Spacious DOUGLAS CRIMP In memory of Ronald Tavel A. I like your apartment. B. It’s nice, but it’s only big enough for one person—or two people who are very close. A. You know two people who are very close? —The Philosophy of Andy Warhol Andy Warhol’s early sound film John and Ivy (1965) was shot in a small apartment kitchen. A foreground column or doorjamb—it’s hard to tell what it is since it appears simply as a dark vertical band—divides the film frame into a narrow strip of space at the left, where there is a low stool that John or Ivy occasionally sits on, and a wider area on the right, where there is a cluttered stovetop with a tea kettle simmering on it. Behind the stove is a window, apparently on an airshaft. In striking contrast to the kitchen’s squalor, John Palmer and Ivy Nicholson are stylishly turned out. His sport coat has a star-shaped patch at the back on the armhole; her fashion-model coiffure is chic and expensive-looking. Throughout the film’s thirty-three minutes, the two of them and Ivy’s two young blond children move into and out of the camera’s range from screen left.1 If the rooms in New York’s East Village tenement apartments like Ivy Nicholson’s are often very small, this one seems smaller still because the foreground column so insistently obstructs our view of it. One wonders that there was room enough for Warhol’s camera. John and Ivy look too large for the space, especially because what they do in this cramped kitchen, aside from constantly coming and going, is dance the frug and fall to the floor below the camera’s range for a quick make-out session. 1. Callie Angell has identified the children as Darius de Poleon and Sean Bolger. See Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Abrams, 2006), p. 141. OCTOBER 132, Spring 2010, pp. 5–24. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 6 OCTOBER Meanwhile the naked little boys run in and out and make the kind of fuss that little boys make. Adding to the sense of confinement, a WABC radio broadcast that comprises the film’s most audible soundtrack tells us that the film is shot while the city is in the grip of snow emergency. (We also learn from the radio that it is 5:00 p.m., that the Justice Department has returned indictments in the case of three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi the previous summer, that “Winston tastes good like a—clap, clap—cigarette should,” and that the number one song is the Supremes’ “Come See About Me,” which means John and Ivy was shot in midJanuary 1965.) The foreground column does more than subdivide the screen space: it radically flattens and contracts it—contracts it in the sense that the “action” of the film, especially insofar as that action involves interaction among the film’s characters, is confined to the right-hand two-thirds of the screen, the area mostly taken up by the stove. There are some moments when the action occurs across the left- and righthand spaces, and there is even a brief moment of contained interaction within the narrow band at the left, where John reads a story to one of the boys, sitting in his lap; meanwhile Ivy peels a hardboiled egg in the more expansive swath of space at the right. Some other things Ivy does: she brushes her teeth with a battery-powered tooth brush, smokes, reads the children’s book, pulls up the black tights that she wears beneath her over-the-calf boots, dampens those same tights by rubbing them with a handful of snow taken from the airshaft, picks up one of her boys and holds him, makes instant coffee, dances to songs by the Shangri-Las and the Beatles playing on the radio, blows air into a paper bag and pops it behind John’s head while kissing him, and throws a snowball at John. John doesn’t do much. He changes stations on the radio. He observes that meeting the camera is like meeting a new person (if this is the way he acts when he meets a new person, he’s not very sociable). But the column paradoxically also expands and opens up the space, and it does so in a way that startles you when it occurs. On a couple of occasions, rather than walk behind the column from screen left to screen right, Ivy moves rightward toward the camera and passes in front of this repoussoir element to appear as a looming silhouette in the foreground. At these moments we become aware that the space we’ve been looking at is not nearly as two-dimensional as it had seemed; in fact the spatial configuration is one not only of left and right of the column but also of behind and in front of it. Of course, the space on screen has all along appeared to have some depth, but that depth has not until these moments noticeably extended in the direction of the viewer. That this should be so startling is a measure of Warhol’s ability to make us see the screen as surface. Warhol’s is famously the artist of surface—“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and my films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” 2 Certainly, scanning the surface of Warhol’s early films is a sensible response to his camera’s immobility. But when we 2. Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 90. 