12. Mixed Blood (Paul Morrissey, 1985)

   There’s a wonderful moment in a documentary about the singer Nico in which director Paul Morrissey says in that slightly nauseating voice of his: “well, you can always do it like Janis Joplin: just scream your lungs out and then die of a drug overdose.” It’s a moment that presents Morrissey in a nutshell: tough, brusque, unscrupulous, with savage and biting humor that cuts through all the bullshit. But his remark doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t like the music of Joplin, indeed it’s quite possible he listens to it all the time. What he certainly doesn’t like is all the circus around it, the mystique that’s been build around the figure of Joplin and all the adoration that comes with it. Because in Morrissey’s view, and it’s hard to truly deny this, when you place someone or something on a pedestal like that, it will automatically prohibit a true field of vision, as such adoration unnecessarily obscures the qualities not only of, in this case, Joplin’s music, but in a way also robs her of her humanity. Which is ironic of course, as it makes such people immortal while they have emphatically proven their own mortality by dying so young in such a foolish way. 

Dying young in a foolish way was something Morrissey encountered quite a lot when he entered Andy Warhol’s famous Factory in the sixties. Although he never really fit in (he never took drugs and openly despised most of the people there), he did manage somehow to get his foot in the door with Warhol until he eventually more or less took over almost his entire film output. The exact film authorship has since been a topic of hot debate amongst scholars, with people usually favoring Warhol over Morrissey, an attitude which has done much to obscure Morrissey’s work since then (virtually his entire eighties output is still unavailable on DVD, which includes amazing movies like ‘Forty Deuce’, ‘Madame Wang’s’ and ‘Spike of Bensonhurst’). It seems clear to me that everything from ‘Flesh’ onwards is very much the work of Morrissey alone with little input from Warhol and probably ‘Chelsea Girls’ the achingly perfect marriage between Warhol’s structural aestheticism and Morrissey’s biting satire. Morrissey is often blamed for destroying the old Factory and creating the new one, by pushing most of the freaks out of the door and replacing the anarchic old atmosphere with the more business-like spirit of the Factory’s later days. Although he probably had much to do with it, the nearly fatal shooting of Warhol shouldn’t be overlooked as a contributing factor. Whatever the case, when dealing with Morrissey you’ll have to deal with Warhol too as the former did come out of the Factory milieu.

Warhol’s genius lay primarily in his bringing together of two distinct cultures: upper and lower bohemia. Middle bohemia, with its artists and intellectuals roughly comparable to the Left Bank of Paris, filled Warhol with absolute horror as he couldn’t stand all their incessant talking and snobbery. Instead he was delighted by the glamour and extravagant lifestyles of the upper class of filthy rich socialites, pop and movie stars. This he combined with the street culture: the hookers and pimps, the hustlers, drug pushers and other assorted misfits. He took their vitality and originality and bestowed them with the glamour of the really rich, thereby creating an explosive cocktail which ultimately lead to the peculiar subculture now generally associated with the Silver Factory. As Warhol’s protégé, Morrissey inherited this culture and slowly but surely started to peel away all the glamour, which some may argue was essential to it and which certainly was what it made unique but which didn’t quite fit in with Morrissey’s conception. When you look closely at the famous album cover Warhol designed for the Velvet Underground & Nico album, you’ll see it consists of nothing more than a banana with the words ‘peel slowly and see’, words that easily serve as an accurate description of Morrissey’s strategy. He is only interested in the peeling away of everything that stands between obscurity and clarity and be assured Morrissey won’t rest until he has accomplished this. 

