Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES” My rating: B+ (Netflix)

After viewing the six one-hour episodes that make up Netflix’s “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” I’m not sure I’m any closer to knowing Warhol as a person.

But I’m a lot closer — invested, even — in the mystery.

Let’s say from the outset that this Andrew Rossi-directed documentary series is not a survey course on all things Warhol.  If you’re an art newbie wanting to know what all the fuss was about in an easily digested format, look elsewhere.

You’ll  see lots of his paintings, of course, but this show doesn’t take the art-history approach. Music geeks should note that there’s  no mention of Warhol’s involvement with the seminal rock group the Velvet Underground. Nor is there an attempt to analyze his cinematic output.

The focus here is on Warhol’s interpersonal relationships as revealed in his posthumously published (in 1989) diary, which covered approximately the last decade of his life. One assumes (hopes) that Warhol was being honest in these entries, but there are moments — usually traumatic — when he simply says he’s not going to write about that.

The diary entries are read here by actor Bill Irwin, whose voice has been electronically augmented to mimic Warhol’s.  The results are eerily realistic. Irwin’s approach is appropriately  deadpan; he often ends a sentence on a rising note that suggests a tentative question mark.  Anyway, it sounds just like Andy.

There are dozens of interviews with Warhol friends and associates, critics and others.  And the series offers an unbelievable collection of Warhol film, video and still photos.  Despite his professed shyness,  the man was a publicity whore who over years fashioned his own oddball persona and played the media masterfully.

And yet when it’s all over, Andy Warhol eludes our attempts to pin him down.

Take, for example, the matter of Warhol’s sexuality.  He was queer, but not openly so (he grew  up Catholic in a Slavic enclave in 1940s Pittsburgh; conditioned with nagging inhibitions, he wasn’t  about to go public with his homosexuality).  One assumes that he engaged in sexual relations…but we cannot be sure.  He once dismissed sex as “too messy” to be bothered with.  He shared a bedroom with one of  his lovers, but for all we know it may have been a chaste arrangement.

Throughout the series we witness Warhol being pulled in two directions.  On the one hand, he was reluctant to open himself up emotionally, and this reticence seems to have led to a major breakup.  On the other, the diaries reveal a painfully lonely individual who partied all night at Studio 54, then retreated to the loneliness of his bed. Like just about everyone else, Andy Warhol wanted to be loved.

The first episode in the series lays out the broad strokes of Warhol’s life and career.  The next two center on two men he loved.

Jed Johnson was boy-next-door handsome and met Warhol when he made a delivery to the artist’s famous Factory in NYC; he ended up doing odd jobs around the place and eventually moved in with his boss.

“Nice guy” doesn’t begin to cover Johnson’s positive attributes. He was tremendously loyal to Warhol and had a calming effect on the artist; everyone who knew him seems to have loved him. He started his own interior design business and became a huge success.  Apparently, though, he wanted more from the relationship than Warhol was willing to give.  He became the artists’s great lost love.

Then there’s Jon Gould, a movie studio executive. He, too, was very handsome, and much younger than Warhol.   Again, an all-around nice guy, though apparently more interested in Warhol as a friend than a lover.

Tragically, he died of AIDS at age 33, shortly after abandoning Warhol and life in New York.

Weird note:  Both Jed Johnson and Jon Gould have identical twin brothers who are interviewed for the doc.

Another episode centers on Jean-Michel Basquiat, the young cutting-edge artist befriended by Warhol and with whom he enjoyed a productive artistic collaboration.

Given that Warhol’s essence seems perennially out of reach, is it worth devoting six hours to an epic case of head-scratching? To a mystery with no answer?

Yeah, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” isn’t for everybody. But I don’t regret a minute of the time devoted to watching the documentary. As a time machine into 70s and 80s Manhattan the enterprise is hugely seductive, and in the end I found myself viewing Warhol with unexpected affection.

There’s plenty of eye-catching art here, but in the end, Warhol was his own greatest creation. 

| Robert W. Butler