an evil father, and if you had a pill to give her, you’d stuff it down her mouth just to shut her up and calm her down for a minute.
As for the 1960s, they simply had to be more fun than this. Tom Wolfe called the decade a “happiness explosion,” and certainly part of the appeal of Warhol’s demimonde was the crazed and liberated sense that everybody mixed up with Andy was like a disobedient child getting the run of the house while the parents were away on a trip. No rational person would ever want to go to one of the parties we see in Factory Girl, but the problem is that for people like Edie Sedgwick and many of her close friends, they couldn’t bear to spend a second away from the party. If life in chic Manhattan had been as unpleasant as director Hickenlooper and his team of screenwriters make it out to be, all of its denizens would have moved to Brooklyn in the 1960s instead of waiting until the new millennium to cross the river.
It’s unfortunate that the most neoconservative movie ever made is such a drag. Our only hope now is for somebody to make a motion picture out of Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