At this point one could very well ask, if he didn’t like the drug-infused freak culture of the Factory what was he doing there in the first place? It’s a legitimate question to be sure and also one that point to the many paradoxes that lie at the very core of Morrissey, which I’ll get into later. Morrissey disliked basically everything about the Factory, yet for years he tried to create a more disciplined and streamlined movie production there, which brings us to the eternally sticky question of morality. Warhol’s nickname was Drella, a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula as it points to both a certain naiveté and the fact he fed on other people like a vampire. Consequently he has often been accused of using the Superstars that peopled his Factory, perhaps encouraging them on to behave in ever more outrageous ways only to foster his own mystique. Was he, so goes the general argument, responsible for the many early deaths and should he have tried to make sure they didn’t happen? Or were all these self-destructive people responsible for their own actions and on their way out anyway? There’s no easy answer to this, but Warhol’s eternal passiveness will probably always be a sore point for many as he didn’t do anything to spur it on nor stop it – he just didn’t do anything, period. In sharp contrast to his former mentor, Morrissey did at the very least possess the brutal honesty Warhol entirely lacked, so consequently one of the first things he did was to lay bare the fact these people were not only being used – they were also loving it to bits. One could say he introduced the morality into the Factory that hitherto just hadn’t come into play. Where Warhol indulged the indulgence of his superstars, Morrissey destroyed it. ‘All is pretty’ Warhol loved to say, something that probably enraged Morrissey as it couldn’t have been farther removed from his own vision. He took all the glamour and mystique these people loved to build around them, flushed it down the toilet and filmed the process along the way. He was the first to hold a mirror before them and most people didn’t like what they saw. Morrissey exposed them for the clowns and lowlifes that they really were without the protective armor of their glamour and role playing. He satirized that which already was something of a satire.

The satirist falls squarely into what Bill Plotkin calls the East facet of the Self in his book ‘Wild Mind’, which he describes as the Innocent/Sage. The paradox this implies also neatly explains the tensions within Morrissey, because in common parlance one cannot be both innocent and wise at the same time. But as Plotkin argues “both exhibit a nonattachment to outcome”. He elaborates:

“Do we all have a facet of our psyches that is both innocent and wise, both joyous and serene, both goofy and insightful, that can help us lighten up and live beyond conventional rules and norms, and that can trick us and others out of everyday routines? […] Have you ever had a good laugh with (and maybe even at) yourself about how you take certain things oh so very seriously, as if those things – getting yourself through traffic, winning a game, writing a decent sentence – are, in the moment, the only important considerations in life? You know you’ve accessed your Innocent/Sage whenever it feels to you as if a veil has lifted and you’re able to see a situation, a person, or a place in utter clarity, and you wonder how you could have been so blind for so long.”

Morrissey too, acts with similar paradoxes: he is extremely world-wise and cynical, yet displays a touching innocence in his willful blindness to social conventions. He documents but steers clear from documentary. He freely mixes realism with gross exaggeration until both are so contaminated by each other they become one. By all accounts he is a highly calculating man, yet he openly embraces a ragged aesthetic. He is very crass, yet can also be more subtle than most would suspect. As both have turned their cameras to the streets so much, Morrissey is something of a bargain basement Martin Scorsese, but without the expressionist or operatic elements. Perhaps he is closer to Abel Ferrara then, but even he probably uses fantasy too freely for Morrissey’s taste. Because fantasy is a way to escape and there is no escaping from Morrissey: from his very first solo outing ‘Flesh’ with every cut being a jarring jump cut, he made his agenda very clear. Morrissey wants to tie you to a chair, point a gun at your head and make sure you don’t look away from all the squalor, depravity and misery he confronts you with. It is his way of saying: “you may think you live in an advanced and civilized age, but underneath it all we’re still animals and so many of us live in beastly conditions, either by choice or fate”.