7 Spacious Andy Warhol. John and Ivy. 1965. All images courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. look around the screen, what we see is, in fact, space—sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. Scanning the surface and finding space is not only something we do as a result of the static shot; it is also, in the later films, something Warhol’s nowmobile camera does for us. In a number of films beginning late in 1965, Warhol tilt-pans all the way up to the ceiling and down to the floor to give us a dizzying sense of too much space, a disorienting sense of spaciousness. The delineation of space is nevertheless comparatively systematic in some of Warhol’s films. For Haircut (No. 1) (1963), an early silent film made up of six one-hundred-foot reels spliced together, Warhol shows us the haircut and the room in which it takes place from a different angle or distance in each reel, as if to mark out the mise-en-scène with his camera set-ups, except that the lighting and framing also make the space difficult to comprehend, so much so that in one especially striking shot the heads of the three actors (there are eventually four) are so oddly juxtaposed as to make a frame enlargement look like a collage of cutouts of each head. There is also a kind of spatial joke in Haircut. Judson dancer Freddy Herko, who isn’t getting a haircut but looking on—looking at the camera, posing—appears shirtless at first and then for ensuing camera set-ups undresses fully except for a cowboy hat. Billy Name’s careful, precise, erotic, slightly menacing scissoring of John Daley’s hair occurs in the foreground while Freddy sits cross-legged behind them. The joke is that if you are not watching the eponymous event but looking into the background at this sexy guy, you will get a quick pay-off 8 OCTOBER Warhol. Haircut (No. 1). 1963. as he uncrosses his legs and re-crosses them on the opposite side (it’s the same maneuver employed by Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct).3 Freddy’s crotch-shot is something of a clue to the way to watch Warhol’s films. Scanning the surface is how you see, pace Warhol, behind it, into spatial depth. A classic example is Vinyl (1965), a film scripted by Ronald Tavel in which Gerard Malanga plays bottom to Tosh Carillo’s very professional top in an S&M scene that takes place in the film’s left foreground. The right foreground is occupied by Edie Sedgwick, whose film debut Vinyl is. She wasn’t in fact meant to be in the film, but she arrived at the Factory as the shoot was beginning, so Warhol put 3. Stephen Koch describes this moment in his chapter on Haircut in Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 1991), p. 54. Koch mistakenly refers to Billy Linich (Billy Name) as the person getting, not giving the haircut. Far more egregiously, he identifies Freddy Herko not by name, but with a description even more moralistic than the one of DeVerne Bookwalter I’ve criticized in “Face Value” (in About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits [Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum; and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999], pp. 110–11): “Nearest the camera . . . is a very nasty-looking type posing without a shirt. He wears exhibitionistically tight, and very dirty, white jeans that glare a bit in the lens. Both he and his clothes look as badly scuffed as the loft itself. Bluntly, he looks like he knows 42nd Street as well as or better than the protagonist (antagonist?) of Blow-Job. His face and body have the strung-out wiriness, the tough, undernourished gracelessness of a slum escapee who survives on street food, on sausage sandwiches bought at greasy open-air stands, hot dogs, Pepsis, and amphetamines. His chest and arms swarm with matted masses of black hair, but whatever vitality he has seems deflected into a loveless, hollow-eyed preening over the groin that his (otherwise carelessly worn) jeans force into high relief. Close to the camera, he preens and postures in a laconic, faintly nasty way” (p. 53). 9 Spacious Warhol. Haircut (No. 1). 1963. her up front to the right of the action; she sits there on a steamer trunk, looking insouciant, chain smoking, occasionally moving her upper body to the beat of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.” The S&M interrogation that is the film’s ostensible subject during the second reel is clearly exaggerated: Malanga’s cries of pain sound phony and silly. But if you move your eyes from the left foreground Clockwork Orange–inspired aversion therapy scenario toward the right background, behind Sedgwick, you see in glimpses a genuine S&M scene in which Larry Letreille as a sexy submissive really is subjected, silently and presumably willingly, to sustained sexual torture, first by Carillo, then by Jacques Potain. Warhol and Tavel seem to want us to recognize sadomasochism as the background condition of whatever normally engages our attention. Certainly the fact that both what underlies a narrative and the narrative itself can play out in a single shot is one of the astonishing spatial achievements of Warhol’s mid-period films. What was intended to be the most determinedly programmatic spatial delineation among Warhol’s films is a Tavel project called Space (1965). Tavel explains that, in order to achieve the degree of abstraction Warhol asked of him, he wrote a script consisting of eight passages of dialogue each for eight readers who would sit in a figure-eight configuration.4 A roving microphone would be carried from one reader to the next, and the person at the mike would read his or 4. Ronald Tavel, The Complete In-Facsimile Warhol Shooting Scripts, http://ronald-tavel.com/screenplay.htm. 10 OCTOBER Warhol. Space. 