Recycling Trash

The films of Paul Morrissey are not just a Factory outlet

by Peter Keough

THE FILMS OF PAUL MORRISSEY. At the Harvard Film Archive, February 19-28.

Nearly three decades after the Paul Morrissey film of the title, trash has triumphed over taste in every aspect of American culture. How prescient the former Andy Warhol Factory fixture and blithe transgressor of cinema standards was can be seen firsthand in the Harvard Film Archive's timely series "The Films of Paul Morrissey." The debasement of sexuality, intimacy, and dignity unflinchingly exposed in Morrissey's "underground" films have since gone mainstream, celebrated in institutions ranging from network TV to the highest levels of government. Voyeurism, narcissism, and degradation are the common coin of popular entertainment and the political process, as is a hypocritical moralism that Morrissey, to his credit, never submitted to.

In 1970, Trash (screens Friday, February 19, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, February 21, at 9 p.m.) outraged viewers not because of the casual nudity and drug use, but because of its banality, tawdriness, and despair. There was none of the glamour or idealism with which the waning counterculture had anointed such bad behavior. No doubt Morrissey had gotten his fill of decadence and excess during his association with Warhol, who gave him his start working on such soup-can productions as My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys.

Before Morrissey's involvement, the Warhol studio films had taken the notion of cinéma vérité to the extremes of formless inanity. With Flesh and Trash, Morrissey restored such audience-friendly conventions of storytelling as character and a plot. Sort of. Trash doesn't advance much beyond its opening shot: a close-up of Joe Dallesandro's spotty buttocks as he undergoes an unsuccessful blowjob from a girlfriend. "You used to be dynamite, Joe," she says, decrying his heroin habit. "Don't you miss it?"

In fact, he doesn't. In a series of loose episodes, his life unfolds as a dreary round of scrounging money for dope and shooting up. In one escapade, he breaks into an apartment and is surprised by a decadent teenaged newlywed who wants him to join in a threesome with her callow white-collar hubby. Failing that, they insist on watching him shoot up. They lose interest when Joe passes out -- naked, contorted, shot from overhead, the long-haired Dallesandro looks like a motherless pietà -- and they toss him outside like, well, trash.

His girlfriend Holly (the brilliant transvestite actress Holly Woodlawn), though, has a fondness for garbage; she collects and sells it to help make ends meet. Like everyone else, she longs to make it with the impotent Joe. In a harrowing, hilarious scene, Holly masturbates with a beer bottle while Joe nods out on the floor. "How're you coming, Holly?" he asks as the camera zooms in to focus on their clutching hands, and then pans to a close-up of his eye, and an unfallen tear.

Such pathos in the midst of squalor elevates Morrissey's farce to near-tragedy; he loathes the flesh but still loves humanity, a sensibility that sheds light on the sorry lives in Heat (1971; screens Friday, February 19, at 9:45 p.m. and Friday, February 26, at 7:30 p.m.). Here Dallesandro is a former TV child star forced to live in a sleazy Hollywood motel waiting for another big break. At first his best deal seems to be servicing the grotesque landlady for a discount in the rent. But then he becomes reacquainted with Sally (Sylvia Miles), an aging movie star who is taken by Joe's passive charms. Playing off Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, the tale takes expected and unexpected twists, rendered both hideous and touching by Morrissey's eye for human frailty, folly, and wasted grace.