If Noel Coward is the very height of the sophisticated form of satire, Paul Morrissey stands at the exact opposite of the spectrum. As all satire is always in direct relationship to something else, it may be illuminating to look briefly at ‘Andy Warhol’s Heat’ (1972), Morrissey’s satire of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950). The Wilder film is in itself already a satire of course and quite biting too, especially for its time – MGM boss Mayer exclaimed in horror ‘Wilder should be run out of town’ after seeing the film. When someone asked rather naively what Gloria Swanson was doing with the monkey that’s buried at the beginning of the film, Wilder rather bitingly said ‘why, they were fucking of course’. Obviously, bestiality wasn’t something Wilder could have gotten away in 1950 (and he probably didn’t want to anyway), but it does shed some light on the biting nature of his satire and his desire to expose decadent Hollywood culture. Most people see the film as just a comedy, but as theorist Noel Carroll reminds us, it also has much in common with the horror film, as the basic theme points to the knack Hollywood has to turn its stars into monsters. But all this clearly isn’t enough for Morrissey who wants to take this already biting satire and turn even that completely on its head. So, he obliterates all the glamour that possibly obscures the true message (and very probably has in the case of ‘Sunset Boulevard’) and so makes ‘Heat’ nothing more than just a sordid tale of a sad old woman living off the body of her gigolo. With this, most subtlety disappears of course and many will prefer the more hidden critique of Wilder as ultimately both films do point to the same thing and subtlety always has been more in vogue than the ‘rub-it-in-your-face-techniques of Morrissey. But Morrissey doesn’t care about that, because all he wants is clear field of vision, he wants to aggressively pull off all the blinkers and force people to look closely. In this way, the relation between ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and ‘Heat’ is not unlike that between ‘Pretty Woman’ (Garry Marshall, 1990) and ‘Whore’ (Ken Russell, 1991). Apparently Russell was outraged when he saw the glorified life of a hooker in ‘Pretty Woman’ and so set out to make his most Morrissey-like picture ‘Whore’ with the tagline ‘if you can’t say it, see it’.   

Morrissey then, isn’t really unlike Sigmund Freud. When Freud died, his rival and colleague Carl Jung wrote a short piece ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ in which he pointed to what he perceived as Freud’s greatest achievement:

“He [Freud] put his finger on more than one ulcerous spot. All that glittered in the nineteenth century was very far from being gold, religion included. Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities that even Nietzsche wasn’t enough. Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed. He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values. All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. Like Nietzsche, he overthrew the gigantic idols of our day, and it remains to be seen whether our highest values are so real that their glitter is not extinguished in the Acherontian Flood.”

So it is with Morrissey too. In ‘Mixed Blood’, as always, Morrissey gives his attention to the underbelly of the underbelly and obviously delights in putting his fingers on ulcerous spots. Beside the general feeling of despair and sordidness of the picture are the really in your face elements: there is a loving close-up of the needle when someone is shooting up heroine; a kid is thrown from a roof and splashes in the street; two couples make love on a mattress in the middle of the street (!) until one of them is overrun by a car – not to mention all the shooting and foul language that forms the default mode of ‘Mixed Blood’. This particular movie is Morrisey’s savage critique on the failure of the American melting pot, but he is much too clever a satirist to be preaching. In fact, the closest he comes to anything that could be seen as conventional social critique is the moment when someone asks the Brazilian drugs baroness why she came to America to which she replies that it’s easier there because America doesn’t have any laws. At first sight then, Morrissey seems almost indistinguishable from Freud as both seem to have had the same agenda, but there is one crucial difference. As Jung says somewhat further in the same text, Freud was very good at drilling out the carious tissue, but not so good at filling it again – which is what Jung so impressively set out to do and which is arguably the greatest difference between Freud and Jung. Freud was good at taking away the cobwebs that can cloud the mind, but he was far too focused on the negative aspects and the neuroses, which is where Morrissey differs thanks to his ever-present paradoxes. One could say he merges the techniques of Freud with the spirit of Jung, as Morrissey is never only interested in destroying or merely pointing toward all the problems: there is always a deep humanity underlying it all and a celebration of diversity (try finding a movie with more different accents than ‘Mixed Blood). He may take great pleasure in destroying all the social and emotional make-up our society likes to plaster us with and  he may force one’s head down the toilet bowl, but only in order to make visible the burning animalistic humanness that’s usually buried beneath all the make-up. In this way Morrissey is like a concerned father who wipes all the unnecessary lipstick off the face of his young daughter before going out, not in order to humiliate her, but to make her see she’s much more beautiful without all the cosmetics. 

