Torture by Heat

THESE PEOPLE around here are just disgusting," mutters the Motel Lady (Andrea Feldman), whose poolside establishment is the hub of a grotesque little universe. An audience otherwise dazed and disoriented nods its head in agreement: if nothing else, at least we can be certain of that. But, with another question the Motel Lady does not help us, namely, are these people disgusting for any good reason?

Under the aegis of Andy Warhol, writer-director-photographer Paul Morrissey has fashioned another episode in the life of Joe Dallesandro who, in portraying the character Joey Davis, again plays himself. Joey is an ex-child star in movie westerns turned rock singer, who moves to Hollywood in an attempt to bolster a sagging career. He then proceeds--blithely, almost mindlessly--to partake of the pleasure various apertures of various bodies have to offer, apparently with the theory that if one can't get his foot in the doorway of fortune, an earthier variation of the metaphor will do.

Joey's first and only Hollywood connection is Sally Todd (Sylvia Miles), a bleached-out starlet living off alimony payments and her TV game show money. He conducts this relationship with the bland, innocent dispassion and quiet self-sufficiency which have virtually become Dallesandro's (and Warhol's) popular trademarks--while she is a turbulent mass of emotions, insecurities, and hurts, always seeking his support without success. Her pleading queries--"Do ya think I look allright" or "Did ya think I was a good actress, Joey?"--find no response except their own echo; Joey's adrenalin seems to run only in certain prone positions.

Sally is in fact the only figure in the film with any self-consciousness, and as a result she is the only character who is emotionally vulnerable and humanly pathetic. In her absence the scenes become like Candid Camera vignettes--not just in terms of devastatingly mundane dialogue, seemingly always drowned out by roaring cars, but also in the sense of characters totally oblivious to their true, bizarre circumstances. Only under this condition could perfectly straight dialogue take place between a 17-year-old unwed mother who wants to become a lesbian and a member of a night-club act featuring incestuous homosexuality:

"Hey, I heard ya go to bed with your brother."

"Yeah, but only onstage."

"That sounds dynamite. You must like it, huh?"

"Well...it's a living."

Joey's ongoing affair with Sally is supplemented by other encounters. The Motel Lady takes him for her own, and he saunters into the boudoir of the 250-pound proprietress at her beck and call, always with the blank pleasantness we reserve for meeting long-lost aunts. The teenage unwed mother is Sally's only child, Jessie (Pat Ast), who constantly sends her mother into hysterical fits ("You're not a lesbian--it's a temporary thing!"), especially with her half-successful attempts at seducing Joey. And the standard symbolic figures of Hollywood sterility abound: the cliche-laden director of kitsch; the ex-husband, short, stooped and Jewish, armed with empty loquacity and a bulging wallet: the columnist who is a wincing, mincing replica of Rex Reed.

SO IT GOES, one incredible parody after another, strung together in little more than a succession of episodes. To talk of this film in terms of progression to a climax is to judge it by standards it disavows. Morrissey deliberately flouts so many tenets of movie-making and taste that it is in fact difficult to establish any point of reference from which to appraise his film.

But whatever the viewer's orientation happens to be, I don't see how he can escape the feeling that this film is somehow cruel. Heat, unlike its predecessor, Trash, has no stellar Holly Woodlawn performance to hide this fact from us. Somewhat cruel to the audience, yes--Heat has an icy cool sense of moral superiority underlying it, as it is constantly beating us over the heads with caricatures of ourselves while maintaining its own sang froid, and we should resent a movie that makes us bleed without bleeding itself.

But more importantly, this film is cruel to its own characters, making cheap fun of them in order to make an impact on us. This is especially easy for Heat because its characters, by design, tend to be so unaware and witless. (Wasn't Candid Camera itself often cruel?) Reducing Sally to emotional trauma several times as a vehicle for parody is a good example of such pitilessness. The film's last scene, in which her attempt to kill the faithless Joey evokes only audience guffaws as the gun fails to shoot, adds insult to injury; this is the major emotional crisis of Sally's life, and Morrissey turns it into a farce. Likewise, the constant use of the Motel Lady's physical ugliness as a stimulus to laughter is on a level with the playground viciousness young children often direct towards the physically "different."

At these sights and others we may laugh, but it is out of shock and surprise, and accompanied by bad conscience. In attempting to justly and give meaning to "disgusting" scenes by means of parody. Morrissey produces the opposite effect, leaving the audience with the feeling: Was all this really necessary?

One suspects that Heat had no choice but to rely on absurd and repulsive caricature, and the cheap humor that goes with it; if a film is unable or unwilling to achieve a true understanding of its characters, there is little else with which to gain hold of an audience. As the Motel Lady offers in defense of her preoccupation with pornographic comic books: "If you can't get it all the time, you make fun of it."