by Ara Osterweil

Threes Company’ Everything in the world is about sex except sex. experimental films from the period, Malanga was not only ’s Oscar Wilde studio assistant and co-conspirator from 1963–1970, but also one of the primary creative engines at Warhol’s studio. The least well-known In October 2013, I drive seven hours from Montréal to New York to of the three performers is Walter Dainwood, who appears in Warhol’s see nine minutes of film. Surely this is one form of insanity. Couch and Since (aka The Kennedy Assassination, 1966), as well as two of Warhol’s , one of which was included in the My journey is to see Warhol’s film Three at the Museum of Mod- compendium The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. Little is known about ern Art Film Study Center. Made in early 1964, and never publicly Dainwood, except that he was a friend of Ondine’s, and part of a screened, the film is slipped from the archive just long enough to crowd known as the “opera people” who used to hang out at the Fac- catalogue it. After a day or two of careful consideration by a panel tory and listen to records and Ondine’s lectures on the operatic arts.1 of curators and scholars, it is returned to the vault, so that it can live out its golden years alongside other artifacts deemed too perverse to The entire film is shot in the bathroom of , Warhol’s maintain Warhol’s scrubbed public image as a painter of celebrities infamous studio and site of hipster congregation, whose door has and soup cans. conveniently been left open for us to peek in. As both Warhol and Duchamp knew, a toilet was a thing to think with. By presenting a Three is one of the few truly pornographic films that “readymade” urinal as a work of art, Duchamp dared viewers to made. Other titles in this disreputable club are Couch (1964), Eating reconsider the relation between value and waste, art and everyday Too Fast (1966), and (1968). By the term “pornographic,” life. Warhol’s conceptual project was, as so many critics have noted, I mean films that show explicit images of sexual acts and genitals, kindred. Rather than flushing cultural detritus down the toilet, Warhol rather than films that merely allude to them. Nearly all of the hun- made use of it to explore the very conditions of being in late twen- dreds of films that Warhol made between 1963 and 1968 might be tieth century culture. Using throwaway cartridges of film, Warhol said to belong to the latter category. Blow Job (1964), which shows transforms the toilet into a theater of human relationality, a place a man’s face as he presumably receives oral sex below the frame, is where the private self makes itself up into a public persona. It is no but one obvious example. I have been invited by the curator of the wonder that mirrors figure so centrally in these quotidian temples of Andy Warhol Film Project to watch Three because I am an expert in self-fashioning, for the bathroom is the place to “prepare a face to the representation of sexuality in American avant-garde cinema. I meet the faces that you meet.”2 Yet how we compose ourselves in am honored by the invitation, and also amused. Regardless of what the presumed privacy of the bathroom changes drastically with the sexual acts may or may not be documented in these precious reels, presence of the camera. What happens when we leave both the door the trip is bound to make a good story... even if the film does not. and the lens open? How might shit be transformed into gold?

Unsurprisingly, Warhol’s film is structured in threes: three men, three It is tempting to consider the bathroom as a microcosm of the entire reels, three acts. Each of the three reels features a different arrange- Factory: a place of art-making, sexual congress, performance, and— ment of bodies, and stages a different variety of sexual acts. Each inevitably—waste. The first part of the Factory to be silver foiled by reel is three minutes long. Three men star in the film: Ondine, Gerard photographer (Linich),3 the bathroom modeled the silver Malanga, and Walter Dainwood. Born Robert Olivo, and self-chris- look that became part of the signature ambience of Warhol’s studio.4 tened the “Pope,” Ondine (1939–1989) was one of Warhol’s most On July 30, 1965, Warhol recorded Ondine speaking in the bathroom loquacious Superstars. Perennially high on speed, Ondine could out- for twenty-four hours straight; the transcripts from this session form wit anyone with his constant stream of vituperation. Though Ondine the basis for Warhol’s novel a: a novel.5 There is no better place to appears in many of Warhol’s films, including Couch, Vinyl (1965), and record Ondine’s logorrhea than the toilet, that architectural crucible Restaurant (1965), his most famous turn is in (1966), of the anus. When speech becomes a form of mindless expendi- when, playing his usual role as the arbiter of divine insult, he verbally ture—diarrhea of the mouth—recording takes the form of retention, abuses and then unexpectedly slaps his co-star Ronna Page during an attempt to conserve someone else’s crap. But if a: a novel inves- her “confession.” Poet, photographer, and performer Gerard Malan- tigates the equivalence between language and shit, Warhol’s cinema ga is another one of Three’s musketeers. Appearing in countless explores other forms of anal possibility. 142 143

