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Ohn 3 June 1968, Valerie Solanas, the only member of Scum (Society for Cutting Up Men), joined. Andy WarholFactory, pulled out a .32-caliber pistol and fired three shots. The first hit art critic Mario Amaya in the hip, the second landed on the wall and the third pierced Warhol’s chest. After two days, Robert Kennedy was killed, stealing airtime for an assassination attempt on a famous American Pop artist. After the shooting, Solanas, as Warhol would say, got his “15 minutes of fame”.
When the police asked Solanas why he shot Warhol, he replied that he had “many reasons”. This phrase is repeated throughout Mary Harron’s 1996, I Shot Andy Warholwhich takes its title from another line in Solanas’ police confession and drives the viewer through his life, leaving the question of why he did this for interpretation. Thirty years ago, it opened Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, and today, this film is still one of the 90s’ most famous and well-known dramas and has become a well-known cult.
This summer, I Shot Andy Warhol returns to cinemas in a new 4K restoration from Janus Films. For many years, the film told about the fate of its subject, which was not known. Its rights passed through a series of distributors, and the only way to watch it was through a YouTube download from a long-out-of-print DVD. “I’ve been trying for six or seven years to get this film back into circulation,” said Harron from an office in Brooklyn.
For Harron, the film harkens back to a time when his treatment of gender and his politics could be read differently. “I think people understand better now. Our culture is going back to male dominance and authoritarianism; everything that women like Valerie fought against.” Solanas, who was born in 1936, and went to college at a time when most Americans were very conservative, had a politics that might seem similar to today’s feminism; driven as much by righteous indignation at patriarchy as they are by life. In his Scum Manifesto, he claimed that men’s chromosomes make them inferior.
In Harron’s portrayal of Warhol’s would-be killer, Lili Taylor plays Solanas as a ragtag artist in constant search of an audience, which she believes the star-making power of Warhol can provide. Jared Harris embodies Warhol with sardonic anger, and Stephen Dorff plays Candy Darling, a cult figure and actress whose beauty Solanas hates. “Valerie was like Terf,” says Harron. “He had all kinds of ideas, and then these were big prejudices.”
A willingness to live with such ambiguities and reject clear-cut terms has defined Harron’s work, since. American Psycho until 2018’s Charlie Says, which starred Matt Smith like Charles Manson. He recalls that studio executives wanted to know more about Patrick Bateman’s childhood while making American Psycho, hoping that psychology would explain his motives. He opposed the clean, defining system of the time, and always has. He said: “It is not good to explain things like this.”
That’s what sets I Shot Andy Warhol apart from most modern historical reenactments. Harron approaches Solanas sympathetically without turning him into a saint. He said: “I really like Valerie, but you don’t have to turn her into a 100% hero. “It’s not about heroes or villains. For me, this is what makes the story always interesting, showing people’s problems, and the conflicts between people.”
Harron first discovered Solanas in the 80s while researching a BBC documentary on Warhol after a music journalism stint that included extensive interviews with The Velvet Underground about NME. “I just fell into music journalism, but I always wanted to do something creative,” he recalls.
In a Brixton bookshop, he picked up the Scum Manifesto for the first time. Harron says it hit him “like a bolt of lightning”. In Solanas’s words, he found his frustrations and sexual experiences – “all my years of male selfishness” – written in their worst form, as Solanas called for “reasonable, responsible women” to “overthrow the government, abolish the financial system, establish automation and destroy men”. Harron was taken not only by Solanas’s brashness but also by his lively and easy-to-write voice. “I thought he was just a crazy person,” Harron recalls. “But he’s funny. He’s very clever, and nobody ever said he was funny.”
At first, Harron thought of Solanas as British fiction and art. “For me, it was a very exciting idea to make a difference, to give this person, a forgotten, neglected person, the care and love that you would give someone who the world already recognizes as great,” he says.
But in searching the records, Harron found only “a line or two” about Solanas in books, along with a few newspaper articles, and a psychiatric report that indicated she had been sexually assaulted.
The lack of reliable information – “and the fact that I could not sell the records of Valerie Solanas” – pushed Harron to new genres. I Shot Andy Warhol, with its vivid, vivid images, comes close to something like an anti-biopic style. Throughout the film, Taylor delivers passages from the Scm Manifesto directly to the camera in vivid black-and-white footage shot at Warhol’s Screen Tests. “I felt like Valerie was speaking from heaven,” Harron said.
In these shows, Taylor is calm, confident, and very intelligent. Elsewhere, he trudges around New York, trying to recruit others to Scum while remaining, in practice, its only member. “To me, I think it’s a story of isolation pain, and it needs to be heard,” says Harron. “I don’t think any of us would be without a community.”
It’s a thread Harron sees in sections of the manifesto to this day. “There were some really good things in the Unabomber manifesto,” he told me. And with Luigi (Mangione), there was something there. Most of what these people say is true. And for all of them, like Valerie, the symptoms are always the same. They begin to isolate themselves.
While others are quick to talk about intelligence and influence as well sex for pariah men, in the 90s, Harron was among the few to advance the same support for Solanas. “I see him as an adulterer. Some say he was ugly, some say he was beautiful, and I saw him as an adulterer in a smart, intelligent way.” Taylor plays her with such magnetism, her sexuality manifesting itself through acerbic expressions and smoldering fury, like the emotional Fran Lebowitz.
Thirty years later, the film remains one of the greatest attempts to understand Solanas as someone other than a footnote in history. The irony is that this understanding was created through assumptions, requirements and missing documents. However, years after the film’s release, Harron received an unexpected confirmation. At a show in Seattle, a woman approached him and introduced herself as Solanas’ niece.
“He told me that he and his mother really liked the movie,” Harron recalls. “That it was the best picture of Valerie.” For Solanas and the film that sought to understand him, it was a slow process of understanding.
