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Roy Grundmann. Andy Warhol's Blow Job. Temple University Press, 2003. 228 pages; $22.95.
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The early underground cinema of Andy Warhol points the way to the spangled postmodernism of our own times. This is not just a matter of the fascination with pop culture and those by now proverbial fifteen minutes of fame; it can be seen also in his playfulness, his manipulation of mass images, even in his refusal to communicate meaning in any conventional, narrative sense. For the Warhol of the early 1960s, as for all of us now, reality lies in the eye of the beholder.
The first factory films were minimalist embodiments of this, and Blow Job is one of the best known, although it is more of an idea hovering in the ether than a film that anyone has actually seen. Made in 1964, it consists of one, silent, monochrome shot in which a young man, starkly lit against a brick wall, indicates by his...