1965. her lines, which were random samplings from radio and TV ads and snatches of conversation Tavel had overheard on the street. A few examples from the script that actually made it into the film: Well, when she was alive, all you heard was Marilyn Monroe this and Marilyn Monroe that, and Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dimag [sic] and Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe this and Marilyn Monroe that. But now that she’s dead you never hear anything about her. I cried throughout the whole movie . . . . dreadful film, dreadful. Someday, pornography will be accepted, but nudity will never be understood. I wanted to be a playboy Bunny. I wanted to be a Bunny that boys play with. A hundred times I filled out applications. But the P.R. man said I didn’t fill them out, and failed to hire me. I’m a two-time loser. What’s your pitch, honey? Spacious 11 Tavel’s script was almost completely subverted by the film’s cast, especially Sedgwick and her friends Donald Lyons and Ed Hennesey, who show no interest in following the scenario. Instead, Lyons attempts to teach Edie to recite the rosary, while Hennesey eats, drinks, and regurgitates upon whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting within close range, “as if this were just the quite most amusing thing one could do in the world during a movie,” as Tavel bitterly put it.5 Those who did follow Tavel’s directives, at least initially, are the handsome young folk singer Eric Anderson, who speaks his lines while accompanying himself and others with his guitar, and the extraordinary Dorothy Dean, whom the camera captures far less than the glimmers of her appeal we do manage to see would seem to demand. But for all that, this is a film crowded with interesting personalities and pretty faces—Dean, Anderson, Sedgwick, Gino Piserchio (the beauty of Beauty No. 2 ), Roger Trudeau (the beauty of Kitchen)—Warhol is in fact more interested in the concept of space, though not necessarily the one plotted by Tavel’s script. Space is among the first of his films in which Warhol experimented with camera movement. Initially the sound girl, Kristy Keating, does move the microphone from person to person as instructed by Tavel. There are several more than the scripted eight players, all artfully arrayed in a tightly crowded grouping around Anderson. The Factory’s half-sphere mirror ball, recognizable from other films such as Camp and the Vivian Kurz Screen Tests, sits on the floor; it might be taken as a symbol of Warhol’s cinematography for Space insofar as the mobile camera fragments and confounds our spatial perception of the scene it shows. (The emblematic nature of the mirror ball is underscored by the fact that the second reel of Space begins with a slightly out-of-focus close up of it, after which there is a cut back to the fuller scene; this “establishing shot” followed by a cut duplicates what happens in the film’s first reel, which opens with a shot of a sound-check on the set followed by a cut to the beginning of the action.) Whereas the spatial ambiguity of Haircut is the result of chiaroscuro lighting, the lighting of Space is bright and even, but the combination of camera work that never shows the scene in its entirety as it insistently pans back and forth and zooms in and out, and the fact that what the camera sees is a jumble of faces, bodies, limbs, furniture, objects, and mirrors, makes it impossible either to fathom from moment to moment or to reconstruct in memory the space of Space. Moreover, Warhol only rarely moves his camera in sync with the microphone, so the sound we hear doesn’t accord with the characters we see talking. There are especially disorienting moments in the film’s second reel in which we see a hodgepodge of pretty faces both in front of the mirror and in it—Edie-in-the-mirror, Eric, Edie, Norman Levine, for example, or Edie-in-the-mirror, Ed-in-the-mirror, Edie, Gino. The space does indeed collapse into surface at these moments, and that surface is exquisite. We might thus read Warhol’s suggestion to “just look at the surface” here as an admonition: If we look beyond the surface to the “substance” of Space, all we see is 5. Ibid. 12 OCTOBER the childish nonsense of the hootenanny into which the scenario has deteriorated. And while Edie Sedgwick is no more capable of singing along to “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” or “Puff the Magic Dragon” than she is of learning the rosary or reading Tavel’s lines, her physical presence and her face never cease to dazzle. The dazzle of her face is surface and substance of Outer and Inner Space (1965), Warhol’s first experiment both with video and with double-screen projection and at the same time another complex spatial diagram. Callie Angell has interpreted the “outer” and “inner” of the title of this extraordinary fourfold portrait as signaling “the dichotomy between Sedgwick’s outer beauty and inner turmoil” and also as describing the “two very different spaces of representation occupied by the video-television medium and by film.”6 Indeed, not only is the electronic