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Friday, Jun 3, 1994
Bike Boy
Bike Boy is the second in the series of "sexploitation" features made by Warhol and Morrissey in the summer of 1967. The film is a kind of picaresque sex comedy in which Joe Spencer, a real motorcycle gang member, passes through a series of apparently pre-coital encounters with various Warhol superstars....Despite the nominally fictional structure of this episodic narrative, Bike Boy is an authentic portrait film-the portrait of a young, working-class motorcyclist who finds himself, for what seem to be inexplicable reasons, in the middle of a Warhol film....This basic situation-in which an attractive yet naive outsider is introduced into a special group of hip insiders, by whom he is treated primarily as a sex object-is closely analogous with the basic hustler/john scenario that recurs as a kind of motif in a number of Warhol films....Yet Bike Boy is perhaps the most interesting film in this group, because the premise of its scenario is so transparently identical with the circumstances of its making. Bike Boy is thus more of a social experiment than a fictional narrative: Joe Spencer, who, for all his awkwardness, cannot be other than himself, introduces a conflicting yet powerful note of social reality into the rarefied hipness of the Warhol scene.-Callie Angell
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