Ms. Sedgwick

I haven't been excited about a movie in a while, but Factory Girl opens in L.A. on Friday.... I've heard that Bob Dylan isn't too pleased about the film's portrayal of his relationship to Edie, but we shall see. The bio sets up Dylan--like Andy Warhol--as having used Edie to draw attention to himself (pretty party girl = media), so I wonder if the film does the same. I think the film might also make too much of their "relationship" (which, according to the bio, Edie inflated in her own head).

Jonathan Taplin (Dylan's road manager in the 60s and later president of Lion's Gate Films) said the following:
"Dylan liked Edie because she was one of the few people who could stand up against his weird little numbers: she was much stronger than the sychophants who were hanging around him at the time. He was always in an adversary relationship with women. He tested people...perhaps to find out about himself...Dylan respected Edie's spirit, and her strength in being able to deal with him, and that she didn't wither. You know that song of his, 'Just Like a Woman?' They say he wrote it about Edie."


So, why care about Edie's story? Because she was smack dab in the center of the mid-to-late 60s art and music scene and she was everyone's muse (Warhol, Dylan, The VU, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, designer Betsey Johnson), she set a million iconic trends, she lit fire to the Chelsea hotel on multiple occasions, was in and out of mental hospitals, and lived on the brink the entirety of the short span of her adult life (she died when she was 28 of a barbituate overdose). She also came from a long line of crazy, compounded by an abusive father and a withholding mother. I don't think the film gets too much into that, though (from the looks of it); I think it's focused more on her relationship to (duh!) the Factory.

One of my favorite (partly because Viva's comment makes me laugh, but also because it's SO representative of scenester-ish bullshit and the intense desire to alienate and ostracize that which no longer has a use value) moments in the bio is when Rene Ricard (who was in one of Warhol's films with Edie) and Viva (another Factory girl) discuss Ingrid Superstar's induction into the Factory in order to piss Edie off and consequently dispose of her.

Rene Ricard:
"The Warhol people felt Edie was giving them trouble--they were furious with her because she wasn't cooperating. So they went down to a Forty-second Street bar and found Ingrid von Schefflin. They had noticed: 'Doesn't this girl look like an ugly Edie? Let's really teach Edie a lesson. Let's make a movie with her and tell Edie she's the big new star.' They cut her hair like Edie's. They made her up like Edie. Her name became Ingrid Superstar...just like an invention to make Edie feel horrible."

Viva:
"I always used to feel sorry for Ingrid when she was being groomed to be a superstar because she was afraid she wouldn't suceed and she'd have to go back to New Jersey and work selling refrigerators."

I think the way the Factory girls were used and thrown away when they lost their sparkle complicated JD's argument about women in Warhol films as subjects rather than objects of desire. Warhol's desire for these girls, though it was non-sexual, was still undergird and fueled by their use value in the network of desire that occured between men in the Factory, and in the network of filmic art and representations of female desire (or lack thereof). Though on screen the women come to represent this queer space where women can work outside the parameters of hetero male objectifying desire, they are still intimately caught by the politics behind the camera, and this seems to, as JD so eloquently puts it, "haunt the entire field."

Factory Girl Trailer