Free Andy Warhol by Wayne Koestenbaum Page A

little or nothing happens, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, lest I miss something important. I didn’t dare look down at my pad, peer around, close my eyes, or leave the room. I could barely take notes, so entirely was I hypnotized by minute gradations of light and shadow, anger and lust. My life—or the film’s—depended on keeping a keen eye on his screen, as if I were a nurse on intensive-care bedside vigil in a hospital, and the screen were Andy’s beating heart. The eye, not having a narrative to lead it, and not having camera movements and quick editing to manipulate what it sees, may tour the film frame as if it were unmoving, and may enjoy or puzzle over stray pieces of what the frame contains, without fear that the camera will shift angle and deprive the eye of its present feast, whose oral dimensions were not lost on Andy. He understood the relation between seeing and eating, and described, in an interview, how reel-long close-ups gratify the viewer’s hunger: “People usually just go to the movies to see only the star, to eat him up, so here at last is a chance to look only at the star for as long as you like, no matter what he does, and to eat him up all you want to. It was also easier to make.” Two pleasures converge: mine and Andy’s. I, the viewer, get to look for a long time; Andy gets to take it easy. (He loved the word easy. He would exclaim to prosperous-seeming friends that they were living on Easy Street.)
    Like Warhol’s camera, I will try your patience by lingering longer on Haircut (No. 1) , a film that critic Reva Wolf has discussed in detail in her illuminating book Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s. Haircut (No. 1) is perhaps the strongest of several film portraits that Andy made during the early 1960s—cameos of renegade masculinity. The profession of hairdresser, stereotypically gay, was stigmatized as effeminate. Paradoxically, Billy brings butch power to it: he approaches it as a Zen meditation, and the film’s slowed-down time makes it a sacred ritual, fervent as a bris. Haircut is a covert portrait of Billy taking care of Andy. Although Mrs. Warhola said that Andy “cuts nice,” he was averse to cuts: he didn’t have much hair to cut (he covered it with a wig), and he certainly didn’t like to edit. Billy’s focused, entranced haircutting is an act of erotic ministration to a passive, suppliant man (John Daley), whose vaguely Slavic features resemble Warhol’s; but this is not an attention that Andy himself will admit to receiving or wanting. He claims, in his invisible seat as auteur , to transcend the need for haircuts, or any kind of cut.
    Critics will condescend to Warhol for being passive; indeed, his art is masochistically open to the thrust of external images and assistances. And yet his portrait of haircutting—a metaphor for other kinds of craft and care-taking—actively looks at a naked man, Freddy Herko, whose hairy chest seems immune to the film’s scissoring donnée. On one side of the frame, Billy cuts hair; on the other, Freddy undresses. The haircutting may seem to snip away masculinity—Delilah shearing Samson—but Freddy reveals more and more male flesh as the haircut unwinds. No one is passive—neither Andy’s camera, nor Billy’s scissors, nor the undressing dancer. The only passive creature is the sylph receiving the haircut. ( Haircut poses as documentary of an intimate rite, but it may be a simulation. Few hairs seem to fall.) As usual, Warhol gives us two bodies or practices to observe, and we must decide which matters the most: on the left a dancer, and on the right a haircutter. Do the two influence each other? Are they separate atmospheres? Doppelgängers? Will one action infect the other? Do we (Andy and the viewer) occupy a third, isolated atmosphere, or can we enter the camera’s bipartite room of haircut/striptease?
    In late