Culture crash

?REVIEW

• 1/2

‘’Trash

Directed by Paul Morrissey

Stars Holly Woodlawn, Joe Dallesandro

NR

June 16-22

GSU’s cinéfest

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“Strangers With Candy,” “South Park,” John Waters - the crude transgressions of lowbrow culture past and present can’t hold a candle to the sublime degradation of Andy Warhol and his filmmaking partner in crime, Paul Morrissey, director, writer and photographer of the 1970 sleaze masterwork Trash.

Like many of Warhol and Morrissey’s film projects, (Flesh, Heat), Trash is concerned with the gross underpinnings of beauty and glamour. With their drug-addicted pretty boys and ramshackle drag queens, the slippage between aspiration and tawdry reality endows such films with a uniquely vulgar charm.

Warhol and Morrissey’s obsession was the deranged glamour of the marginal and the delusional - the pulpy dreams of kids from the wrong side of the tracks who moved to Manhattan where they unleashed identities crafted out of old Ida Lupino movies, speedballs and the kind of elegance you buy at the local Woolworth’s cosmetic counter. Warhol’s superstars were the attention-starved five-and-dime divas of Manhattan’s underground who would submit to any indignity for that fleeting 15 minutes of limelight.

The icon of all this moth-eaten glamour is Trash star Holly Woodlawn, born Harold Santiago Rodriguez Franceschi Dankahl Ajzenberg, and one of the shining lights in Warhol’s Factory of underground “free spirits.”

In Trash, loopy transvestite Woodlawn is a whining, weasely trash picker living in one-room squalor with bohunk lover Joe Dallesandro. The aspirations of this Bowery bums-meet-“The Honeymooners” couple are simple: Woodlawn dreams of attaining a better standard of living by going on welfare while Dallesandro’s only desire is for a functional dick. What might be called a plot centers on Dallesandro’s efforts to get “it” up despite a libido-damning heroin addiction and the many bottom-feeders who aspire to “help” him with his problem.

Warhol/Morrissey productions were distinguished by improvisation, shoestring budgets and reputed $25-per-day wages for its actors that no doubt kept them in penicillin and scabby Salvation Army chinchilla. Like other Morrissey films, Trash has a dead-end charm and the delightfully half-cocked lunacy of an amateur dinner theater production performed by recent bug-house escapees. Most appear to be computing how many whiskeys at Max’s Kansas City their $25 wages will get them in between labored delivery of dialogue.

Spawned by Warhol’s culture-crashing Factory, Morrissey’s films were a pop art-fueled attempt to derail consumer culture and cornball hippiedom alike. Trash is a beguiling train wreck of Old Hollywood, Jacqueline Susann, Method pretense and “shocking realism!” that is hard to look away from, no matter how grisly it gets. ??

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