image of Sedgwick’s face flattened by its even lighting as compared to the shadows that sculpt depth into Sedgwick’s filmed face—shadows that in fact result from the face’s being illuminated by the slightly larger picture on the TV monitor that sits beside and slightly behind it—but that image is also manipulated electronically at times to make it disintegrate into a moiré pattern that makes it even more surface-like. The film’s title might also describe the camera’s view of the space of the set and of its two subjects—Edie’s video image and Edie herself, twice—as it describes a backwards U shape from outer to inner and back to outer, or, to employ the language of cinematography, from medium shot right juxtaposed with close up left, to close ups left and right, and finally to close up right, medium shot left. Of course, this spatial demarcation from outer to inner and back to outer is really a function of the double-screen projection: Warhol began with a close-up in reel one, moved out to a medium shot, began reel two with a medium shot and then finished by pulling in to the close-up with which he’d begun. We don’t see this outer and inner space as space, however, even when the two reels are projected side by side; rather we follow the spatial demarcation in time: we map the U-shape of the space mnemonically. Warhol also plays a different kind of spatial game with Outer and Inner Space: he shows us the actual space in which Sedgwick sits, facing the camera, in front of the TV monitor showing her profile, thus making clear how the highly abstract tight close-up on the left-hand screen is constructed. He then dissolves that space by pulling the right-hand shot in to close up to fill both screens with juxtaposed profile and three-quarter views, quadrupling Sedgwick’s visage. We now experience the film purely as a surface line-up of video profile/filmic threequarter/video profile/filmic three-quarter images. Sedgwick chatters to someone off camera in all four versions of herself, though she moves her head much more often in the film register than in the video one. We hear only snippets of what she says—a word here, a phrase there, hardly ever a complete sentence. From time to 6. Callie Angell, “Andy Warhol: Outer and Inner Space,” in From Stills to Motion and Back Again: Texts on Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Outer and Inner Space (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2003), p. 14; see also Callie Angell, “Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space,” Millennium Film Journal 38 (Spring 2002). 13 Spacious Warhol. Outer and Inner Space. 1965. time she seems to react to her own voice emanating from the monitor beside her, but we infer this more from her movements than from hearing what she says. At first, we strain to listen, but very quickly we give up and simply watch the shimmering mobility of her facial expressions and her enormous dangling earrings. The film’s sound is thus a sort of ruse, making us think that perhaps there’s a story, a conversation, gossip—something that we should be in on. A transcript made by a lip-reader teaches us otherwise: Sedgwick reprises “Puff the Magic Dragon” from Space, and that’s about as interesting as it gets.7 What she says doesn’t matter. What matters is that a constant patter of her vocal sounds accompanies her changing facial expressions and bobbing head. Outer and Inner Space is a work of vividly animated portraiture, a unique experiment in complicating and extending—spatially, temporally, sonically—the early silkscreen paintings of Marilyn, Liz, Elvis, and Jackie and the nearly five-hundred Screen Test film portraits that Warhol made between 1964 and 1966.8 Of course, a great many, if not indeed most, of Warhol’s films can be thought of as portraits: the early, silent ones obviously—Sleep ( John Giorno), Eat 7. A transcript of the sound of Outer and Inner Space was prepared by a lip-reader. See “What Edie Said in Outer and Inner Space,” in From Stills to Motion and Back Again, pp. 27–39. 8. See Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests. 14 OCTOBER Warhol. The Closet. 1966. (Robert Indiana), Blow Job (DeVerne Bookwalter), Empire (the Empire State Building), Henry Geldzahler, Taylor Mead’s Ass, Shoulder (Lucinda Childs), Mario Banana (Mario Montez)—but the later, sound ones too—Face, Poor Little Rich Girl, Beauty #2, Afternoon, and Lupe (more portraits of Sedgwick), Paul Swan, the Ronald Tavel scr ipted Screen Test #1 ( Philip Fagan), Screen Test #2 (Mar io Montez), and Suicide (Rock Bradett), Mrs. Warhol, Eating Too Fast (Gregory Battcock), Bufferin (Gerard Malanga). 