Bathrooms, after all, are not only places to shit. They also func- Like Jean Genet’s 1959 film Un Chant d’Amour, which stages the tion as regular if incommodious spaces for a tryst, as Warhol knew desire of two male inmates for each other through a hole in the wall well. None of Warhol’s film demonstrates the relationship between that separates the prison cells to which they have been condemned, bathrooms, sexuality, and subjectivity better than his 1965 film My both Three and My Hustler mediate lust through architecture. Medi- Hustler. The premise of the film is relatively straightforward: Through tating on the impossible forms of desire aroused in tight quarters, a service called Dial-A-Hustler, a middle-aged queen (Ed Hood) has both films think homosexuality through the spatial and social limi- ordered a gorgeous young stud played by Paul America (a.k.a. Paul tations in which it has historically been defined. The bathroom we Johnson) to come entertain him and his friends at his bungalow in glimpse in Three is a New York City classic: impossibly cramped, Fire Island. The first half of the 70-minute film documents the voyeur- and, under the circumstances,crammed. It is not even a bath-room, istic longing of—and catty competition between—the friends on the unless there is an actual tub hiding beyond the camera’s purview. porch: which of these nasty queens will get to sleep with the beef- This is a toilet. A john. The can. What you folks in the UK call the loo. cake on the beach? The second, more riveting half of the film takes In Three, it is transformed into a miniature sexual theater, whose tini- place in the bungalow’s tiny bathroom, where Paul America and an ness is well suited to encourage the kinds of awkward intimacy that older, more seasoned hustler played by The Sugar Plum Fairy (a.k.a. characterizes most of Warhol’s films. But while Warhol was certainly Joseph Campbell) spend nearly thirty-five minutes trying to figure influenced by both Duchamp and Genet, he is also a Caligari, for the out each other’s desires and motives. Competing for space in front of toilet in Three is a cabinet of sexual curiosities. the mirror, Sugar Plum pries while Paul America preens. They submit the business of sexuality to relentless interrogation. What are the But I digress. Even the most claustrophobic of Warhol’s films invite distinctions between friendship, sex, and work? What is performed such unfocused meanderings. Trapped in the bathroom with the for money and what for love? Sugar Plum Fairy uses all of his wiles boys, my mind drifts. In today’s economy, you can dial-an-expert as to compel Paul America to confess: When? Why? Who? How? How easily as you can dial-a-hustler, but that doesn’t guarantee an objec- often? How much? Tensions simmer as the performers squeeze past tive or efficient delivery of our services. The density and opacity of each other between threshold, toilet, and shower. Yet in spite of desire intervenes. Distracted by my own intensities, I wander and being delivered to Fire Island like a pizza, America coyly refuses to withhold, forgetting to play the role I have been assigned, or choos- divulge either the secrets of his labor or his lust. To the chagrin of all, ing not to. In my role as sexual chronicler, I find myself evading the the towel wrapped around his waist does not budge. . What consti- facts. How to give it to you straight about a film that is so unapolo- tutes “sex” in My Hustler is the art of evading it. getically queer?

Nobody ends up holding anyone in the cramped erotic theater of My Alas. Hustler’s john. Here, intimacy takes the form of a seemingly endless negotiation of corporeal capital. By talking around and about the For the first two reels of Three, the bathroom occupies the entire mechanics of hustling, Warhol undermines the notion of sex as a frame of the film. The shot is framed so tightly that anyone who sits romantic conceit. Like art, sex is commodified, or as Foucault argued on the toilet inevitably has his head chopped off by the camera. Since in the History of Sexuality, transformed into a discourse in which the there is no other place else to sit, such forms of dismemberment are quantification and description of pleasure becomes a way of produc- inevitable. The third reel is composed of a much wider shot, which ing and disciplining subjects of power.6 Yet even in a world in which gives more perspective on the scene, and the relationship between you can dial a hustler as easily as you might order from Amazon the characters and the surrounding space. As we shall see, the differ- Prime, the “truth” of desire remains elusive. ence is significant.

