A Brief Tribute to Paul Morrissey, by Adam Lehrer

On Paul Morrissey, the filmmaker and chief Warhol collaborator who passed in Late October

Such a hectic couple weeks in the lead up to victory that I forgot to honor the life of great filmmaker and apex American iconoclast Paul Morrissey; one of the few artists of his generation who actually understood the radicality of Americana (along with his chief collaborator, of course, Andy Warhol).

Morrissey knew that it was the nature of American glory and prosperity that facilitated something like Warhol’s Factory to prosper. It wasn’t Communism nor academic leftism that fostered an environment for strange and bewildering characters to come together and make great art, it was America all along. The founding fathers paved the best conditions from whence a truly rebellious and unique avant-garde could be generated, in total contradistinction to the stiff, European version of similar creative circumstances.

When asked by Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1975 why Paul, a staunch Catholic Republican, portrayed addicts and hustler with sympathy, the filmmaker responded: “A human being is a sympathetic entity, no matter how terrible a person might be.”

This is a sentiment that resonates with me strongly. A leftist artist would insist on the moral worth of all his subjects and due to this ideological blindness could never understand a sentiment of such innate truth. Not everyone is a good person, some of us are actually complete pieces of shit. Moral failure and SIN is the very thing about man that is worthy of sympathy, if not redemption. Redemption is reserved for those who desire change and transcendence. Morrissey was interested in those perhaps not at all worthy of redemption, but sympathy indeed.

Favorite Paul M movies: 1. Trash 2. Blood for Dracula 3. Heat