This is surely also why I can’t think of any other filmmaker who has such a consistently beautiful array of actors in his movies. They may often not be pretty in any conventional narrow sense, but are almost invariably beautiful nevertheless. ‘Mixed Blood’ is no exception in this and is filled to the brim with boys and girls whose animal magnetism almost literally burns through the screen. Their stares are paradoxically both vacant and filled with humanity at the same time. When they are so lovingly captured in one of those achingly beautiful close-ups, they have all the force and impact of the Greek Medusa almost, as if them looking at you could turn you into stone. It’s why his casting is always so crucial, because in this way most of Morrissey’s film are almost like a battle between actors and director: Morrissey’s doing everything he can to destroy his actors, but try as he might, the personality and will of his actors is so strong they refuse to let him get the better of them. Which brings us to the ultimate paradox in Morrissey: he might be a bull in a china shop, he invariably only manages to shed light on the strength and vitality of what it means to be human. It is also what gives his movies their undeniable freshness: as he pushes and strips everything to their extreme nakedness, all he finds eventually is humanity, a flame that might flicker but never will extinguish – not even in those extreme circumstances he always turns his camera to. Near the end of ‘Mixed Blood’ this is so beautifully illustrated it almost hurts: some young punk shoots up and the camera moves around a completely white, unfurnished, decrepit room. It’s a despairing environment unfit for any human being, yet at the same time reality for more people than we usually like to acknowledge. But the room is also brightened up somewhat, merely by its presence of the humans: degraded and foul as they may be, their presence quite literally gives the room some color, as one stain of blood from a shooting and their colored clothes lighten up the room. It’s an extremely forceful and strangely poetic moment that can only be so forceful because it has been earned: Morrissey worked long and hard during the whole movie to achieve this effect and it wouldn’t have had the same impact without everything that preceded it. It’s like a great jazz concert, when at the end of the performance the room is thick with smoke and tension, brimming with aliveness. There’s no shortcut to this feeling, it has to be earned and worked through and few people are better at this than Morrissey. 

There’s also a the crucial difference between the pictures Morrissey made in the Factory and those he made entirely on his own, as the Warhol pictures had people who made a conscious choice to live that way, while virtually all his pictures from the eighties focused on people who were born into such circumstances and had to survive somehow. These eighties pictures in particular are human comedy pushed beyond the breaking point, as so many people do live that way and there’s nothing particularly funny about living in such subhuman environments. And this is what Morrissey wants us to feel, that they don’t live somewhere hidden where nobody can be aware of their existence but instead in plain view: everybody knows they exist and yet nobody seems to care enough to change it or doesn’t know how. Which is also where Morrissey’s hidden but nevertheless existing subtlety comes into play: in 'Mixed Blood' one of the characters asks why Carmen Miranda never stopped smiling, to which the Brazilian woman answers: 'why should she? She was the Abraham Lincoln of Brazil'. It's a brilliant but subtle joke, pointing as it does toward the strange conflation of politics and entertainment that has pervaded the world and that's the basis of virtually all Morrissey's movies. Because as he makes clear, we live in a world where a mere entertainer can be just as famous as someone who actually wants to try to change the world. But there’s more to it than that: a film like ‘Mixed Blood’ is in some way also a critique not only on the poor living conditions of so many people living in the city, it also functions as a critique of films that glamorize such conditions or treat them merely as a pretext for entertainment. These films can pretend to want to call attention to these social problems, but they are first and foremost considered as entertainment, with the social critique almost thrown in for good measure. For instance, many of the Italian Neo-realist pictures like those of Vittorio De Sica (whose casting in ‘Blood for Dracula’ was far from a coincidence) do critique the social conditions but at the same time fall squarely within the safety of entertainment or art. And it is precisely this protective armor Morrissey denies us as he wants to move beyond social conventions and niceties to expose the world as it really is – with both its despair and its beauty.

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