If I had been brave and texted her a few questions about the film, I’d likely get a text back about: the dangers of technology (a theme in Ciao!), or “the jab” (another theme, though in Ciao! it’s a speed-filled jab rather than a vaccine), or the nefarious qualities of men in power (yup, another theme in Ciao!), and/or a few sentences about how I’ve made up and/or imagined everything in my memoir (yet another Ciao! theme).

Viva is not in the movie much. Her scenes are all contained in the black-and-white flashbacks: Edie’s memories from the past, before she realized the Factory was “bullshit,” before she fell from grace. I watched my mother’s fleeting and floating scenes (she is beautifully naked in a pool for the majority of her screen time) with great awe, and also curiosity. Who is this woman? This woman, just before she became an Underground Superstar, just a few years before she became a mother—this slender, languid woman, so familiar and yet alien, naked with her pencil-thin arms around the anorexic shoulders of beautiful, doe-eyed Edie, the icon, with only a few more years to live, equally naked, equally languid, both of them smiling and laughing together. These two women—Edie and Viva—doing the opposite of what they were told to do by their rich, conservative parents, both fleeing childhood trauma inflicted by Silent Generation fathers, both refusing to fit in with prescribed societal behaviors, both taking a feminist stance and reveling in their (naked) freedom, and both suffering, on and off, from mental disorders (as a young woman Viva also spent time in a psych ward, however briefly).

In the present-day, California-set narrative of the film Viva and Edie have long parted ways, and also in reality their lives had taken very different turns. In real life, Viva had left the Warhol scene, published a critically acclaimed auto-fiction book about it, and was a new mother (to me). In the film, Edie is stumbling around in color, still topless but with fake breasts now, getting electroshock therapy (from doctor Roger Vadim), living in a tent-like construction at the bottom of an emptied-out pool ensconced in her film-mother’s Xanadu. Here, Edie tells the story of her past, a warning tinged with nostalgia, or her version of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. During a bucolic hippie scene featuring Allen Ginsburg in the film’s sub-narrative about a commune of “saucer People” living in a “villa for happy people,” we hear her voice-over: “That’s the revolution of the youth, sort of like a mockery, in a way, of reality. They think everything is smiles and sweetness and flowers when there is something bitter to taste, and to think there isn’t is foolish.”

Flash forward 50 years and many of Ciao!’s premonitions about capitalism, technology, and “the man” have been realized in America, and the residual anger from the collapse and death of the ’60s counterculture has turned a good amount of boomers into paranoid conspiracy theorists. (Bill Gates is the modern version of The Rich Man character, Mr. Verdecchio, who is secretly controlling everything in Ciao!) At the end of the film, Butch, the hapless hippie character who has failed at caretaking Edie, who has no idea what is real and what is not, who is trying to hitch a ride to Manhattan to get Mr. V to help him build his “saucer,” asks: “Who’s hustling who?”

Good question. I’d love to call my mother and laugh about it all, but I can’t. She’ll think I’m hustling her because I’m controlled by 5G.

Alexandra Auder is a writer and actor. She resides in Philadelphia with her husband and two children.