Andy Warhol’s Moralist
By Bill Kauffman

Catholic reactionaries are not unknown in the world of motion pictures: there is Mel Gibson, of course, and director Eric Rohmer, whose The Lady and the Duke is the most unflattering depiction of the French Revolution ever committed to film. But no Catholic reactionary moviemaker is as mind-bogglingly unlikely as Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s 1960s sidekick, whose oeuvre includes such films as Trash, Flesh, Heat, Blood for Dracula, and Flesh for Frankenstein, with nary a Bing Crosby priest among them.

 

Paul Morrissey was formed by his family and his Catholic education. Son of a Westchester County lawyer and graduate of Fordham University, Morrissey made experimental films before hooking up with producer Warhol to make movies about junkies, gay hustlers, and drag queens—including the infamous “Holly” of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Morrissey always denied that he was celebrating transgressive behavior; his theme, rather, was “people trying to survive all the freedoms they have been cursed with.”

 

Freedom is the villain in Morrissey’s films. He explained, “Pandering to the basest instincts, the stupid liberal says, ‘Let it all hang out.’ ‘Do whatever you feel like doing.’ With three big carrots—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—they rule, they have the power, they control life under them with a much stronger hold than the Soviet dictators with their enforced puritanism ever dreamed possible. But what I think people really crave is a familial identity, not a sexual identity. Unfortunately, once you’re cast adrift from custom and tradition they all want it on their own inverted terms.”

 

Unlike other denizens of Warhol’s Factory loft, Morrissey was no lapsed Catholic. He dismissed Vatican II innovations as “hippie garbage” and held tightly to the catechism of his boyhood: “I still believe every word of what they told me then. Nothing of what they tell me now.”

 

His most sympathetic explicator, Maurice Yacowar, author of The Films of Paul Morrissey, calls him “America’s most undervalued and least shown major director.” Yacowar speculates that Morrissey’s politics—“he is a reactionary conservative” and “the last (if not indeed the only) of the red-hot puritans in the American independent cinema”—befuddled critics into silence. How does one begin to approach explicit films about drug-addicted transvestites made by a director who says, “‘Liberal’ is to me the most hateful word in the English language,” and “Without institutional religion as the basis, a society can’t exist”?

 

Drugs and homosexuality were the air and water of the Factory realm, but Morrissey rejected both. “Paul didn’t take drugs—in fact, he was against every single drug, right down to aspirin,” recalled Warhol. “He had a unique theory that the reason kids were taking so many drugs all of a sudden was because they were bored with having good health, that since medical science by now had eradicated most childhood diseases, they wanted to compensate for having missed out on being sick. ‘Why do they call it experimenting with drugs?’ he’d demand. ‘It’s just experimenting with ill health!’”

 

After the release of Beethoven’s Nephew (1985), his penultimate film, Morrissey said, “I’m basically always telling the same story—how if you give people whatever they want, whether it’s sex, drugs or dead bodies…their lives are going to be empty and miserable.” He elaborated that “To a sex-worshipping liberal, all normal relations mean sexual relations. But the emotional urges toward family, and to control life and, in doing so, frustrate death, are far more complicated and more interesting and more dominant than the biological sex urge.... Sex destroys the possibility of order and harmony and…love and affection. To me, sexuality [is] something destructive. In my contemporary stories, it is always the last resort of the bored, of the empty.”

 

Though he has not made a feature film in almost 20 years, Paul Morrissey lives. His best-known work is available in DVD. Whether you consider his films bleakly comic Catholic meditations on modern despair, or tedious arthouse porn, he was as sui generis as they come.

 

 

Bill Kaufman is a TAE associate editor.