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The Decisive Moment:
Norman Mailer in Person and on Screen
Online Exclusive Review
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer dialogue at the Walter Reade (July 2)
Norman Mailer retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater, Anthology Film Archives and Paley Center (ongoing through Aug. 5)
Reviewed by Michael Joshua Rowin
Philip Roth once defined the extreme poles of a writer’s public persona as “aggressively exhibitionistic Mailerism and sequestered Salingerism.” “Aggressively exhibitionistic” is a gentle way of describing Norman Mailer in the Sixties, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning author courted all manner of public controversy in an effort to test the limits of his own ego, defy the conventional roles expected of a man of letters and challenge the repressive forces of American culture. Beginning in 1959 with the self-examination and reinvention of Advertisements for Myself, in which Mailer set himself apart from his contemporaries by declaring allegiance to the cocky swagger of “hip” and the immodest ambition to “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” the bestselling writer of The Naked and the Dead hardly hesitated in making loud ventures into foreign territories not traditionally meant for the novelist. As suggested by the title of the Norman Mailer retrospective occurring at the Walter Reade, Anthology Film Archives and the Paley Center for Media, Mailer chose an unforgiving muse, and if writing was his faithful but embattled wife, filmmaking was one of his tough but rewarding mistresses.
At the age of 84 and with a new novel, The Castle in the Forest, published this past year, Mailer is still productive, but no longer the walking maelstrom of the mythic Sixties, the time of his time. Onstage this past Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater for the retrospective’s opening and a dialogue with Q&A, Mailer spoke of his short but fascinating filmmaking career in an introspective manner befitting a man mellowed with age, but unregretful of his vigorous past. Between screenings of Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Maidstone, Mailer explained his method of pushing improvisation to the extreme by directing without scripts and often without concrete goals, trusting “confidence over preparation” and his cinematic philosophy that “half the people alive are actors” in making explosive moving-picture “out of cock-eyed scenarios.” Mailer’s closest cinematic relatives might have been John Cassavetes and Andy Warhol, but he’s taken great pains to distance himself from their different aesthetic motives. Cassavetes, in Mailer’s estimation, “betrayed improvisation” by leading actors toward preplanned drama, while Warhol could only report on the modern condition of ennui that Mailer wished to combat directly. When one questioner in the audience suggested that Mailer was fascinated by Warhol’s ability to film in real time, Mailer responded, “I don’t like time winking at me.”
In Wild 90 and Beyond the Law (which will screen at Anthology), time doesn’t dare the viewer to a staring contest, bu rather, to use a classic Mailer metaphor, a boxing match. Enacting Mailer’s claim that “film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long,” these are 90-minute films during which one feels every second, not out of boredom but because of the potential danger threatened by the feral performances. Shot in gritty, rich black and white by D.A. Pennebaker (who, along with Ricky Leacock, collaborated on each of Mailer’s first three features), Wild 90 (1968) has Mailer and two actor friends, Mickey Knox and Buzz Farber, drunkenly portraying gangsters who taunt each other over the course of four nights as they plan their next heist. Described by Mailer as a “cut-loose mess,” the film is palpable with tension but flawed by an inability to find a single thread of order. The best it can do is make good on Mailer’s love of cinema’s “primal activity” to engage — unlike writing — the viewer’s direct senses. In front of the camera he does that by leading a singular “guttural symphony” of belches, grunts, shouts, and barks. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is a muddle due to a terribly recorded soundtrack. A few lines of intelligible dialogue, however, give a feel for this avatar of “bottomless cinema”: “If you find yourself in cow shit, never sing”; “I could fuck a broad with my ears better than you can with your dick”; and the classic “You know what you are? You’re the prunes.” “Prunes? You’re the dunes.”
Beyond the Law (1968) improves substantially on the Wild 90 premise by portraying one night in a Brooklyn police station where cops interrogate criminals using cruel physical and psychological games. The film came out of Mailer’s idea that “everybody alive has a cop or a crook in him,” and the use of multiple cameras to shoot separate but simultaneously occurring fields of action, led by Mailer as an Irish police chief, induces a better executed field of improvisational possibilities. Using the third person, Mailer writes of the outcome in The Armies of the Night: “It was not impossible he had divined and/or blundered onto the making of the best American movie about police he had ever seen. It was certainly the first film which had ever bypassed altogether the formal morality of Hollywood crime and punishment. His film brought forth instead the incredible — which is to say existential — life buried in all passing relations between cops and criminals.” While it intermittently brings to the surface some rarely captured moments of Mailer’s observed “grudged appreciation” between the two strata of society, Beyond the Law also falls victim to the same technical flaws that sunk Wild 90 — his conception still had yet to find proper realization.
Despite Mailer’s own opinion that Beyond the Law is the best of the early films, had he ended his filmmaking career there his directorial efforts would be little more than curiosities, overambitious failures to file away alongside the impudent writer’s heedless excursions into poetry and political campaigns. Thankfully, from 1968 through 1970 Mailer made Maidstone (1970), one of the most interesting underground films of its time and possibly a masterpiece in its own right. Filled with, as its creator well put it, “wonderful flaws and startling successes,” Maidstone can be seen as the apotheosis of the Mailer process and aesthetic. For the film Mailer assembled dozens of friends, actors, hangers-on to play out a loose scenario over several days in the Hamptons. Mailer plays Norman T. Kingsley, an art cinema director of semi-pornographic work who runs for President of the United States. Kingsley’s entourage is a ragtag crew called the Cashbox; his potential enemies are the members of the Prevention of Assassination Experiments, Control, an organization whose aims seem to be entirely opposed to its title.
