The Nothing Diaries

Netflix creators sometimes manufacture a lot of bloat for the sake of having something to binge, so usually I end up watching half of a docuseries or whatever, feeling like the makers of content could have done the job in an hour or so, not ten.  But with The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new 6-episode arc concerning the life and loves of the ultimate genius/weirdo, the opposite happens:  twelve or so hours of content feels like a dream you want to enter, and at the end I wanted even more.  There's a feeling in every episode of beautiful sadness, carried through to a penultimate sense of strangeness by recreating Andy's voice through an artificial-intelligence program, conjuring the voice and spirit of Andy so that throughout the whole thing his persona and identity swirl into a sort of deadpan, distant Godliness.  It's breathtaking.    

Andrew Rossi is credited as writer/director, and you truly feel an auteur at work.  The series is sort of a grand 60s/70s/80s Pop-Art collage merged with a moody Douglas-Sirk melodrama. Rossi is able to illustrate Andy's wide-eyed sense of wonder through curating a string of gorgeously shitty pop songs and gorgeously shitty movie scenes.  Andy was a consumer of all the rotten stuff you forget about:  moments from movies like Mommie Dearest and The Neverending Story and  Excalibur blur into Andy's reality like frost on windows, and you feel his love of them somehow fates him to be a victim of his own need to be a victim, but also his love for movies and pop-songs and Campbell's Tomato soup (and so on) is truly what saves him, allows him to salvage his own sense of who he was and who he had to be.   

The 6 episodes follow Andy's life from childhood through death, but the caravan slows down on the parts that focus on his two major loves:  Jed Johnson and Jon Gould.  Rossi gives both objects of Andy's desire subjectivity and grace, so that you understand how much he loved them, and why.  There are great scenes too, real-life footage, of Andy having a good time on a summer vacation with Jon, Andy relaxing in Central Park with Jed, and you have this connection to lives so outside of your own that everything feels strangely full-circle and hyper-real but also beautifully shitty-movie nostalgic.  That crazy cross-pollination of the phony and the sincere is what drove Andy both in life and in his aesthetics, and in his flagrant but shut-mouthed spirituality.  

"I'm always looking for nothingness" is a line from The Diaries read aloud by Andy's A-I voice toward the end of the series, and you can feel what that means because you have been through that search with Andy one-on-one, up-close, throughout the whole 12-hour shebang.  "Nothingness" in Andy's world is a beautiful state of being, a religious format for him, and in his paintings and collages and photos and movies and diary entries, in the way he lived his life, he was constantly simplifying the search while he continued looking for that nothingness, editing out propriety and bull-shit and goodwill, in favor of brilliantly cutting nonsense and violence, his mordantly Catholic wit sometimes taking on the guise of a vampire in search of victims, other times a little kid with a balloon watching a horrible parade.  He was not a hero of his own life, in any way, but he had a sort of secretly heroic life, just being who he was:  always in love but never able to quite have love.  Always wanting to be popular, but never having the ability to know what level of popularity meant something, could satisfy.  

The Diaries, when they first came out, and for a long while after, were seen as a joke:  glib asides from a mostly cynical creep on the make.  I've read them and I have always known they were not that at all.  Andy's poetry was the poetry of nothingness, his selfishness was an X-Ray of what a human-being is, and his creepiness was only genius constantly flowering into electric-chairs and false idols.  He was a monster on purpose, but also not a monster at all.  The series reads between all those lines, and all the ruckus, and gives Andy back to us -- not as an innocent or a hero, but as a genius of nothingness.  A wizard of what's there sadly in front of us all the time but somehow we just let it be.  Andy could not let it be.  He had a need to capture it all and transform it into glossy golden iconography, crappy pretentious low-rent movies, gorgeous abstract meditations, hot-pink celebrity portraits, dull talk-shows focused on what it takes to be a 24-hour hot-pink celebrity, delicately rendered screen-prints of people falling to their deaths...  And so on, so forth.  The docuseries is an amazing experience, to be able to witness Andy for the first time for (maybe) what he actually was and is:  a nobody in a world of somebodies that don't matter that much anyway.