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Factory Girl is Edie for Dummies

Miller, meanwhile, works very hard at her Edie. She does the voice and the laugh and the style to a T, though she never nails the ineffable, effervescent vitality. Who could? On the one hand, Edie is a walking cliché: the poor little rich girl who burned bright then burned out. On the other, shes as enigmatic as Warhol, a white-light/white-heat lightning bolt from the zeitgeist, showering the scene with giddy radiance. You need but see her in Vinyl, her Factory film debut, holding down a corner of its deep-space S&M tableau doing nothing but flicking a cigarette and bopping her head, to get her enchantment. Chief among Hickenlooper's follies is his restaging of Vinyl; I'm glad his heavy hand laid off Kitchen, one of my favorite Warhol two-reelers, in which Edie gives a charmed, hilarious performance punctuated by nonstop sneezing, the signal she's forgotten a line.

Hickenlooper makes up for it with his mutilation of Beauty #2, the richest of Warhol's cine-interrogations and the apex of Edie's underground Superstardom. Plunked on a bed with a chunk of stud named Gino, Edie submits to the offscreen questions of Chuck Wein (a clueless Jimmy Fallon), an old friend of Edie's whose crucial and controversial role in the Factory ecosystem is here glossed over. Factory Girl literalizes the rape scenario implicit in Beauty #2, escalating into the vulgar (and wildly exaggerated) spectacle of Wein forcing Gino on the distressed starlet.


wasnt edie ciao! manhattan for dummies?


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