A Sign of the Times: Paul Morrissey’s FLESH

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh starts out with a typical Warholian shot: a prolonged four-minute shot of a beautiful guy sleeping as the radio plays some Wednesday morning surf-agogo tunes. In fact, after the first ten minutes, I had to double-check to see that it wasn’t Warhol who directed it. It’s a movie about a guy, played by the effortlessly talented Joe Dallesandro, who hustles on the streets of Manhattan in order to get by and support him and his wife. This simple scenario, like some Cassavete’s films, allows for Morrissey to shoot a slice-of-life, that’s it. It’s a genius, understated film that, in an unprentious and unassuming way, captures a sense of the times, how people’s attitudes towards modern life were changing in 1968.

On the surface, at first, it almost seems that the film was made by one of Warhol’s factory hipsters, just having fun. It’s choppy, in some places seems unfinished, and has the feel that it was made on-the-spot. Yet Morrissey wasn’t the hipster type. He was one of the only 9-to-5’ers hanging out in Warhol crew during the Factory days. In fact, he was downright conservative. Quoting from Gary Morris’ 1996 featurette on Morrissey in Bright Lights Film Journal:
“Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Morrissey, probably irrelevant to the brilliance of the films, is his political profile. Yes, the maker of Trash, Flesh, and Heat is a right-wing, reactionary, Catholic Republican! Writer Maurice Yacowar has quoted him as follows: "Without institutionalized religion as the basis, a society can't exist. All the sensible values of a solid education and a moral foundation have been flushed down the liberal toilet in order to sell sex, drugs, and rock and roll." Whew! Since it's impossible to reconcile these knuckleheaded views with Morrissey's unique body of work (which could never have been made in the kind of fascist theocracy he seems to desire), I mention it merely for the convenience of completists.”
His devout Catholic religious views might make a film trilogy like Flesh, Trash and Heat almost idiosyncratic. If a film like Flesh doesn’t glamourize a certain on-the-street lifestyle of street hustling and casual and frivolous relationships (it doesn’t), it does seem to be made of someone in the know of that lifestyle—it doesn’t seem to be made by an outsider.

The film is shot in vignettes and spans only a day in hustler Joe’s life. Morrissey shoots it in an amateur style—there’s no carefully set-up shots, it could’ve been shot over the course of a week. The film is edited in a way so that, between shots, there’s a flash. The amateur style of the film almost makes it seem more genuine, more candid. The dialogue is casual, there isn’t much “acting”. It almost seems like Morrissey just wanted to depict a day where a guy goes hustling again for his wife, so she can pay for the abortion of her best friend. In a perfectly original way, the day becomes a web of associations of many people’s attitudes about sex. A scholar, a tranny, a factory girl hipster, a young Ivy league prostitute, a married john—they all have their say.

Films shot in this manner have an edge and a shape that’s truly inspired. Morrissey’s ability to take characters straight out of Warhol’s Factory and let them simply “be” on screen is quite enough. It’s an example of a director standing back and having faith in the selection of his actors. Each person selected for the film would be impossible to be played by anyone else. This is probably because Morrissey set out to shoot something that wasn’t quite fiction and wasn’t quite documentary. Contemporary filmmakers take note: Flesh was a sign of the times.