When it comes down to it, all any film needs is to have that one superlative element to push it over into greatness, regardless of the level of quality surrounding it. With Heat, it’s a capitol-”p” Performance from Pat Ast as Joe Dallesandro’s entirely unredeeming and unheroic, sexually frustrated, control freak landlord who struts her ample, pastey frame around her “pooule” with a hand-fan (a combination status symbol and disciplinary club). Ast enters every scene gangbusters, cutting through the bull (”You know, your rent is two weeks overdue!”), and is memorably hypocritical about the moral standards of her “establishment.” At one moment, she shakes her head and dismisses the daft lesbian Andrea Feldman (”I just can’t have people like that here any longer!”), at the next minute she’s offering to cut Joe a break on the rent in exchange for a little nipple-twisting. Heat is, very clearly, an update of the Sunset Boulevard story, although with very contemporary touches. Wherein the original studio satire put a true has-been in the role of a has-been, Heat came out in the early-’70s wave of new, gritty genre respectability, and so Sylvia Miles (who had just received an Academy Award nomination three years prior) takes on the role of Norma Desmond. Morrissey seems to be commenting that in contemporary Hollywood, the gulf between what’s considered May and what’s considered December is even more cruelly narrow than it used to be. The mush-mouthed Feldman has a large role here, filled with such great Feldmanisms as “Boy, whatta pickle!” and a scene in which she blubbers over chlorine soaking into her cigarette burns, only to dissolve into peals of laugh-cries. I honestly don’t know if Morrissey ever wrote any dialogue for Feldman, because ever scene she’s in feels like the ultimate in lackadaisical improvisation (that’s a compliment). It’s a treat to see Miles playing off her, as in one scene where after a pointless Feldman tirade, she gives her a deadpan look before spitting “What the hell’re you talking about?!” In one fell swoop, Miles’ grounded performance validates even the most amateurish of Morrissey’s “stars.”

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Not really so much an Andy Warhol film, as it’s so often given credit for being (along with the next two in the “trilogy”), but it does open with a Sleep-styled five-minute shot of Joe Dallesandro gradually waking up in his funky, probably mite-ridden bed. Morrissey’s film is hardly sentimental, his camera far from forgiving, but I dare anyone watching to come away without sympathy for the lovable loser Joe, especially in light of the final scene in which he tries to get to sleep as his wife and her girlfriend are going to third base in the same bed. Although basically structured as a day in the life of a male hustler (he only really scores one major job), the plot also shows, through Joe’s gradual path from big-dollar scores to overlong visits with friends to begging a sort-of boyfriend for cash, a microcosm of a largely aimless life. Morrissey was purportedly not much of a fan of sexual liberation, sensing that too much sexual freedom would inevitably end in ennui (the first scene of Trash demonstrates this, albeit with the addition of drugs). But beyond sexual meaninglessness, Flesh also attacks indolent social contact. Joe meets up with a whiny, wanna-be hustler, who complains that he can’t seem to get any johns, never stopping to think that his demeanor, so casual as to become totally immobile, has anything to do with it. In a priceless exchange, Joe asks if he went to school, to which the kid snidely says he did. “Couldn’t take it, huh?” Joe asks. “Nah,” he answers, “well I took it ’til I graduated.” Morrissey’s films are populated with characters like this guy. There are the snippy transsexuals, who read glamour magazines presumably all day long and pick each other’s looks apart. There’s the crusty old artist (played with Bill Borchardt-like zeal by Maurice Braddell), who sketches Joe in the raw, all the while mumbling about how terrible is America’s “body worship” (at one point, his self-obsession blinds him from the fact that his subject has left him alone: “Am I talking to an empty bed?”). And yet, for as cruel as Morrissey’s glance is, there must be some glimmer of hope. Who knows, maybe it’s in Geri Miller’s defiant speech about how she tried to make herself as stiff and unappealing while she was getting raped, only so she could shake her shimmy up on stage to show her assailant what he missed.

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Performance is something that I’ve probably given the short end of the stick in my sparce writings thus far (at most, I’ll simply say Billy Bob’s performance in the latest Coen movie was titanic and leave it at that). While there is an auteuristic ethos in Paul Morrissey’s trilogy — as I went into when chatting about Flesh — a great deal of the largely improvisational films depends on the level of performance. Trash in particular doesn’t disappoint; Heat may have the grotesque Pat Ast owning every inch of her screen time, but in general Trash doesn’t have a bum performance in the lot. For starters, Joe Dallesandro’s laconic iconicism is at its forte here, probably because his appearance is at its most incongruously unappealing. His deadpan approaches dead. Geri Miller (returning from Flesh with noticably enlarged boobs) appears at the beginning to show, exactly, what her rapist in the earlier film in fact missed. Andrea “Ya gots ta git me suhm aaa-sid!” Feldman, quite frankly, scares me. I think she scared Joe, too, judging from how ugly their scene together ends up (he actually breaks his film-long sex-breather to rape her while her mush-mouth sqeuals “Don’t rip my $800 coat!”). The middle third or so of the film is devoted to Joe’s botched robbery attempt of the very ugly-rich Jane Forth and Bruce Pecheur, which goes from a condescending enthnographical case-study to an unsexy menage-a-trois bid, ultimately ending up with Joe passed out while the two engage in some community theater Albee “realism.” In the end, though, the show clearly belongs to the world’s oddest transvestite: Holly Woodlawn, who creates a fully-rounded character rich in pride as well as insecurity, pendanticism as well as profligation. Her immortal “Just because someone threw it away doesn’t mean it’s trash” is probably the best tagline for the film. And although some would prefer to look at Morrissey’s film ironically, I prefer to think that Morrissey wishes that the characters in his film would translate Woodlawn’s theory on trash to other humans as well. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Jane and Bruces of the world weren’t so quick to dump Joe on the street like so much refuse?

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