Content area
Full Text
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas, self-proclaimed revolutionary and author of the radical feminist document, the SCUM Manifesto, was catapulted from relative obscurity to media notoriety when she shot and nearly killed the pop artist Andy Warhol at the Factory, his studio in New York City. Twenty years later in South London, Mary Harron, a researcher for the BBC who had recently completed work for a television documentary on Warhol, happened to glimpse a newly published edition of the SCUM Manifesto in a Brixton bookshop window. Amazed to find this vestige of a long-lost radical moment on commercial display, Harron immediately bought a copy. On her way to work she read Solanas's unflinching call for "civil-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females ... to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system... and destroy the male sex." According to Harron, these words profoundly changed her life. "The Manifesto... reached a core of anger I didn't know I possessed," she writes. "On first reading it, I thought, 'I have never had the courage to even think some of these things, and Valerie Solanas only had that courage because she had cut her moorings and separated herself from traditional feminine virtues such as fairness, compassion, empathy... It made me wonder about blighted talents, vanished possibilities, and what might be lurking in the great host of humanity we call failures."1
Harron's fascination with one particular vanished possibility inspired her to direct a 1996 film about Valerie Solanas, a painstakingly researched, meticulously detailed, partially imagined account of the events leading up to the botched assassination attempt on Warhol. Co-written with Daniel Minahan and originally conceived as a classic BBC documentary, until Minahan drew Harron away from what she calls her "obsessive clinging to facts,"2 I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) features Lili Taylor as a chainsmoking, ambitious, streetwise, and sardonic Solanas who turns tricks for enough money to rent a room, labors fiercely over her notebooks and secondhand typewriter, and whose socioscientific thesis on the expendability of the male sex leads to her formation of a revolutionary organization SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, and to the creation of the SCUM Manifesto.
Solanas herself summarized the SCUM Manifesto as a two-part treatise. In her words: "The first part of the Manifesto is an...