I Shot Andy Warhol.

Madness resists drama. The irredeemably mad head straight for their abysses and watching this is boring, for they will never significantly deviate from their self-destructive routes. We are, mentally, there at the finish lines (the asylum, the suicide) before they are. However, the incompletely or erratically insane can be fascinating protagonists of fiction and drama because they question, struggle against, sometimes silence their internal din. And what dignity, even grandeur, there is in this struggle! Think of Dostoyevsky's heroes, Strindberg's The Father, Sylvia Plath's heroine/surrogate in The Bell Jar, Liv Ullman's character in Bergman's Face to Face, the adolescent protagonist of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. These characters may evoke our compassion but never our lofty pity. Only a boob would murmur, "Poor Rashkolnikov."

On the other hand...

Poor Valerie Solanas! This would-be playwright and founder of S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) gunned down Andy Warhol after months of vainly badgering the artist to produce her plays. Aside from the fact that Mary Harron journalistically covered the Warhol scene back in the sixties, it's easy to see why the writer-director took on the subject matter for her first feature film, I Shot Andy Warhol. There are three compelling ironies implicit in the crime.

First, Warhol's most famous maxim is the one about everyone on earth some day enjoying fifteen minutes of fame. Well, Valerie enjoyed her quarter-hour by slicing off part of Andy's mortality. (Permanently weakened by his wounds, Warhol may have died a bit before his time.)

Second, Solanas wanted fame as fiercely as she hated "the world" (that is, the male-dominated, testosterone-fueled Way Things Work). But it is precisely that "world" that dispenses fame. So she was scrambling for a niche in a system she was bound to despise.

Third, her nutty version of feminism was a doctrine that condemned the entire male sex for its obscenely flailing, woman-pursuing libidinousness. (Working as a part-time prostitute aggravated her contempt.) Yet the man whom she accused of controlling her when she gunned him down was no heterosexual but a passively homosexual, emotionally becalmed, and very cool mocker of the "straight" world. True, Warhol, a black belt in emotional jujitsu, was an expert manipulator of those unfortunates (drag queens, would-be starlets, well-heeled druggies) who formed his entourage, but Valerie imposed herself on him. So the attempted assassination was a case of a would-be revolutionary trying to murder a past master of subversion.

It is to Mary Harron's credit that these ironies emerge during her film. And if you are interested in what went on in "the factory" (Warhol's studio) as a site for parties, work, orgies, business, drug-taking, or just hanging out, this is the movie for you. But I don't go to movies to collect ironies or to relish you-are-there verisimilitudes. I want multilayered emotional experiences and I become peevish when denied. I Shot Andy Warhol isn't really an excursion into the psychology of an odd woman or an odd milieu; it's a freak show. And, as is the case with freak shows, it doesn't try to encourage empathy but only a faintly ghoulish mixture of fascination and disdain.

Dressed like the Artful Dodger, Lili Taylor plays Solanas with Ratso Rizzo scuttling energy, a Groucho Marx hunch, and frenzied, appropriately stabbing gestures. Under a Dutchboy cap, her face looks as novocaine-numbed as Fran Lebowitz' and as frigidly sarcastic. But while Lebowitz's face is the mask a writer puts on to keep the nosy world at bay, Taylor-Solanas's visage is merely the reflection of an enslaved mind. Much praise has come to Taylor's performance and I can join in to this extent: the actress presents a believable, consistent, and initially striking impersonation. But this is a characterization without dramatic arc. That's not Taylor's fault, for the story itself, at least as Harron tells it, also has no arc. Valerie Solanas enters this movie crazy, exits crazy, and, in between, never has a chance to struggle against the grip of madness. The main actions of the story show us what lit the fuse to the bomb: Valerie's financial mistreatment in the hands of the brilliant but unscrupulous publisher, Maurice Girondias, and Warhol's repeated rejection of Valerie's artistic efforts. But the bomb was always there waiting to be ignited; Girondias and Warhol were merely the fortuitous agents. Back and forth, back and forth Solanas paces behind the bars of her obsessions while we, calm visitors to Harron's Zoo, can cooly observe the heroine's torment before passing on to, say, the dope-addicted transvestite in the next cage.

