This film's realism dispelled the myth "that drugs are supposed to free people from inhibitions". This movie for me was a revelation in film making, a affirmation of the beauty and pathos of human degradation. Joe Dallesandro plays a junkie living with his girlfriend Holly (played by Holly Woodlawn) in the streets of lower east side N.Y. They substitute their income from Holly's knack of bringing home trash from the streets which she inturn either keeps, or sells. Holly takes her trash seriously. As she warns Joe when he's carelessly moves their pedestal sink, "Careful. people are gonna pee in there." From the outside perspective, the characters themselves are trash, like the trash they drag in from the streets. The camera follows Joe around in from one place to the next while he shoots up, gets naked, or is seduced by all women he comes in contact with, mostly a combination of all. In one scene with Geri (played by Geri Miller) and Joe, Geri wants to screw with Joe so badly, trying first blowing him, then dancing naked on a stage she constructed in her home, fondling, and then more blowing to no avail. The use of drugs by Joe has made him totally impotent, but he doesn't miss it, in fact he never even remembers that he used to be "dynamite" as Geri concedes. The more sympathetic yet ludicrous of Geri's attempts to arouse Joe include appealing to his mind by asking of political issues like: "Do you think we should have war?". In two wholly improvised scenes, Holly shows a dignity and self-respect that deny her the label trash. When she finds Joe in bed with her pregnant sister, Holly explodes, because of the betrayal by her two most cared for people in the world. In Woodlawn's on camera improvisation, her original emotions of sexual jealousy and indignation soften under her maternal sentiments: "There's her mattress, now she's never going to use it. And her kid's bassinet - so what if it's only a drawer." Her anger unleashed on Joe mostly from the inability of Joe making it with her, and now finding him with her sister, to which Joe responds with " I just wanted to see if I could do it." Holly's integrity is confirmed later, when she refuses the offer of Mr. Michaels (Michael Sklar), the social worker, to give her welfare support in exchange for the silver platform shoes she found in the garbage. Individual shots carefully conceived, inserts of street life, which root the narrative in the real world, are more carefully pointed to the characters. Morrissey's static tripod camera suggests a cool, unflinching eye watching life of real people unfold. Trash represents Morrissey & Dallesandro at their best work out of the Three Movies (Heat, Trash, Flesh.).
