From Muse to Victim: How Factory Girl Degrades Its Subject

"Someone had peed on the floor of the small Times Square auditorium at the only critics' screening of Factory Girl," begins NY Magazine film critic David Edelstein's review of the Edie Sedgwick biopic, "which had some audience members speculating on whether this was (a) an advance review of the movie or (b) an attempt to transport us back to the Deuce in the age of Andy Warhol’s Factory. A powerful antibacterial agent took care of the theater’s smell, but not the film’s."

I had a similar Factory Girl experience, which I saw yesterday in Syracuse. No one had peed, but the place was once (rumor has it) a porn theater (the ceiling fans are all the proof I need), and, frankly, doesn't look like it's been properly cleaned since that time (why else would the lights be dimmed all the time, seriously, you have to practically grope your way into an empty seat). The one other time I saw a movie in this theater, I was, well, a bit grossed out by the ambiance. But this time, the squishy quality of the carpet, the ceiling fans lazily swirling overhead, the empty cups and wrappers littering the floor barely even registered: I was too horrified by what was transpiring on screen.

With Factory Girl, director George Hickenlooper has transformed Edie Sedgwick, a pretty, mentally unstable socialite turned Andy Warhol superstar who died of a drug overdose at 28 (played by Sienna Miller), from fascinating underground icon to cloying, mundane woman-child vampirized and used by Warhol (Guy Pearce), who turns on her when Sedgwick begins sleeping with "the musician" (Hayden Christensen), a thinly-veiled (read: transparent) depiction of Bob Dylan.

I'm not going to go into Factory Girl's gross number of inaccuracies and misleading representation of Edie's life, or the fact that the film feels less like a film than a 90 minute montage (I think there were only a handful of scenes that exceeded two minutes), or that trite catchphrases do not a screenplay make ("He's changing the way we look at the world," a fresh-faced Edie says of Warhol-- vom). However, I will harp on this: painting Edie Sedgwick as a victim, and only a victim, does a grave disservice to the film's subject--and makes her mind-numbingly boring. There are countless beautiful young women who descend into a spiral of drug use, and there are dozens of celebrities who live fast and die young (James Dean, River Phoenix, et. al.). What makes Sedgwick different? Why should we care about her?




What makes Edie interesting, and an important part of pop culture, isn't that she did drugs or died young or wore long earrings and black tights: it's that she was one of art's great muses. She inspired some of Warhol's best films ("Poor Little Rich Girl," "Beauty #2") and (allegedly) several songs on Bob Dylan's masterful Blonde on Blonde album. Perhaps this quality that inspired others to create great works of art is something too slippery and elusive to be properly conveyed in a biopic, but the film doesn't even try. Worse, it portrays Warhol as some no-talent hack, with the "true artist" Dylan ridiculing Warhol's empty soup cans and exposing Warhol's supposed inability to direct a film when he shows up at the Factory for a screen test. If Warhol's work was such a sham, what does that say about his great muse?

By belittling Warhol, Factory Girl not only belittles Sedgwick in turn, but also the entire art scene of the 60s. Jim Lewis expressed this so wonderfully in an article for Slate, that I am going to end with his words

I should be pointing out that Warhol was a great artist and a great filmmaker, that he made paintings and movies the likes of which no one had ever seen before—and so he did, though you'd never know it from Factory Girl. I should be telling you that he was also, and not surprisingly, an exceedingly complicated man, that Edie, for all her winsomeness and beauty, was a suicide looking for an excuse, and that Dylan was such a minor character in that scene that it's bewildering to find him in this movie at all, and preposterous to portray him as Warhol's tormentor. I should be reminding you that the times were, by all accounts, hectic if not hysterical, and that Sedgwick was not the only one who paid the price. Warhol was shot, almost to death, by one of his more unstable hangers-on, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie, either.

But I want to say something else, instead. The visual arts have traditionally been a refuge for marginal people: queers and misfits, fragile and disobedient people, the flamboyant and the terminally shy, some brilliant people, some shallow people, and quite a few con artists; and Warhol's Factory was open to all of them. There's a great deal more to art than that, of course; there's hard work and scholarship and as much to think about as there is in poetry or novels or philosophy. But many of us first came to the art world because decades earlier Warhol had made it seem like a wonderful place to be, and besides that, a home. So Factory Girl isn't just a bad movie, it's a 90-minute insult to the culture it pretends to be capturing, and what I really want to say—as I would almost never say of anything I see or read or listen to—is that I hated it.

Amen.