Killing Representation: Feminism And Violence At The Limit

The last time we see Valerie Solanas in I Shot Andy Warhol, she is wearing a hospital gown and being led shakily down the corridor by two nurses in a psychiatric institution. The scene is shot from Solanas's back, so we are looking at her partially exposed body in an humiliating posture. Degraded, incarcerated, and helpless, the tough butch dyke is transformed in our last view into the essence of pathologized femininity. She lingers, however, in Andy Warhol's imagination, returning once more as an hallucination of her former self standing across the street menacingly gazing at him as he enters an art opening. Author of the SCUM Manifesto (now a feminist classic) the real Valerie Solanas died homeless on the streets of San Francisco from pneumonia in 1989. While her writing remains, Valerie Solanas has been relegated to the “lunatic” fringe of radical feminism. Within the context of her manifesto, shooting Andy Warhol had a political purpose and a theoretical justification. In the narrative of her life, however, which this film represents, Solanas becomes a paranoid woman whose act is treated as one of individual vengeance against a man whom she believed had usurped her work. Throughout the film, the narrative of Solanas's life is cut up with scenes of psychological experts attempting to decipher and render coherent a series of “traumas” that could explain what led this promising, intelligent young woman to become a fanatical man-hating lesbian who performed an act of irrational violence. All the customary “causes” are announced as matter-of-factly and mundanely as one might expect: father/daughter sexual molestation, homosexual experience as a fourteen-year-old girl in boarding school, prostitution as a young adult. Solanas doesn't particularly like sex, even with women. This film makes a point of that lack of sexual desire (it