The oddly erotic music video Andy Warhol made for The Cars
Andy Warhol’s obsession with female beauty is well documented.
As a sickly child living in the industrial centre of Pittsburgh, he pored over glamour magazines, searching for photos of Hollywood actresses for his scrapbook. In adulthood, this fascination went on to inspire many of his most iconic artworks, including The Marilyn Diptych (1962), a technicolour silkscreen painting depicting Marilyn Monroe. In this censored music video he made for The Cars, we see Warhol take his fixation into the realm of the surreal.
Andy Warhol was an artist with a range of creative outlets. As well as being a painter and provocateur, he was also a band manager and, notably, a director. After all, this is the man who famously once said, “Art is what you get away with”.
He also famously had an interesting viewpoint on love, sex and relationships, once stating: “People have so many problems with love, always looking for someone to be their Via Veneto, their soufflé that can’t fall. There should be a course in the first grade on love. There should be courses on beauty and love and sex. With love as the biggest course. And they should show the kids, I always think, how to make love and tell and show them once and for all how nothing it is. But they won’t do that, because love and sex are business”.
His film Kiss, a 50-minute silent film which features various couples kissing for three and a half minutes each, was utterly revolutionary in its day, and leans close into how he understood intimacy. The inclusive eroticism of that piece, which depicts same-sex couples as well as heterosexual ones, was one of the first films Warhol made at The Factory in New York.
“Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway.”
Andy Warhol
The music video he made for The Cars’ 1984 single ‘Hello Again’ isn’t quite as subtle as Kiss, but it proved to be just as successful.
The video for ‘Hello Again’ was the second Warhol made for The Cars. Taken from their 1984 album Heartbeat City, the artistic polymath previously crafted a highly eroticised video for ‘You Might Think’, which was one of the earliest MTV video hits and one of the first music videos to utilise computer graphics. The video is the epitome of ’80s sleaze. The half-clothed glamour models, the clunky animated sequences, the cocktails – it’s all there.
When discussing the project, The Cars’ keyboard player Greg Hawkes recalled, “I think [Warhol] mainly did some of the conceptualising and showed up to be an extra.” Warhol brought his whole entourage along to be involved, as Hawkes continued, “He invited his various friends to be in it. It was like any video shoot, but with a more interesting cast of characters. And you could always look over on the set and go ‘Hey that’s Andy Warhol.’”
Warhol’s next directorial effort saw him elaborate on the aesthetics he established on ‘You Might Think’, indulging in his fixation on the female form even more than before, to the extent that it’s hard to tell whether he is participating in beauty worship or satirising it. Warhol actually has a cameo in this particular video, playing the part of the nervous bartender to brilliant effect. It also features a young Gina Gershon, who recently starred in Don’t Look Up! alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.
For obvious reasons, the video was censored when it appeared on MTV – removing much of the nudity and many of its more Warholian elements. Considering Warhol died in 1987, the video represents one of his last works. In it, we see Warhol create some pretty unusual animations using Amiga Computers, the same ones he employed to paint the first computer artwork, a portrait of Blondie frontperson Debbie Harry.
You can check out the full uncensored original video for ‘Hello Again’ below.
