ABOVE: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries.’ (Photo courtesy Netflix)
You might think that more than three decades after his death, there would be no need for another documentary about Andy Warhol.
Arguably the most iconic cultural figure of the late 20th century, his image, as much as his artwork, is so familiar to us that we take his fame for granted – and that’s exactly why we need it.
Our familiarity leads us to assimilate the surface details of his life without pondering what lies beneath – something that the aggressively shallow artist himself almost certainly intended. After all, as we are deftly and elegantly reminded by the Ryan Murphy-produced “The Andy Warhol Diaries” (which begins streaming on Netflix March 9), Andy’s greatest and most ambitious work of art was Andy himself.
The titular diaries were published in 1989, two years after Warhol died at 58 from complications after a gall bladder surgery. He had begun it in 1976, dictating daily entries over the phone for his longtime friend and collaborator Pat Hackett to type up. After his death, she compiled them with minimal notation and published them – something that Warhol had always planned. As Hackett (continuing her role as his editor and envoy) points out onscreen in the documentary that day came much sooner than anyone expected.
You might think that more than three decades after his death, there would be no need for another documentary about Andy Warhol.
Arguably the most iconic cultural figure of the late 20th century, his image, as much as his artwork, is so familiar to us that we take his fame for granted – and that’s exactly why we need it. Our familiarity leads us to assimilate the surface details of his life without pondering what lies beneath – something that the aggressively shallow artist himself almost certainly intended. After all, as we are deftly and elegantly reminded by the Ryan Murphy-produced “The Andy Warhol Diaries” (which begins streaming on Netflix March 9), Andy’s greatest and most ambitious work of art was Andy himself.
The titular diaries were published in 1989, two years after Warhol died at 58 from complications after a gall bladder surgery. He had begun it in 1976, dictating daily entries over the phone for his longtime friend and collaborator Pat Hackett to type up. After his death, she compiled them with minimal notation and published them – something that Warhol had always planned. As Hackett (continuing her role as his editor and envoy) points out onscreen in the documentary that day came much sooner than anyone expected.
When it hit the stands, response to the book was largely lukewarm. Poring through the minutiae of Andy’s daily life for scandalous tidbits about the galaxy of celebrities with whom he surrounded himself, readers with a hunger for gossip may have come away satisfied, but those who were hoping for more insight from behind the plastic curtain of his carefully cultivated public image found themselves sorely disappointed. There were plenty of pithy observations, maybe, and glimpses into the workings of his mind through his thoughts and feelings about people and things, perhaps – but there was no deeper discussion of his inner life, nor any exploration of how it may have expressed itself in the creation of his art.
This seeming dearth of personal revelation was not the only thing going against the book. The art world, which saw his post-1960s output as insignificant in comparison to his earlier work, had developed a dismissive attitude toward all things Warhol, branding him as an exploitative sellout who had sacrificed relevance for commercialism and fame, and his seeming refusal to address the AIDS epidemic – even as so many other queer artists were driven to activism – had disillusioned many of his fans. All these factors combined to result in a general disregard of his diaries as a final piece of glitzy nothingness from a man for whom lack of substance was the cornerstone of a career.
That was 33 years ago, however, and in the intervening time appreciation for Andy Warhol has exploded beyond anything he ever experienced during his lifetime. The influence of his legacy – not just the paintings, photographs, films, tchotchkes and other ephemera he prolifically produced for most of his adult life, but the “taste-making” through which he launched or elevated the careers of countless other legendary figures – has trickled into our cultural landscape over the years and shaped it with all the irresistible force of a glacier, so much that it is perhaps impossible to trace all the interconnected currents that have tangentially sprung from it back to their source. With the passage of time, and the 20/20 hindsight that comes with it, we can now see things with a widened perspective – and suddenly, Andy’s musings are a lot more revealing than most of us thought.
In the new six-episode miniseries, written and directed by Andrew Rossi, we don’t see or hear much about the “Factory Era” that cemented Warhol’s place as an architect of pop culture; those days were long over by the time he started the diary. Instead, the series essentially begins with Warhol’s 1968 shooting by Valerie Solanas – an incident after which the artist said he was always experiencing his life as if he were “watching TV” – and takes us from there through the ‘70s and ‘80s, mostly focused on events referenced in the diary but supplemented by “now-it-can-be-told” illumination from Hackett and a collection of other surviving members of Warhol’s inner circle, who are all on hand to provide their own insights, reactions, and personal reminiscences. It’s this input that helps us to read between the lines and recognize, perhaps for the first time, the true Andy peeking out at us – and he is surprisingly, heartbreakingly human.
The Warhol we meet here is the one he kept hidden during his life. Though he was never “in the closet,” he wasn’t exactly “out,” either, cultivating an image of asexuality that lingers to this day – yet in the diary his gayness is refreshingly on display. Moreover, though he elides and omits details that might be too revealing for all parties involved, his friends fill in the gaps enough to reveal that he was engaged in at least two long-term relationships – three if you count Jean-Michel Basquiat – that had profound impact on both his life and his work. Though his sometimes glib, often insensitive comments about AIDS may shock us, they are mitigated by his frequent and obsessive complaints about his age and his health, which speak volumes about the omnipresent fear of mortality that haunted him and kept him moored to the Catholic beliefs of his upbringing. Perhaps most humanizing of all, despite the coldness of his demeanor and the distance at which he seemed determined to keep himself, the heartfelt emotions of his former collaborators and companions as they remember him on film provide proof of the deep connections it was possible for him to form with others.
As one might expect from a life as well documented as Warhol’s, much of the diary’s material is comprehensively supplemented by photos, films, drawings, and other archival embellishments; and to make things truly immersive, the diary excerpts are read to us by Andy himself – or rather, by a cutting-edge AI voice reconstruction layered over the voice of gifted performance artist Bill Irwin.
This latter flourish has generated considerable controversy from some critics, who question the authenticity of a documentary that leans so heavily into such elaborate artifice. But Warhol (as the series reminds us, multiple times) famously claimed to wish he was a machine, and there is something about hearing his words through the fusion of mechanism and artistry that lends his words – which are delivered, in true Warhol style, with as little emotion as possible – an augmented sense of meaning. Just like a soup can, their banality is transcended through duplication and presentation.
And what does “The Andy Warhol Diaries” tell us about the artist’s work? Does it offer a key that at last will allow us to decode his creative process and understand how the forces of the turbulent inner life at which it hints revealed themselves in his art? Is such a thing even possible?
You’ll have to watch to find out – and even if you’re already a Warhol superfan, you’ll likely come out the other side liking him, just a little bit more, for the human being he turns out to have been hiding all along.