Could it have been otherwise? Should Harron have invested Solanas with flashes of lucidity which she perhaps never possessed? Not at all. This recreation of the woman's madness is probably accurate enough. It's just that the accurate recreation of madness is nothing to the purpose of drama. Imagine the novel All the King's Men if Robert Penn Warren had locked us up for four hundred pages inside the coarse and hungering mind of Willie Stark and had never created the disappointed idealist, Jack Burden, to serve as narrator and mediating consciousness. Would we then see the significance of Stark's actions? Imagine The Great Gatsby without Nick Carroway: all that gallant naivete dying in the swimming pool with nobody to ponder Gatsby as the avatar of the American Dream.

That's the trouble with I Shot Andy Warhol. For all its purposeful direction, artful photography, and good acting (Jared Harris capturing Warhol's crafty vacuousness to perfection and Lothaire Bluteau bringing Maurice Girondias to complex life), there's no mediating consciousness between us and the catastrophe that was Valerie Solanas. Watching this movie is like watching cars collide. It's vivid, noisy, interesting, and without significance.

Anne Frank's diary is often designated as one of the supreme documents of the Holocaust. So it is, but the thousands of teen-aged girls and boys who read it every year realize that it is also a testimony of adolescence by a supremely sane child living in an insane time. Perhaps the essence of sanity is the realization that other people are not characters in the ongoing novels of our lives. (Think of Solanas trapped in her own little paranoid thriller of which Warhol was Dr. Fu Manchu.) All teenagers, no matter how fundamentally sane, are drawn toward this sort of paranoia since it simplifies the vertigo of early adolescence. Anne, stuck for two years in the back rooms of an Amsterdam warehouse during the Nazi occupation of Holland and pressed up against the habits, crochets, backbiting, and smells of two families and a rather pedantic old bachelor, was undergoing the usual woes of youth aggravated to the nth degree. But, though she did villain-ize the adults on many pages (especially her mother and her bachelor roommate), she just as often struggled to understand them and their complaints, to see herself as they saw her, to attain the power of making reasonably objective judgments. Against greater odds than most teen-agers ever face, Anne struggled to become an adult. By the time the Nazis caught her, she was well on her way to becoming a wonderful woman.

The Academy Award-winning documentary, Anne Frank Remembered, written and directed by Jon Blair and narrated by Kenneth Branagh, beautifully extends Anne's spiritual work. Since she could not life herself above the claustral irritabilities of the Secret Annex to arrive at the balanced judgments spaciousness permits, the movie does it for her. For instance, we learn that the bachelor-dentist whom Anne unfortunately immortalized under the name Dussel (the Dutch equivalent of dummkopf), was no dussel at all but a bon vivant called Pfeffer whose forethought saved his own beloved family but who found himself, after a life of some culture and sportsmanship, locked up in a few rooms and forced to share living and sleeping arrangements with a mercurial brat. Easy for us to love Anne as we read her; not so easy for Pfeffer! How Anne would have loved the fairness the movie extends to her old roommate, for this is precisely the fairness and humanity she was striving for during the time of her confinement.

In its second half, the portrayal of Anne's final days in the concentration camps, the film actually becomes more of a Holocaust document than the diary can be, for it places the girl's individual fate in the context of what happened to the millions of other slaughtered Jews. It does this without diminishing one whit Anne's blazing individuality. As Branagh's lucidly spoken narration reminds us, Anne's diary gave an unforgettable face to the collective suffering of the Nazis' victims. This movie now asks us to take an even more painful look at her, to imagine her suffering, in the days preceding her death, just as the testifying survivors in this film suffered, to apply their descriptions of starvation and disease to the face of the still buoyant and healthy child we know from the photographs of Anne in her pre-Annex days. Can we afford not to imagine such grief?