In spite of the simplicity of its conceit, My Hustler is the first, and one Those who have watched Warhol’s films before will recognize the of the greatest narrative films made in Warhol’s five-year filmmaking signature elements of the filmmaker’s “early” period in Three. The career. A masterpiece of Warhol’s cinema, it is also one of the most film is black and white, and, like Paul America’s towel, the camera important American films about sexuality made in the 1960s. If My does not budge. There is no editing, no sound, and no credits. The Hustler is a song of love, then Three is just a ditty. actors don’t act so much as pose. The acts begin and end in a blur of 146 147 white dots as each reel runs out. The everyday is made strange by some liquid in a bottle, lavishing special attention on his feet. After relatively simple interventions: tight framing, lack of sound, and the arching his back in what seems a spasm of pleasure, Malanga climbs almost imperceptible slowing down of time that occurs as a result on Ondine’s cock. By this time, Dainwood is standing nude in front of Warhol’s shooting the film at “silent” speed (16 or 18 frames per of them. His body is lanky; his cock, unimpressed. The film ends in second) and then projecting it at normal sound speed (24 frames per medias res, as Ondine struggles to stuff his cock into Malanga’s ass.

second). * *

Reel One: A man (Ondine) sits down on the toilet, takes his pants * down, and begins to play with his cock. Soon another man comes in (Malanga), takes his pants down, bends over, and starts to suck After a while, describing the minute erotic variations of Three can- the first man’s cock. When it is suitably hard, he sits on it. Then he not help but feel like an exercise in absurdity. This is sex that lends sucks on it. Then he sits on it again. It alternates like this for a few itself to listing or, if one is to accept poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s notion moments. We see the top of Malanga’s naked ass, and the back of his of “uncreative writing,” conceptual poetry.7 Into whose mouth has legs with his testicles peeking out as he stands with his back to us in whose cock slipped this time? By the time you find yourself imagin- the foreground of the tightly cropped shot. Walter Dainwood enters, ing all of the other various plumbing arrangements possible in such a only to disappear along with the others as the reel runs out. tight space, you might as well be directing a Warhol film. Or perform- ing in one. Reel Two: Reel two begins after what seems like a few minutes gap in action. (It would have taken Warhol, or whoever was operating the To have sex is, necessarily, to perform. But if it is hard to compose camera, time to change the reel.) Malanga is still sucking Ondine’s yourself in front of a movie camera, and harder to have sex in front cock. This time, the act is more visible. We see Malanga’s face in of one, then it must be even harder still to compose yourself in a tiny profile, although Ondine’s head is again cut off by the top edge of the bathroom in front of a movie camera while other people have sex frame. Dressed well enough to meet your grandmother, Walter Dain- behind you. Yet sometimes what happens in the outskirts of sex also wood enters the frame. He sits down in the bottom right corner of becomes sex, as Walter Dainwood’s performance suggests. Proximity the image. Dainwood is eating an apple, and though he keeps turn- is erotic, and the meaning of ordinary activity shifts in relation to the ing his head back to peek at the action, he chomps away as if it is the bodies entangled around it. Dainwood watches and waits, contorts most quenching, delicious thing in the world. Somehow, the act of and composes, manifests fascination, boredom, and bemusement. eating an apple manages to hold its own against the other spectacle Give him an apple and he steals the show. of consumption occurring behind him. Even when Malanga seems to spit up what looks like cum from Ondine’s cock, Dainwood seems But what is so special about this apple? Sure, an apple goes well with only mildly interested. Perhaps it is not cum after all. Maybe it is a a sandwich, and Walter Dainwood might as well enjoy the former really good apple. if he is going to be excluded from the latter. But unlike the bananas that ironically stand in so many of Warhol’s films for the cocks that Reel Three: The third reel presents a much wider shot. As a result, we usually remain invisible, an apple has no phallic charge. Perhaps an see at least a bit of the space surrounding the bathroom threshold, apple is what you eat when you are not being eaten. Or maybe just including a wall with a window to the left. For the first time, we can something to do while waiting, like smoking a cigarette, or texting. also see all of the performers, and the entirety of their bodies. The wider angle provides more context, but it also diminishes the peep- Of course, it is hard to ignore the biblical overtones of Dainwood’s show fascination of the first two reels. Even in a national film culture comic performance. As Eve eats of the forbidden fruit, so Warhol de- in which hard-core images were verboten, sex becomes routine. Ma- nudes the innocence of sexuality by documenting it with his camera. langa is still sucking Ondine’s cock. Dainwood sits on a step in front Both transgressions produce archives of knowledge; like language, of the bathroom, and begins to undress. He continues while the sexu- recording is another form of naming and cataloguing. But if Three al partners switch roles and Ondine starts sucking Malanga’s cock. Fi- is a discourse of power and