9 Various reels of The Chelsea Girls are essentially portraits of Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Eric Emerson, and Nico. A number of films—Kiss, Haircut, Couch, Camp, Restaurant, The Velvet Underground and Nico—are group portraits; John and Ivy is a double portrait, a portrait of a couple; Blue Movie is a double portrait of Viva and Louis Waldron, a portrait not of a couple but of a fuck (the film’s alternate title). The Closet is a double port rait of Nico and Randy Bour scheidt . Although they are pictured alone together in a closet, a closet big enough for only two people, they are not a couple, and there certainly isn’t going to be a fuck. The Closet is a space of not coupling, of not even getting close. In her desultory way, Nico tries to get Randy to show some interest in her. Feigning incomprehension, Randy demurs. The following dialogue takes place three9. That Warhol’s films are nearly always concerned with portraiture is the point of Callie Angell’s Something Secret: Portraiture in Warhol’s Films (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994). See also About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits, ed. Nicholas Baume (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum; and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 15 Spacious quarters of the way through the film, after Randy has confessed to being perfectly happy to stay in the closet: Nico: Do you think anything seems interesting? Randy: Uhm, yeah. Nico (waits, then exasperated): What? Randy: Sometimes you. Nico: Do you have to get used to something that seems interesting, or the other way around? Do you want to get used to something that seems interesting? Randy: No. Nico: Definitely? Randy. No, because things are usually interesting because you don’t know anything about them. Nico: Don’t you think you can be interested in something you get used to? Randy: Yes, but it doesn’t make any difference, because . . . Nico: Therefore you have to go looking for new things. Therefore you have to go out of here. Randy: Well, things change in here. You know, you change, and I change. Nico: We should all be interested in things we don’t want to be interested in. Randy: Uh, right. The Closet begins with a slightly askew shot of a closet door, an old-fashioned door with moldings and a brass doorknob (we think: “Oh no, this is going to be a film of a closet door like Empire is a film of the Empire State Building, and a closet door is not at all interesting to look at”). Nico’s and Randy’s voices can soon be heard behind the door. They discuss snakes molting. After about eight minutes, Randy pushes the door open. The angle of the original framing remains, and we see that the camera has been positioned low enough that with the closet door open the two actors, evidently sitting on low stools, are captured in threequarter view. The back of the open door is partially visible at the right. Neckties and silk scarves hang down from above. Nico wears a white Foale and Tuffin pants suit; Randy wears an Aran sweater over a white button-down shirt. Nico’s hair is, of 16 OCTOBER course, very blond, Randy’s, light brown. The closet’s interior, like its outside door, is painted stark white. Bright, even lighting bleaches out the scene, making the whole film appear as blond as Nico herself. After a moment of adjusting to the light, the two continue their timid, diffident, not always audible conversation: Nico: Do you actually know where we are, now? Randy: No, I can’t remember. Nico: Is Central Park, New York, a part of New York? Randy: Yeah, Central Park is right there [points to his left]. Nico: I thought it was that way [points to her right]. Randy: Oh, that’s right, I think it is. We realize that this will not be a scintillating conversation, so we stop straining to understand the poor-quality optical sound recording. As if in response to our dissatisfaction, the camera moves. It zooms in to a close-up tight enough that Nico has to lean into the frame to be seen. Nico disappears left, so we look at Randy. His restless body language, darting eyes, nervous smile, and quizzical tone all suggest that he’s camera-shy, not to mention Nico-shy. Nico is a goddess, and Randy is just a sweet kid, star struck, bashful, and undoubtedly sexually intimidated.10 At various moments, Nico plays with Randy’s hair, his sweater, offers to feed him a sandwich. There are long, awkward silences. Midway through the film, Nico asks, “Are you afraid of me?” Randy hesitates, smiles. Nico: I’m not trying to embarrass you. Randy, inching slightly toward Nico: Uh, no [long pause], why? Nico: Do you find there’s a similarity between us? Randy: Uh, not really, no. Nico: No? Randy: No, your hair is much longer than mine. Nico: Not really. Randy laughs, reaches across, gingerly touches Nico’s hair, nervously laughs again. Nico: That’s not an essential thing. Randy: Not really . . . our faces? 10. Viva writes of Nico, whom she calls Olga, in Viva Superstar, “Olga hated sex except with ‘yoooooooooung boys.’ ‘I only like yoooooooooung boys,’ she’d say, sounding like growling” (Viva, Superstar [New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970], p. 104). 17 Spacious Warhol. The Closet. 1966. Nico: Hmm? Randy: Our faces? This dialogue begins with a close-up of Nico’s face. After she asks “Are you afraid of me?” the camera zooms out to a medium shot to capture Randy’s reaction. It holds there until Nico asks if Randy finds a similarity between them, then begins a slow pan to the left that leaves him out of the picture by the time he answers her. By the time he reaches for her hair, Nico is squeezed into the right-hand side of the picture, and by the time he asks “Our faces?” we can see only a narrow sliver of her at the edge of the frame. The camera is trained on the doorjamb and a blank wall. Warhol’s camera work has a pleasingly perverse relation to the cramped space and languorous pace of The Closet’s seduction and refusal. The camera holds steady for long stretches, as if to accentuate the going-nowhere quality and uncomfortable silences of the conversation, but it sometimes becomes very active, even if its repertory of moves is kept to a minimum. It’s as if Warhol has just discovered some things his camera can do and is trying them out: he zooms in from medium shot to close-up, tilt pans down to the floor and up to the shelf above the actors’ heads, pans and swish pans left and right. For example, here is what Warhol does with his camera in the sequence immediately following the conversation I’ve just recounted. We start with the medium shot showing the wall, the closet doorjamb, and a narrow fragment of Nico at the far right. The camera slowly 18 OCTOBER Warhol. The Closet. 