by Ara Osterweil Threes Company’ Everything in the world is about sex except sex. experimental films from the period, Malanga was not only Warhol’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 Screen Tests, 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 the Factory, 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 Andy Warhol “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 Blue Movie (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 Billy Name (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 Chelsea Girls (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.