Only on Video

What if the most famous moment in Andy Warhol’s life wasn’t really about him at all? In this episode of Only On Video, I kick off a season focused on director Mary Harron, with her debut feature, I Shot Andy Warhol. This isn’t a true-crime thriller or a political screed. It’s a character study that forces you to consider Valerie Solanas without telling you how to feel about her. And as a starting point for Harron’s career, it already contains the DNA of American Psycho: dark humor, moral ambig

In Episode 2 of Only On Video, I dig into Mary Harron’s most famous film: American Psycho. This is one of my all-time favorites—not because it’s “fun,” but because it’s brutally precise: it’s a horror film, a pitch-black comedy, and a cultural critique masquerading as a slasher... And it’s still being argued about 25 years later. You start in a recognizable world of 1980s Wall Street excess, then you realize you’re trapped inside Patrick Bateman’s performance of humanity. By the end, you’re le

In Episode 3 of Only On Video (Mary Harron Season), I cover The Notorious Bettie Page—Harron and Guinevere Turner’s tonal left-turn after American Psycho. Instead of a satire about a narcissistic killer, this one follows a woman who becomes a cultural flashpoint simply for existing publicly in her own body. But, Bettie isn’t a rebel or a provocateur. She’s an “unintentional revolutionary”: cheerful, sincere, religious, and—by the standards of mid-century America—dangerously unashamed. The film

In Episode 4 of Only On Video, I cover Mary Harron’s 2011 gothic horror film The Moth Diaries—a psychological vampire story set at an elite girls’ boarding school. It never reached the cult status of American Psycho or I Shot Andy Warhol, and for me it’s one of Harron’s weaker features, but it’s still an interesting pivot: a director known for satire and biographical outsiders testing her themes inside supernatural fiction. My main takeaway: the ideas are solid—grief, isolation, identity, adole

In the Season 1 finale of Only On Video, I close things out with Dalíland—Mary Harron’s most recent feature, and a return to the art world after I Shot Andy Warhol. This time, though, we’re not watching an artist rise. We’re watching what happens when the persona becomes the whole machine—when art, ego, commerce, and self-parody blur into one continuous performance. Daliland is an above-average, often magnetic biopic anchored by Ben Kingsley and Barbara Sukowa, with a vivid 1970s art-scene atmo