1966. pans right, zooms in to a close-up of Nico, tilt pans down to Nico’s pants leg, tilt pans back up, zooms out to a medium shot, zooms back to the close-up of Nico, pans left beyond Nico, then all the way right to Randy, back left past Nico, then swish pans right to Randy. After two more slow pans to the left followed by swish pans to the right, there is a zoom out to a medium shot of Randy and a pan left to the narrow fragment of Nico at the far right with which we began. There is a tilt pan down to the closet floor, right, and up, so that Nico’s and Randy’s heads appear respectively at the bottom left- and right-hand corners of the screen. This framing of the two’s heads at opposite sides of the screen doesn’t exactly isolate them from each other: they are, after all, sitting next to each other in a coat closet. Sometimes the camera zooms in on their tight proximity, showing only adjacent body parts—Nico’s knee next to Randy’s elbow, Nico’s left hand beside Randy’s right. But in The Closet proximate isn’t close. On the contrary, sixtysix minutes of togetherness seem not to have brought Nico and Randy one bit closer to each other. Nico gets nowhere with Randy; she never so much as learns his name. Near the end of the film, Nico takes off her jacket and Randy hangs it up between them, then says, “It’s like two closets.” Nico plays peek-a-boo, hiding behind the jacket, pushing it aside, then hiding behind it again. Randy: Do you think you could forget I was here? Nico: Oh no, never. I don’t forget faces. 19 Spacious Randy: You don’t know my name though. Nico: No. What is it? Romeo? Randy: No. Nico: Why not? Randy: Uh. Nico: Why don’t we play Romeo and Juliet? Randy: Shall I get down on my knees? Nico: Oh no. You could be Juliet, and I’m Romeo. Randy laughs, throws Nico’s jacket sleeve at her, and the film runs out. Nico doesn’t make the most convincing Romeo; you could hardly describe the feeling she gives off as ardor (Randy in fact likens her at one point to an icicle). The Closet’s seduction is so subtle that the participants are able to behave more or less as if it’s not taking place at all. And we think: “Maybe it’s just a stunted conversation between two actors with no chemistry; maybe it’s just a pretext for Warhol to move his camera; maybe it is, after all, just a film of a closet, like Empire is a film of the Empire State Building.” In the meantime, the closet has become a strangely fascinating place. Nico: It’s very sad to be in a closet all your life, don’t you think? Don’t you feel sorry for me? Randy: No. I don’t know what we’d do if we got out. Nico: There would be more variation, I’m sure—variations of color. Randy: I know, but that doesn’t make any difference . . . you just get used to them. There are some variations in here. Confinement in The Closet is rendered less claustrophobic, so much more variable, by Warhol’s mobile camera, which, while always keeping the closet in frame, constantly re-configures and opens out its space. Confining enclosure is, by contrast, especially palpable in the second reel of My Hustler (which predates The Closet by a year) because the unmoving shot of a small beach-house bathroom shared by Paul America and Joseph Campbell—called the Sugar Plum Fairy in the film—follows upon a reel shot outdoors on Fire Island, with, for Warhol in mid1965, all sorts of camera movements—pans, swish pans, tilt pans, zooms in and out—and even two cuts. Close-ups of Paul lying on the beach zoom out to long shots, and toward the end of the reel the camera follows Paul from a great distance as he plays in the waves with Genevieve Charbin. Even close-ups of the group on the beach-house deck (Ed Hood, who plays the john to Paul’s hustler, 20 OCTOBER and variously John McDermott as the houseboy, Genevieve, and Joe) give an illusion of spatial depth because of a large beachscape painting hanging inside the house that is sharply visible behind the assembled characters. In one especially spacious shot, the camera pans away from a close-up of the group on the deck along the façade of the house, zooms out to a long shot of the sand dunes and other beach houses in the distance, and continues to pan while zooming back in as it reaches its destination in a close-up on Paul lying on the beach. During this complex shot, we hear Ed make a proposition about his Dial-a-Hustler call boy to Joe and Genevieve: “The bet is this: that neither one of you can make him, and you can both try—of course, you can’t try too hard, you can’t try everything. I don’t want your clothes coming off, Genevieve . . . . ” Apart from the early and