Maidstone has received the most attention of Mailer’s films for a simple reason: Its climactic scene features the infamous, unsimulated, and very bloody fight involving Rip Torn, who plays Kingsley’s half-brother, and Mailer himself. Aside from that (don’t worry, we’ll get back to it), the film has received little critical evaluation as a whole. This is a shame — its 110 minutes are a rich and delirious happening that half-accidentally reveals not only Mailer’s self-awareness but also the self-destruction of the late Sixties Left. “You get the crazies out of me,” Mailer’s sparring partner in Maidstone tells Kingsley, and the “crazies” are exactly what Mailer unleashes from the rest of his Felliniesque cast of models, high society, black radicals and midgets who collide in a kaleidoscopic bacchanal of experimentation and violence. Amid the chaos one can discern a critical intelligence at work: Mailer uses the Kingsley cloak to mockingly examine his public image, as when his character compares women to horses, gets challenged by African-Americans refusing to accept his empathy, and defends his campaign from charges of self-indulgence by deeming himself not a politician but a magician. As with Wild 90 and Beyond the Law, the Mailer in front of the camera is an attention hog, but exposing that was a function of the film, the camera wielded as a psychiatric tool of self-revelation for this man who admits “no sense of shame.” “When I saw myself in the editing room,” Mailer confessed, “I saw that I would bully myself into scenes, and that I was much more disagreeable than I ever dreamed of.”
In a move continuous with the third-person journalism of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago — where he fashioned himself into an especially riveting protagonist through whom to observe the picaresque episodes of Sixties tumult — Mailer creates a fictional version of Mailer the New York mayoral candidate who in real life ran for office two years prior. With assassination fever in the air (Robert Kennedy had been killed less than a week before shooting commenced, and some Maidstone actors carried pistols on the set), Mailer dovetails a fantasy of his own political aspirations with the era’s collective paranoia. Torn’s “assassination” of Kingsley therefore exemplifies the “moment when a fantasy, which is to say a psychological reality in the mind, transcends itself and becomes a fact,” as Mailer expressed his ultimate goal for improvisation in the 1971 essay “A Course in Filmmaking.” Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the scene — in which Torn surprises Mailer with a hammer to the head and Mailer in turn bites a piece of Torn’s ear as they struggle in a beautiful meadow in front of Mailer’s young children — is that it comes between two dialogues on the very nature of the film. The first is led by Mailer as the cast and crew assemble after what was supposed to be the film’s denouement, “The Grand Assassination Ball.” There Mailer/Kingsley explains his intention for Maidstone to achieve the “spooky experience” of “slid[ing] from one reality to another” even as cast members complain of manipulation and the fear of “being squashed” by the director/protagonist. By defending his methods Mailer gets the final word in this scene, but Torn later hijacks the film, initiating his own dialogue after the fight by justifying his excesses in the name of art. Calling Mailer “a fraud” for refusing to use the scene, he trumps even Mailer’s extreme measures. But what does it mean that the scene is the conclusion to the film?
Mailer’s last directorial outing, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, had a bizarre genesis, which Mailer discussed at the Walter Reade more extensively than the film’s mixed results. The production came about in 1987 after a 17year absence from filmmaking through a deal involving Cannon Films and Jean-Luc Godard (“the second or third most awful man I’ve ever met”). The experience eventually led to Tough Guys, which Mailer adapted from his 1984 novel of the same name. The glossy Hollywood neo-noir is a striking departure from the low-budget disorder and uncontained energy of the first three films, and stars Ryan O’Neal as a loser writer framed for murder by his white trash ex-wife and a psychotic police chief.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance is an odd duck — too awkward and badly acted to qualify as genuinely good, too unsettling and funny (intentionally and unintentionally) to be entirely dismissed. If anything, the film proves that Mailer is better at breaking rules than playing by them. The original novel is a minor work in a career that’s produced The Naked and the Dead and Ancient Evenings, but satisfies as a Proustian, first-person mystery narrative filled with metaphysical dread and homosexual panic. The movie version is its skeleton, a beautifully photographed love letter to Mailer’s longtime home of Provincetown — Mailer said he was happy the film captured the “mournful, elegiac quality” of the beach community — that replaces the harmony of good writing with serious misjudgments in tone and out-and-out loony performances by Wings Hauser and Debra Sandlund. “Professional actors are a pain in the ass,” Mailer unsurprisingly pronounced after the film’s screening, and in Tough Guys he seems much more comfortable directing as the army general and circus ringleader he envisioned himself than as a wrangler of consummate thespians.
“One lives existentially with filmmaking, not with writing,” Mailer said at the end of the enlightening discussion at the Walter Reade, and one wonders if this statement constitutes the key to his work. For as much as Mailer has always loved the nuts and bolts of writing, of expressing imagination through language, his aspirations couldn’t be limited to that format. Thus the need to expose himself, warts and all, while creating “attacks on the nature of reality,” as Mailer states in Maidstone, by using improvisation to confront an audience with what is typically suppressed in art — life’s instability and peril. Mailer had to risk guaranteed prestige and financial security (Maidstone bankrupted him) in order to foment those confrontations, to communicate beyond the written word the existential adventure he tried to live at every moment. If, then, one wants to meet these difficult and occasionally sublime films on their own terms, they must be considered necessary processes in Mailer’s indiscriminate journey to break free of artistic and social restraints. Perhaps the only fair judgment of an outlaw filmmaker is how close he or she gets to realize a fully emancipated vision. Even if his undertaking as a final product rarely satisfies, Mailer playing the role of cinematic explorer surely reached that goal.
The Mistress & the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer continues with screenings at Anthology (through Aug. 2nd) and the Paley Center for Media (through Aug. 5th) and closes with a special screening of The Executioner’s Song at the Walter Reade on August 5th