Politics & Power Quote by Milos Forman

Forman’s insistence on “apolitical” is doing two jobs at once: it protects his subject and it protects himself. As a Czech director shaped by life under Communism and the post-1968 crackdown, Forman can’t talk about “experience” without the ghost of politics entering the room. So he swats it away. The denial is a kind of admission.

The line is also a miniature debate about Andy Warhol. Calling Warhol apolitical isn’t a neutral description; it’s a claim about how power works in culture. Warhol’s genius was to treat fame, money, and mass reproduction as surfaces you could stare at forever. That posture reads like withdrawal, but it’s also strategy. In a society where everything becomes commodity, “not taking a side” can itself be a position: letting the system speak in its own glossy, numb language until it sounds obscene.

Forman’s phrasing, “Andy was never political,” has the ring of someone trying to stabilize an unstable idea. Warhol’s Factory was full of outsiders, hustlers, queer sensibilities, and media gamesmanship; it was a social world that collided with the era’s moral panics and culture wars whether it wanted to or not. Declaring Warhol apolitical lets Forman frame the film as character study rather than thesis statement, but it also slyly reframes his own biography: the immigrant auteur refuses to be reduced to a Cold War morality tale.

The subtext: politics isn’t only slogans. Sometimes it’s the decision to turn reality into an image and call that distance “neutral.”