essentially unique Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of, shot at various sites in Los Angeles in 1963, and the lost “documentary” Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love, Warhol made no films on outdoor location before My Hustler. And it was only around this time that he began to move his camera and include edits in a thirty-three minute reel (as we’ve seen in Space). So when Warhol reverts to a stationary, unedited shot of a bathroom interior in My Hustler’s second reel, we’re all the more struck by how cramped the space is—and more so too because of the physical intimacy coupled with emotional distance of the two guys. Parker Tyler describes the scene well: Cozily flank by flank in the cottage’s tiny bathroom, the pair engage in some beautifully deft verbal sparring. The hush that can sound like an interminable desert of silence in Warhol’s films is here as precisioned into tense pauses as the most carefully crafted dramaturgy. One has a notion the directorial genius that makes everything in this true-life put-on look utterly right is a real objective hazard; I suspect it was perfect understanding between the two performers as to just what was involved. Adagio, sotto voce, it leads into a veiled proposition from the old pro—tactically prolonged through an endless shave and wash-up—that the blond, in return for the other’s invaluable list of tried customers, must first render his body up to the old pro himself.11 We see them from the side, while seeing their faces in a medicine cabinet mirror. They jockey for position in front of it, changing places again and again throughout the reel. They see each other in the mirror too. They check each other out surreptitiously while paying closest attention to themselves. Their narcissism is stunning, even for a Warhol film; to say that they primp is an understatement, if only because they do so for thirty-three minutes straight. They shower, 11. Parker Tyler, “Drugtime and Dragtime or, Film à la Warhol” (1967), in Andy Warhol Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI, 1989), p. 102. 21 Spacious Warhol. My Hustler. 1965. dry off, shave, brush their teeth, comb their hair, clean their ears with Q-tips, clean their nails, apply talcum powder, dry themselves again, comb their hair again, and again, and again. Paul takes a piss. Joe watches out of the corner of his eye. Joe sprays deodorant on his underarms and mists cologne on his shoulders and in his hair. He dries Paul’s back, rubs it, moves his hands around to Paul’s chest and massages it. He does all these things while pretending disinterest in Paul’s body, even as he says, while grasping Paul’s chest, “It just depends on how cooperative you’re going to be . . . I mean, you’ve got a beautiful body, you know.” The cooperativeness and physical beauty he’s discussing ostensibly concern Paul’s potential as a hustler, not as a score of his own. And since Joe admits to being an experienced hustler himself, his interest is not—again ostensibly—in Paul, even though he does say, in his most overt verbal come-on, that after hustling for awhile “you get accustomed to it, not that you don’t like girls or anything, but you actually sort of . . . ah . . . sort of enjoy making it with a younger guy once in awhile.” Paul plays dumb: “Whaddaya mean a younger guy? What are you talking about?” . . . Why, how old are you?” Joe doesn’t answer that. The question of older men brings him back to johns and what they’ll expect from Paul. “A john is a guy that, you know, appreciates you for being . . . ah . . . what you are, or what he thinks you might be.” Joe knows one john, for instance, who doesn’t demand much. He doesn’t want your ass. He doesn’t want to get sucked off. He just wants to play with you . . . . But he doesn’t just lie there. He talks to 22 OCTOBER Warhol. My Hustler. 1965. you. He says things like, you know, “Make it ooze, make it ooze,” and you say, “Make it ooze, make it ooze.” And then you say, “I got a hot load coming. I got a hot load, hot load, hot load.” You know, you break up in laughter but it’s real. That’s the way he gets his jollies, and you figure, well, that’s the way he’s getting his jollies and I’ll get my jollies when I get my thirty-five bucks twice a week for fifteen minutes. Joe’s ploy is, as Tyler notes, to get Paul to make it with him as a commission for introducing Paul to some of his johns, but Paul steadfastly fails to comprehend what Joe is offering—or pretends to fail to comprehend. Joe’s exasperation finally leads him to impugn Paul’s masculinity. Joe: So what is your game, anyway? I mean, you’re not exactly the ordinary guy on the street. Paul: Whaddaya mean? Joe: Well, I mean your hair’s pretty long. You’ve gone with a couple of johns. You’re not out here with a girl. You were an athlete in school. Whaddaya, you got out of school, you were in the army, right? Paul: No. Joe: You weren’t in the army? Paul: No. 23 Spacious Joe: Navy? Paul: No. Joe: Marines? Paul: Nothing. Joe: Why not? Paul: 4F. Joe: 4F? An athlete? Paul: I have a bad knee. Joe turns away in feigned disgust. Paul protests: I do. Joe: Yeah, sure. Right after this insinuation, Joe rubs Noxema on Paul’s back and moves his hands around to caress his chest again. Twice while doing so he eyes the camera. His furtive glance startles: all of a sudden we are made aware that there is an outside of this bathroom space we’ve been confined to. Joe returns his hands to Paul’s back, then reaches around to his abdomen and down to his belt . . . At just this moment, Genevieve appears in the doorway in extreme close-up, her head in shadow, her profile outlined by the bathroom light. