"The Chelsea Girls", Warhol's most ambitious film to date, has been labeled "an odyssey of the new generation", "a voyage to the Hell of drop-outs and junkies". The theme, it would seem, is the searching trip; the chief symbol, that old haunt of artists, the Chelsea Hotel…. The agglomeration of scenes, in forty-five minute spurts projected two at a time on a split screen, hardly suggests any unified theme—of consecutive movement, ideas, or even locale…. You are faced not with obscurity but a more mysterious effect—mundane clarity. You expect the artistic film to speak a figurative language when its language is in fact simply literal.

The literal in "The Chelsea Girls" happens to be highly contrived. What the males and females say and do happens, for the most part, to be interesting. Several speakers in the accumulated reels begin their monologues: "What should I say?" This...