pleasure meant to produce knowledge nally, Dainwood, too, is stripped bare. He starts to wash himself with about sexuality, then might eating an apple serve as a particularly 150 151 self-reflexive form of self-defense? Recalling Eve, Dainwood simul- own pleasure. There is, after all, nothing more tedious than a couple taneously acknowledges and deflects the penetration of the surveil- in love, as Dainwood’s flaccid cock confirms. We need Dainwood, like lance apparatus into the most private recesses of intimacy. His per- we need Iago, to keep it interesting. Yet jealousy is but one hack- formance is not a sexual confession but a playful refusal of Warhol’s neyed response to otherness. Unlike his demonic forebear, Dainwood attempt to extract one. Camp parodies what shame fails to conceal. opens up rather than compresses the dynamic. Never invited to join in the hard-core action that occurs behind him, he engages with us Yet what kind of knowledge do we glean from Three’s permutations? instead. Activating the margins of the frame, he inspires us to con- Why threes and not ones or twos or sixes? Luck, particularly when sider the hermetics of coupling in relation to what lies elsewhere it is bad, is said to come in it. As far as I am concerned, as long as and beyond. Bending triangle into rhombus, Dainwood admits the someone comes in it, your luck can’t be that bad. viewer’s proximate particularity into the scene’s imbalanced geom- etry. Mirroring our own vacillation between boredom and interest, Judging from the Three Musketeers, the Three Little Pigs, and the Dainwood reminds us of the unpredictability of our own corporeal re- Three Stooges, homosociality arranges itself into triads. Then again, sponses, and the potential for non-normative forms of engagement. so do other, more holy trinities. Hinging upon otherness, three bears Refusing to play either the jealous lover or the third wheel, Dainwood upon desire. If two is company, and three is a crowd, then in Warhol’s too, is a thing to think with. cinema the opposite is true. In Warhol’s black and white film Couch, three is the warmest color. As I have discussed elsewhere, the film’s But if Three is about the possibilities of bodies in space, it is also interracial ménage-à-trois is the only scene of mutually pleasurable, about the evanescence of bodies in time. A temporal triptych, Three uninterrupted sex in the entire sequence of reels.8 Three ruptures, not only stages triangulation, but emplots it. Although it is superfi- and provides a utopian alternative to, the insularity of both hetero- cially structured into the conventional three acts, the sexual scenes and homo-normative coupling. we glimpse are not so much “acts” as intervals of intimacy that the camera captures between mechanical blinks. There is no conflict, and When we talk about love, we tend to talk in triangles rather than no resolution, just different ways of seeing time and desire unfold. Of rhombuses or octagons, although the latter configurations might be course, Three is not quite pi, and the permutations of bodies are not even more (or less) fun—depending on how you enjoy your com- infinite. Desire does not endure forever. Even lust cannot completely plexity. If love comes in spurts, then it also comes in threes. Desire transcend the limits of space and time, although its victims may try triangulates, wreaking havoc on balance and reciprocity. Coupling heroically, athletically, and comically to overcome them. Finitude synthesizes a third meaning, whose charge exceeds the sum of its structures longing, just as architecture structures relationality. At parts. Three embodies the dialectic, personifies the charge. some point, everything dissolves in a blur. The reels ends, the film is returned to the vault. I drive back to Montréal, dreaming. The action But sex is not supposed to be like a tree falling in the woods: you stops, in medias res, leaving me to wonder why I want more when it shouldn’t need a witness to confirm that it happened. While desire hasn’t even been that good. Again, the secrets of desire slip through depends upon difference, then sex attempts to colonize this differ- the reels. ence by consuming the other. Coupling routinizes this colonization, and the daily rituals of intimacy erode the otherness upon which 1 Callie Angell, Screen Test book, p. 57. 6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. attraction pivots. Sometimes you need an other other. Or so says 2 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Volume 1. An Introduction, trans. Robert someone adrift on the seas of adultery. Prufrock.” Hurley. New York: Vintage Press, 1990. 3 http://www.warholstars.org/warhol/ 7 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: warhol1/warhol1f/links/jill.html Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, Of course Three is not only about sex, but about the particular 4 Billy Name moved into the Factory 2011. conditions of sex etherized through the lens of the camera. If visual and created the “silver look” as an “installation for Andy to have a fabulous 8 See Chapter Two, “Andy Warhol, Porn pornography inscribes sexuality as primal scene, Three provides a place to work in.” Realist” in my book Flesh Cinema: The surrogate for the viewer in the form of Walter Dainwood, who serves http://www.warholstars.org/chron/1964. Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde html#64bn Film. Manchester: Manchester University as wit and witness to the film’s erotic antics. Dainwood acknowledg- Press, 2014. 5 http://www.warholstars.org/chron/1965. es the audience’s presence as the lovers neglect us in pursuit of their html 154 155