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Joe says, and he backs away out of the frame. “Hey Paul,” says Genevieve, “you could go away with me, you know. I’m going away next week, for about a year. I’ve got some money, and I’m going away to France. It’s very beautiful there . . . It’s better than staying here and being like Sugar Plum.” Genevieve gets no response, so she moves on. Ed takes her place in the doorway: “Hello Paul. Paul, have you ever seen that much cash in one wallet? Do you know how much more there is where that comes from? Do you know the places I could take you? . . . I could get you girls, Paul, beautiful, rich girls . . . . I could teach you things, Paul. I’m extremely well educated. I have a large library.” Ed departs, and Dorothy Dean takes his place. Dean hasn’t appeared in the film thus far. We have no idea what she represents in the story, apart from what she says now: Well, sweetie, you may be lovely, but can you stay lovely? I mean how long can this go on? Not forever. I think it’s more to your advantage to decide what you want to do . . . . You are very pretty, but you’re not exactly literate . . . . Sweetie, I will get you educated, which won’t harm you, and after that, do what you want. I mean, why be tied down to these old faggots? 24 OCTOBER Dorothy pauses and begins to apply her lipstick, and the film runs out.12 Throughout this succession of offers to escape, Paul silently cleans and buffs his nails while Joe stays in the background, out of the camera’s range except for a few glimpses of him in the mirror. Paul never so much as glancingly acknowledges his propositioners. He looks up from his fingernails only to stare at himself in the mirror. Although the subject of his half hour of banter with Joe was whether to continue hustling, he now shows no interest in offers of money, travel, and education in payment for his companionship. Indeed, he shows no interest in moving beyond the bathroom mirror and the game he and Joe have been playing in front of it. Joe Campbell’s and Paul America’s performances in this second reel of My Hustler must count as one of the great improvisational tours-de-force in Warhol’s cinema. Not only do the two men sustain the illusion of an actual conversation between experienced and inexperienced hustlers while at the same time constantly grooming themselves, but they also strike a perfect balance between tough-guy talk and the game of seduction. Joe is kind of a letch, but he’s also kind of a stud. Paul is a fauxnaif tease, but he’s also intimidated. Each wants the other but can’t quite admit it—to himself, to the other, to us. Or is this just the impression they’re creating? The claustrophobia that I suggested resulted from the contrast of My Hustler’s second reel with the mobile camera work and outdoor expansiveness of its first reel is compounded by the game these two play. We feel it, but evidently Paul doesn’t, or in any case he doesn’t mind. Like Nico’s offer to get Randy out of the closet, Genevieve’s, Ed’s, and Dorothy’s offers to get Paul out of the beachhouse bathroom are rebuffed. Why leave, when there’s so much variation right here? You would have to run off together—as a couple—with one of these three characters toward a predictable end, if not the proverbial happily-ever-after ending. In here, you can continue to play around in the space of not coupling, a space that hasn’t been much explored in the movies—or anywhere else, for that matter. It is one of the signal achievements of Warhol’s cinema that it resists denouements.13 Warhol’s films don’t have happy endings. They don’t have endings at all. They just end. 12. In his nasty account of Dorothy Dean, which portrays her with every cliché about “fag hags,” Hilton Als writes that “Warhol treated Dean’s performance as marginal; the film literally runs out while she is still speaking, most of the time in underexposed darkness” (Hilton Als, The Women [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996], p. 102). Dean is indeed a marginal figure in the film, but she has in fact stopped speaking, at least momentarily, when the film runs out. In any case, it is characteristic of Warhol’s films that they end when the reel runs out. The film is not underexposed during Dean’s appearance. She is, like the two actors who precede her in propositioning Paul, silhouetted and back lit from within the space of the bathroom. For a more complex reading of Dean’s “shadowy” appearance in My Hustler, see Taro Nettleton, “White-on-White: The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol Being,” Art Journal 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 15–23. 13. In this respect, yaoi, the term of ironic self-derogation that fans have invented for the genre of Japanese manga involving romances between beautiful boys and aimed at teenaged girls, seems apt for Warhol’s cinema. Yaoi derives from the words meaning “no climax” (yama-nashi), “no punchline” (ochi-nashi), “no-meaning” (imi-nashi).