Stargazer by Stephen Koch

Author:Stephen Koch [Koch, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480459878
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-03-25T16:55:00+00:00

5.

Haircut

LIKE ALL WARHOL’S EARLY movies, Haircut is almost never shown. But it is perhaps the most impressive Warhol film of late 1963, with the most complex internal structure of all his early silents.

Haircut begins in more of that tough blackness of the Warhol black and white—this deep contrast will not reappear until Vinyl. The film makes use of much more space than the other early films—the entire length of a New York City loft, though evidently not the Factory, lit with key lighting from a single spot. The loft becomes a vast umbrageous hall, all its peripheral details just about to be swallowed in darkness, revealing only enough to hint at the battered industrial wood floors and walls, the scuffed and broken Salvation Army furniture, along with some light breaking in a blur through a window nearly opaque with the city’s grime. The far depths of the room vanish entirely in the emulsion’s shadows.

The opening frames present three men standing in this space. In the middle distance is a dark young man with dark hair: It is Billy Linich. Nearer the camera is another man with a faintly more WASP-y look. Nearest the camera, in the extreme foreground and brilliantly bathed by the key lamp, is the most visible and conspicuous of the three, a very nasty-looking type posing without a shirt. He wears exhibitionistically tight white jeans—a staple of early ’60s gay style. Though they are very dirty, they glare a bit in the lens. Both he and his clothes look as badly scuffed as the loft itself. Bluntly, he looks like he knows 42nd Street as well as or better than the protagonist (antagonist?) of Blow Job. His face and body have the strung-out wiriness, the tough, undernourished gracelessness of a slum escapee who survives on street food, on sausage sandwiches bought at greasy open-air stands, hot dogs, Pepsis, and amphetamines. His chest and arms swarm with matted masses of black hair, but whatever vitality he has seems deflected into a loveless, hollow-eyed preening over the groin that his (otherwise carelessly worn) jeans force into high relief. Close to the camera and literally in the spotlight, he preens and postures in a laconic, faintly nasty way.

The three men seem occasionally to speak to each other, seem sometimes to visibly respond to each other, but, in general, attention is mercilessly focused on the raunchy narcissist under the light. The two others, literally recessed in the space, recede in attention. The traditionally slow-moving silence makes each of their small movements slightly strange.

Then, after taking a few steps toward the camera, the shirtless poseur turns his back and very slowly begins to saunter toward the dark, far recess of the room. We follow him—though the frame remains immobile—as he regresses deeper and deeper into this space. Occasionally he pauses, looks back at the camera a little, then turns away again, resuming his stroll. His glaring white-jeaned conspicuousness becomes dimmer and dimmer, less and less visible as he goes, until at last he is virtually obliterated in the shadows.

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