August 22, 2016 16:00
For my next back to school film, I watched the 1965 underground film, Vinyl!
Now, admittedly, Vinyl does not appear to take place in a high school. Then again, maybe it does. All of the action takes place in a cramped corner of a room and we’re never really told, for sure, where the room is located. All we know is that various characters keep wandering in and out of the static frame while the film’s action unfolds.
The center of the film is Victor (Gerald Malanga) who appears to be in his late 20s but who insists to us that he’s a “J.D,” which stands for juvenile delinquent. He does what he wants, whether that means lifting weights or enthusiastically dancing. Victor may be a murderous teenager with a bad attitude but he truly loves rock music.
While Victor dances and occasionally stumbles his way through a monologue about being a J.D, there’s an ever-present audience in the background of the scene. Occasionally, they seem to be interested in what Victor is saying but, just as often, they seem to be bored with the whole thing. Sitting off to Victor’s right and smoking through nearly the entire film is the iconic and tragic Edie Sedgwick. Occasionally, she dances but, for the most part, she’s just observes with an enigmatic half-smile on her face.
Eventually, some men who we assume are the police get tired of Victor dancing and boasting about being a delinquent so they grab him, tie him to a chair, and force him to wear bondage gear while they beat him. It’s a new, government-sanctioned rehabilitation technique and it’s guaranteed to turn Victor is a responsible member of society. While they torture him, they play vinyl records in the background and Victor, possibly to his horror though, due to Malanga’s out-of-it performance, it’s often difficult to surmise what’s going on in Victor’s head, realizes that his beloved rock music is now being used to torture him.
All the while, Edie watches from the corner of the screen. She smokes a cigarette. She dances. Sometimes, someone will refill her drink. She holds a candle for a while. As a viewer who is more than a little obsessed with the tragically short life of Edie Sedgwick and who relates to her on a personal level, it was occasionally difficult for me to watch because, even in a non-speaking role, Edie’s star power was obvious.
Edie!
Of course, Edie isn’t the only person watching as Victor is tortured. Many people wander in and out of the frame. (Vinyl lasts 70 minutes and features exactly three shots.) For the most part, the majority of them regard the torture happening in from with a studied detachment. In fact, they’re very detachment and they’re very refusal to act in any sort of expected way becomes rather fascinating. Vinyl goes so far out of it’s way to defy our expectations of what a movie should be that it becomes one of the most watchable unwatchable movies ever made.
Vinyl was directed by Andy Warhol. Reportedly, it was filmed without any rehearsal and without multiple takes. Hence, when Malanga stumbles over his lines or occasionally turns his back to camera, the moment is preserved. When Edie Sedgwick breaks character and laughs, the film keeps on rolling. When another actor accidentally drops his papers and has to spend half a minute picking them up and trying to get them back in order, it’s saved on camera. And, because it’s in the final cut, Gerald Malanga forgetting his lines becomes as much a cinematic moment as Humphrey Bogart telling Ingrid Bergman to get on that plane or Clark Gable saying that he didn’t give a damn. There is no editing and, as a result, there is no protection. Instead, we just get a group of eccentric outsiders in their amateur glory. Yes, it’s self-indulgent and deliberately alienating but it’s also undeniably fascinating. (It helps that, while he may not have been a good actor, Gerald Malanga had an absolutely fascinating face.) When one watches one of Warhol’s underground films, the question always arises as to whether he was a genius or a con artist. Vinyl would seem to suggest that he was both.
(“What’s the point of all this?” some viewers may ask. The point is that it was filmed and now you’re watching and, because he’s at the center of a static frame, Gerald Malanga is now a movie star.)
Though you might have a hard time realizing it from just watching the film, Vinyl was also the first cinematic adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Victor was a stand-in for Alex and Alex’s love of Beethoven is replaced by Victor’s love for Motown. Six years later, Stanley Kubrick would release his better known adaptation of Burgess’s novel but Andy Warhol, Gerald Malange, and Edie Sedgwick all got there first.
Posted by Lisa Marie Bowman
Categories: Film, Film Review
Tags: Andy Warhol, Back to School, Edie Sedgwick, Film, Gerald Malanga, J.D. McDermott, Jacques Potin, Larry Latrae, Lisa Marie Bowman, movie, Ondine, review, Tosh Carillo, Vinyl
Mobile Site | Full Site
Get a free blog at WordPress.com Theme: WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King.
Let’s all get together and film ourselves doing really banal stuff. Then we’ll all do our best to convince ourselves, and others, that what we’ve done is really, really important.
And when we encounter people who cannot convince themselves that what we’ve done is important, we’ll call THEM banal, and then we’re back where we all started. But now we’re famous. For fifteen minutes.
But Edie was cool.
LikeLike
By chuckl8 on August 22, 2016 at 16:22
[…] I started this series of reviews was so that I’d have an excuse to review Andy Warhol’s Vinyl. The Degrassi films are just a nice side […]
LikeLike
By Back to School Part II #43: Degrassi Goes Hollywood (dir by Stefan Brogren) | Through the Shattered Lens on September 17, 2016 at 06:01
[…] at Teenage Devil Dolls. Along the way, I’ve reviewed everything from Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, A Clockwork Orange, Animal House, and Can’t Hardly Wait to Hollywood High and Keith. […]
LikeLike
By Back to School Part II #56: Everybody Wants Some!! (dir by Richard Linklater) | Through the Shattered Lens on September 19, 2016 at 17:30
[…] Edie was best known for being herself. But, whenever I see Edie in an old Warhol film like Vinyl or even in something like Ciao! Manhattan, I see what a great actress she could have been if […]
LikeLike
By Never Nominated: 16 Actress Who Were Never Nominated For An Oscar | Through the Shattered Lens on February 26, 2017 at 15:01
[…] him out of it. The theory is that, much like Alex in A Clockwork Orange 0r Gerard Malanga in Vinyl, Harry will be rendered incapable of […]
LikeLike
By The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Terminal Man (dir by Mike Hodges) | Through the Shattered Lens on October 18, 2017 at 18:00
[…] Vinyl (1965) […]
LikeLike
By Lisa’s Week In Review — 5/28/18 — 6/3/18 | Through the Shattered Lens on June 3, 2018 at 21:00
[…] Vinyl (1965) […]
LikeLike
By Lisa Marie’s Week In Review: 1/27/25 — 2/2/25 | Through the Shattered Lens on February 2, 2025 at 22:01
[…] scene that I love comes to use from an underground 1965 film called Vinyl! This film, believe it or not, was actually an adaptation of the novel A Clockwork Orange, one […]
LikeLike
By Scenes that I Love: Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga Dance in Andy Warhol’s Vinyl | Through the Shattered Lens on April 20, 2025 at 09:30