More Heat than light As luck would have it, I call Paul Morrissey at his New York office a few hours after the Senate votes for acquittal in the impeachment trial of President Clinton. Morrissey, best known for his late '60s and early '70s graphic underground exposés Trash and Heat, is livid about the outcome. He also thinks these recent events make his early explorations of cultural and social morality all the more timely. "The feeling then was, Gee, you're not supposed to care about anything anymore. Do what you want. It was a middle-'60s invention. And my take was, What happens when somebody lives like that? What happens when somebody takes drugs and goes to bed with anyone and it doesn't mean anything to them? Let's see what happens. "Nobody comes up and says, Oh, you can't do this -- all that crap you get as a kind of leftover from traditional storytelling that I think went stale 30 years ago. Yet people still use it as if there's a real world out there. Now you have a kind of fake marriage in the White House and people approve of that. Everybody accepts the emptiness of life now. I was just trying to show in these stories people who do what they want and suggest that they're silly and they're foolish and empty. In that sense, I think they're timely. And that's where the world is today, with this vote today for the Clintons." Those familiar with Morrissey from images of Joe Dallesandro's limp dick (showcased in Trash) might have trouble reconciling the X-rated Morrissey with this Clinton-bashing fan of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. But Morrissey denies ever buying into the concept of "cool" transgression; he says he's always been a conservative moralist. "Cool is something fashionable," he says, "and fashion is frivolous. But now in the absence of any other standards, there's only fashion. There's nothing else but what's cool. This is a pagan planet, and anybody who speaks up for anything religious is ridiculed. But when you take away standards, you can't have stories. A game played with no rules is not worth playing. Today people live with no rules -- so their life is not worth living!" Not surprisingly, Morrissey hasn't made a movie in 10 years. That may change, though, with a possible collaboration with the Danish filmmakers of Dogma 95, whose no-frills cinéma vérité filmmaking, as seen in Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, is a kind of throwback to Morrissey's seat-of-the-pants (or no-pants) style. "I have a project with them. They suggested it and I said, Well, I did that 30 years ago. But I don't mind doing it again. The story I'm doing is about a man who tries to make it look like he's having sex with children so that he can make a name for himself in the fashion business. It's just another marketing ploy, sex with children. `I have sex with children -- buy my underwear.' " (Paul Morrissey will appear in person at the HFA's February 19 and 20 screenings. Call 495-4700.)

Stumbling through Heat is a blond-curled idiot who looks like a caricature of Dallesandro, adorned in a white dress, knee socks, and Dr. Scholl clogs who occasionally distracts the other characters with his continual, ineffectual masturbation. This kind of Swiftian grotesquery would prevail in Morrissey's work through the '70s, including his anti-feminist parody, the rarely screened Women in Revolt (1971; screens Friday, February 26, at 9:30 p.m. and Sunday, February 28, at 9 p.m.) and his graphic horror spoofs Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) and Andy Warhol's Dracula (1974), both missing from this series.

In the '80s, though, Morrissey would expand his characterizations and delimit his politics. After Forty Deuce (1982; screens Wednesday, February 24, at 10 p.m. and Saturday, February 27, at 10 p.m.), an adaptation of an off-Broadway play about a male hustler, Morrissey progressed from underground to underclass, setting his films in tough, tight-knit ethnic neighborhoods. In Mixed Blood (1985; screens Saturday, February 20, at 9:45 p.m. and Sunday, February 28, at 7 p.m.), the Joe Dallesandro type returns in the form of Thiago (Richard Ulacia), erstwhile warlord of a Brazilian gang of dope dealers at war with Puerto Rican rivals in New York's Alphabet City. His mother, Rita La Punta (Marília Pêra), is really the one in charge, though, and Thiago is just another lumpen hunk dominated by a virago. Blurring the line between camp and realism, Blood takes a cue from West Side Story when Thiago falls for the tony blond mistress of an enemy drug lord, invoking his mother's wrath and treachery. After much farcical bloodletting (pre-pubescent teens seem to take the brunt of the carnage), family values of some sort are seemingly restored.

How much the skewed reactionary values of Blood are to be taken seriously is confused further by Morrissey's last film -- and his personal favorite -- the outwardly genial but creepily unsettling Spike of Bensonhurst (1988; screens Saturday, February 20, at 7 p.m. and Monday, February 22, at 9:45 p.m.). The "Spike" of the title refers not to a heroin needle, but to affable rapscallion Spike Fumo (Sasha Mitchell), a Brooklyn goombah with the Rocky-like ambition to be a champ. Whether the fight is fixed or not doesn't matter -- it's just one of many moral relativisms in a Bensonhurst neighborhood held together by a benevolent, patriarchal Mafia that makes money selling crack in less fortunate neighborhoods.

Unlike Morrissey's other protagonists, Spike has dreams. Too many of them. One includes marrying the spoiled daughter of the local capo (Ernest Borgnine). For this he's exiled and lives with a Puerto Rican family, where he passes the time training for a bout, clearing out the local drug dealers, and having a fling with a comely local girl. Pretty soon he's got buns in the oven in both neighborhoods, and the film's denouement is an odd merging of multiculturalism and quasi-fascism, with Spike sporting a family and a uniform but with the same vacant, bewildered look as Joe Dallesandro's 20 years before when he's tossed naked out the door in Trash. Misery and waste may be a media commonplace today, but in the films of Paul Morrissey they remain a mystery.