On 3 June 1968, Valerie Solanas, the sole member of Scum (the Society for Cutting Up Men), entered Andy Warhol’s Factory, pulled out a .32-caliber pistol and fired three shots. The first struck Mario Amaya, an art critic, in the hip, the second lodged in a wall and the third pierced Warhol’s chest. Two days later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, stealing airtime from the attempted murder of America’s most famous Pop artist. After the shooting, Solanas, as Warhol might have put it, got her “15minutes of fame”.
When police asked Solanas why she shot Warhol, she replied she “had a lot of very involved reasons”. That phrase recurs throughout Mary Harron’s 1996 directorial debut, I Shot Andy Warhol, which takes its title from another line in Solanas’s police confession and walks the viewer back through her life, while leaving the question of why she did it open to interpretation. Thirty years ago, it opened Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, and today, the film remains one of the 90s’ most formally adventurous biographical dramas and has become a queer cult classic.
This summer, I Shot Andy Warhol returns to cinemas in a new 4K restoration from Janus Films. For years, the film shared something of its subject’s fate, slipping into obscurity. Its rights passed through a succession of bankrupt distributors, and one of the only ways to see it was through a battered YouTube upload sourced from a long-out-of-print DVD. “I’d been trying for about six or seven years to get the film back in circulation,” Harron says from an office in Brooklyn.
For Harron, the film returns at a moment when both its treatment of gender and its politics may read differently. “I think people will understand it better now. Our culture’s taking this big back step towards male dominance and authoritarian regimes; everything women like Valerie were fighting against.” Solanas, who was born in 1936, and attended college during one of America’s most conservative eras, had a politics that might be considered an analog to today’s trans-exclusionary radical feminism; guided as much by righteous anger towards patriarchal social control as by specious biological claims. In her Scum Manifesto, she argued that men’s Y chromosomes made them fundamentally inferior.
In Harron’s portrait of Warhol’s would-be assassin, Lili Taylor plays Solanas as a ragtag artist in constant search of an audience, one she believes Warhol’s star-making power can provide. Jared Harris embodies Warhol with irritating feyness, and Stephen Dorff plays Candy Darling, the cult superstar and transgender actor whose glamour Solanas disdains. “Valerie was kind of a Terf,” Harron says. “She had all kinds of visionary ideas, and then these deeply held prejudices.”
A willingness to sit with that kind of ambivalence and refuse a neat conclusion has defined Harron’s career, from American Psycho to 2018’s Charlie Says, which starred Matt Smith as Charles Manson. She recalls studio executives wanting more information about Patrick Bateman’s childhood while developing American Psycho, hoping psychology would explain away his motives. She resisted that clean, explanatory framework then, and always has. “It’s just not intellectually satisfying to give those kinds of explanations,” she says.
It is also what distinguishes I Shot Andy Warhol from many contemporary acts of historical rehabilitation. Harron approaches Solanas with sympathy without turning her into a saint. “I love Valerie, but you don’t have to turn her into a 100% hero,” she says. “It’s not about heroes and villains. To me, that’s what always makes the story interesting, showing the complications of people, and the inconsistencies of people.”
Harron first discovered Solanas in the 80s while researching a BBC documentary on Warhol after a stint in music journalism that included a major interview with the Velvet Underground for the NME. “I’d just fallen into music journalism, but I was itching to do something creative,” she recalls.
In a Brixton bookshop, she picked up a copy of the Scum Manifesto for the first time. Harron says it hit her “like a lightning bolt”. In Solanas’s prose, she found traces of her own creative frustrations and sexist experiences – “all my years catering to the pathetic male ego” – written in their most extreme form, as Solanas called for “civil-minded, responsible females” to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex”. Harron was taken not only by the extremity of Solanas’s arguments but by her comical precision and icy literary voice. “I thought she was just a crazy person,” Harron recalls. “But she’s really funny. She’s very, very smart. And nobody ever said she was funny.”
Initially, Harron imagined a fancy and sedate British arts documentary about Solanas. “To me, it was a very exciting idea to do a reversal, to give this pariah, this totally forgotten, neglected person, the same kind of attention and love that you would give to somebody who the world already recognised as great,” she says.
But while researching for the documentary, Harron found only “a line or two” about Solanas in books, along with only a handful of newspaper articles, and a psychiatric report which revealed that she had been sexually abused.
The scarcity of reliable information – “and the fact I couldn’t sell a documentary about Valerie Solanas” – pushed Harron toward new formats. I Shot Andy Warhol, with its flashing, agitated stream of images, comes close to something like an anti-biopic form. Throughout the film, Taylor delivers passages from the Scm Manifesto directly to camera in luminous black-and-white tableaux modelled on Warhol’s Screen Tests. “I imagined it as Valerie speaking from heaven,” Harron says.
In those scenes, Taylor is calm, authoritative, intellectually formidable. Elsewhere, she moves frenetically through New York, trying to recruit others into Scum while remaining, in practice, its sole member. “To me, I think it’s a story about the pain of isolation, and desperately needing to be heard,” Harron says. “I don’t think any of us can live without community.”
It’s a thread Harron sees in pariahs with manifestos through to the present day. “There were some brilliant things in the Unabomber’s manifesto,” she told me. “And with Luigi [Mangione], there was something there. A lot of what these people say, there’s some truth in it. And with all of them, just like Valerie, the signs are always the same. They start to isolate themselves. Their friends can’t reach them, their families are worried about them.”
While others are quicker to ascribe wit and charisma and sexiness to male pariahs, in the 90s, Harron was among few to extend the same treatment to Solanas. “I do see her as sexy. Some said she was ugly, some beautiful, and I saw her as sexy in that wisecracking, witty way.” Taylor plays her with that kind of self-possessed magnetism, her sexuality expressing itself through acerbic quips and a smoldering rage, like an emotionally heightened Fran Lebowitz.
Thirty years later, the film remains one of the most substantial attempts to understand Solanas as someone other than a historical footnote. Ironically, that understanding was built partly through speculation, necessity and missing records. Yet years after the film’s release, Harron received an unexpected validation. At a screening in Seattle, a woman approached her and introduced herself as Solanas’s niece.
“She told me that she and her mother really loved the film,” Harron recalls. “That it was a very good portrait of Valerie.” For both Solanas and the film that sought to understand her, it was a belated act of recognition.
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The 4k restoration of I Shot Andy Warhol opens in New York and Los Angeles on 12 June with other US cities to follow, and UK and Australian releases to be announced
