Trash

After viewing Trash a second time I have to say that if Joe Dallesandro had not been in this film I doubt people would want to sit through it more than once. Maybe, but most likely not.

The film isn't bad but the acting is amateurish just enough to be distracting. The film is gritty, grimy and has a.... well, a trashy feel to it. Even Joe's fingernails in close-ups are dirty. But he is beautiful to behold. Young men today would give anything to have that body and let's be honest here, the camera loves his nude physique and we see a lot of it here. Full frontal male nudity.

It's hard not to become involved in the film because these people are desperate. They are barely able to survive. Somehow they manage to hold their heads up high and demand respect from other people even though they are living at the bottom of the barrel and very much need the welfare payments they are seeking.

The delivery of the dialog is out of place at times and it's hard to figure out how the actors went from point A to point B. Still, it is interesting to watch and Joe definitely looks good on screen.

Morrissey has said that he wanted to show how drug addicts are really nothing more than trash, which I guess would make this film little more than a 60s "Reefer Madness." Fortunately, he is enough of a filmmaker to let himself (and us) be surprised by the insanely goofy, and sometimes just insane, performances of the people in front of his camera.

Dallesandro is very photogenic, and seems to really be trying to shape and stay in a character. Andrea Feldman is simply crazy, with her flat expression, drawling monotone, and probably pathological rhyming speech, but she does manage to rip out some of the film's funniest lines. Jane Forth doesn't have a lot of control (she seems to be struggling not to laugh while dragging the naked, O.D.ing Joe around her apartment), but her story about Danny DiVito and the tank is not to be missed. Holly Woodlawn is every bit as good as you have heard. As screwed up and drug-addled as she may have been (and, fortunately, no longer seems to be), Woodlawn is a natural actor with a broad range and a raging intelligence.

Finally, the film, though out of focus at points and probably shot with terrible equipment, is surprising beautiful. Morrissey's later, and weaker, "Spike of Bensonhurst" shows that this is no accident. He really does have an eye, and he shows in "Trash" that he has a willingness to let the performances speak for themselves, even if he has no ability to shape those performances.

I've read about the movie's low budget process and expected a low quality flim, but I was surprised by how good this movie is. It is so raw and the actors are so natural that it feels almost like a documentary (perhaps the actors are not so different from their characters, but none the less they are fascinating people).

The characters are strange and high most of the time, which makes the movie absolutely hilarious. This is a brilliant, unique film, thanks to Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol's eccentric vision and their Superstars.

Trash does everything a good underground movie should: it portrays a squalid milieu unabashedly; it deconstructs cinema technique to the point of obliterating it; it provides the kind of transgressive kicks that can normally only be had in places frequented by men in raincoats. It's a sick movie but it's far from repulsive. Spatially it's a disaster, and performance-wise it's even worse, but the rawness of it, the (nearly) complete lack of pretense, is refreshing given the false nobility of so many films that seek to criticize the same dregs, the same lower-rung wash-outs, that this movie unflinchingly presents. The film offers undistilled squalor, unfiltered dubious behavior, but does so with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek.

The "plot" is a loosely connected series of episodes involving the strangely magnetic Joe Dallesandro's encounters with various women, all of whom want to get in his pants. What Joe wants is not sex but drugs; he's an unapologetic junkie whose life entails drifting from one partner to another, holing up here and there, doing whatever women want as long as he thinks they'll give him money. And what an array of women: first there's the young go-go dancer (Geri Miller) who does a charming nude frolic to a rock and roll tune; then there's Holly (the drag queen Holly Woodlawn), Joe's main source of housing and income, a buck-toothed broad (?) who furnishes her apartment with garbage she picks up off the side of the road (her coffee table is a lobster-trap). And of course we mustn't forget the woman identified only as Rich Girl (Andrea Feldman), a Grosse Pointe, Michigan deb, transplanted to New York, whose house Joe breaks into, much to her delight. The most memorable sequence involves Rich Girl, who becomes giddy at the prospect of the muscular, well-endowed Joe raping her (she invites him to do it on the couch), then helps Joe bathe while her husband (Rich Guy?) waits in the living room. The performance of Andrea Feldman can only be described as gratingly off-key, but Feldman, with her plucked eyebrows and fabulous bone-structure, is fun to watch anyway, doing the most outrageous, unfair caricature of upper-crust vacuity imaginable. The sequence reaches a kind of crazy comic height when Joe starts shooting heroin with Rich Girl and her hubby watching, Rich Girl rattling on and on about how she's never seen anyone shoot drugs before, and has never done drugs herself, and was a virgin when she married her husband, the heaviness of Dallesandro's muscular, veiny body providing a kind of counterpoint to the vapid, nasally flow of words. Much of the movie hinges on the contrast between Dallesandro's druggy torpor, his eyes barely able to focus, and the nervous energy thrown off by the various women. The parade of horrendous, high-pitched female acting streams past while Dallesandro remains immovable, a lean, sexually-indifferent force of nature.

It's amazing to watch Dallesandro, a man devoid of anything you might call talent but blessed with more raw magnetism than most Hollywood stars. You can't say that he has personality, exactly, but he does have an overpowering physical presence, and a strangely likable quality that he conveys almost in spite of himself. He spends almost the entire movie listening to women babble, enduring their clumsy seductions, and what makes it all so funny is how oblivious he is, how unconcerned with anything but figuring out how to score more smack. Joe (the character) is a man of total integrity - he makes no particular effort to ingratiate himself, and doesn't pretend to be anything other than what he is. Director Paul Morrissey has an enormous affection for Joe, who he sees as a silent movie character, a smack-head Little Tramp (the film opens and closes with a tune straight out of a silent movie). Had the film been made in the twenties, Joe would've been the dogged hero suffering the abuses of society while never losing his dignity or his hat; in the '60s, Joe is not dignified so much as impenetrably dense, and whatever drives him forward is not doggedness but a kind of blind instinct for survival. Society's abuses are not delineated much (except in the clankingly phony last scene, where Joe and Holly try to swindle a crooked Welfare rep, and the tone becomes almost self-righteous), but there's always this suggestion of forces at work against Joe and his companions, the looming specter of injustice.

The film is consistent in its anti-film aesthetic, its transgressive attitude, its sub-hard-core sense of shock. It's not an avant-garde film in the same knowing, self-absorbed way as one of Kenneth Anger's fetishistic, devilish orgies. It has an innocence to it, the innocence of two kids playing doctor in the bushes. It's not the kind of movie that wants to beat you over the head with hipness; it's a surprisingly accessible film, at times a lovable one. Of course it helps not to be too uptight when viewing it: a catalogue of the film's more explicit content includes oral-sex (shot from behind the man, the woman's hands all over his pimply butt); some rather blunt, not-particularly-erotic "regular" sex; numerous images of Dallesandro's impressive member; penetration-by-beer-bottle; and, of course, lots of needles going into veins (and one pubescent backside). In another film this might all seem repugnant, even irresponsible, but in Trash this material represents the mere facts of life. And who but the most easily offended could get riled about the facts of life?

It's a shame some people consider this and it's companion pieces to be Andy Warhol films when they really have very little relation at all to the Warhol style and Warhol himself had nothing to do with them. The credit goes to Morrisey and his superstar weirdos. What's even more shocking is that these films are considered to be such works of intellectual art when this movie at least is unashamed pure comedy and not much else. A very funny comedy at times granted, but not a great intelectual work, though it has some social relevance of course. The final scene with the social worker is one of the best comedy scenes in movies, or would be if it weren't for the amateurness of the actor playing the social worker. On the minus, you do have to wonder about the ethics of Morrisey since this film is also, to a small degree, a freak show.