Dirt - Piero Heliczer (And a little about Didi)

Y'all just knew I couldn't go long without posting again now that the Archive is back on YouTube.  I was super inspired last night.

So let's talk about Dirt.

I'm going to be honest, I am so not an Andy Warhol person.  I like gentle surrealism, but he goes a little over the top for me.  As does Wallace Berman, actually, which is something Bobby and I would hold differing opinions on.  But any chance to see Bobby again onscreen -- particularly during the "dark ages" of his time in New York -- is worth enduring most anything for.

We see him onscreen almost immediately, alongside Didi, "DeeDee" or "Sharon" Morrill.  She is one more interesting character, by the way.  She would spell her name different ways at different times, and take on the last name of whomever she was with during the duration of the relationship.  Earlier she had been "Deedee Doyle" as in Kirby Doyle... and here she is billed as Driscoll.  Due to her flighty nature and notorious man-hopping (she left Kirby -- whom she had coaxed away from a wife and kids -- for another guy in the summer of '63, when she apparently came back just in time to unofficially "marry" Bobby the same Fall), I want to tell her mean things like "You didn't earn the NAME, chick!" but that's not really fair.  Sharon had her own set of issues like Bobby, I'm sure, and as much as we think we know the "whole story," we really don't.  I'm sure Bobby had reason to love her, and I'd like to think she loved him too, at least on some level.  And here's the thing, folks:  when you use drugs together, your relationship is likely to be full of dysfunction from that alone.  I actually have never yet been able to identify why Bobby and Didi split up; I'm hoping we'll learn more about this from the documentary.  Brian Keith O'Hara says that after a drug deal went bad in New York, she, her brother and Bobby took refuge in Canada for a little while.  Afterward, he says she went back to LA and he went back to NYC.  However, I don't see entirely how that could be the end of the relationship, as a poem was published in an edition of The Floating Bear in 1966/67 that he wrote and she illustrated.  I did notice that at the time of this, she was once again going by "Doyle."  So maybe they were a little on and off?  I have a feeling this was probably a very complicated relationship due to the Beatnik lifestyle and the drug use...

Anyway, Bobby's face comes into view really well at one point, and we are able to see that he is indeed missing teeth.  He seems to have a certain pallor as well, and dark circles under his eyes.  Now I say this, but it could very well have been the filter of the film, which is blueish, that just makes it look that way.  One thing's for sure, he looks far more worn than when we last saw him in the Rawhide episode.  I also noticed that Sharon seems to have been a little taller than him... unless she was wearing heels.

After the scene in which he breaks up laughing, we don't see him again until the end of the reel.  I'm not sure why Heliczer elected not to use him during any of the middle scenes.  I know just enough of Warhol films to know there's always a bit of a "naked woman" theme, and since Bobby couldn't be one of those, he might not have been used.  It does strike me as odd, however, that Bobby doesn't appear in any other Warhol films, OR the Berman film Aleph, which was made right in the middle of when Berman and Bobby were associating heavily.  I don't know if this was by Bobby's choice or not.  Maybe if he still held hopes of being a legitimate actor either on films/TV again or on Broadway, he wanted to only be associated with projects considered respectable at the time?  Or it could have been a filmmaker choice.  I can think offhand of a few good reasons they might not  have wanted Bobby to have "starred" in their picture, and you probably can, too.

We see Bobby again on the Staten Island Ferry at the very end of the film.  Watching his familiar stance and his careworn face -- a very different man from the one he was -- in motion on film for the last time is a haunting experience. 

And cue the end of this post before I go into all my sappy spiel again about the end of his life.  We've all heard it before, and besides, I do try to focus more on Bobby's life than on his death.  He is, unfortunately, becoming way more popular for the tragedy than he was for his work and his life.  So let's just keep it that way!