**** POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL
In 1965 some friends and I started a film society at MIT. We showed many “underground” or “experimental” movies by filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol, who were just starting to attract public attention. Often some first-time viewer, baffled by a film that was out of focus, moving very rapidly or too slowly, or lacking any conventional plot, would leave his seat a few minutes after it began, approach one of us, and ask, “Is the rest of it going to be like this?” The answer was always affirmative, and most often the questioner would then make a quick exit.
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While the Warhol myth, to some extent self-perpetuated, was of an artist who barely cared about his art and preferred to let other people or machines make it for him, Warhol was in fact much more in control than is generally supposed. Just as he is reputed to have spent hours mixing particular shades of paint, he was behind the camera on many of his films–the credits of Poor Little Rich Girl, spoken on the sound track instead of being printed on the screen, end with “camera by Andy.” When the first version of the film proved out of focus due to a lens defect, he decided to reshoot all of it; later he decided to use the first reel of the first version and the second reel of the second for the final film.
Sedgwick’s chatter is relentlessly superficial–her wants, her needs, her clothes; for a time she and Andy, who was known to have a superficial interest or two, acted as alter egos, appearing in public dressed and made up alike. When we finally see her face in focus, her eyes are painted with a few more thin black lines than is customary. Later, when she sits at her makeup table, we get the film’s most formally precise composition, Sedgwick’s presence in the center almost classically balanced with a TV on the left and a chair on the right. The whole frame is an architectural arrangement of vertical lines and shadows, recalling the blacks and whites of her face.
Sedgwick’s performance, too, has an odd homogeneity. Her eyes dart nervously about, she gets annoyed or angry, and yet this woman whom Warhol called “incredible on camera . . . all energy” seems dogged by an inner emptiness. She seems to be all masquerade, with nothing inside–perhaps it has something to do with the pills we see her wolf down right out of the bottle.
The self-denying voyeurism and self-obliterating beauty of Poor Little Rich Girl are not merely cinematic reflections of the personality limitations of some kinky fetishist–though by all indications Warhol was that too. But by pushing voyeurism and an obsession with surfaces to an extreme, he expresses a deep truth about the nature of consciousness–that any experience will, if pushed to its limits, bring one to the edge of the void. In this he speaks to all of us: who has never felt an emptiness at the heart of reality, or within his own soul?
