Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User:TPoole

2025-04-16T14:44:33Z

TPoole:

[[Category:Student Editors]]

[[Category:Spring 2025]]

User:TPoole

2025-04-16T14:43:09Z

TPoole:

A graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Technical and Professional Writing and a graduate certificate in Strategic Business Communication at [https://www.mga.edu/ Middle Georgia State University].

[[Category:Student Editors]]

[[Category:Spring 2025]]

User:TPoole

2025-04-16T14:39:22Z

TPoole:

Tara P. is graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Technical and Professional Writing and a graduate certificate in Strategic Business Communication at [https://www.mga.edu/ Middle Georgia State University].

[[Category:Student Editors]]

[[Category:Spring 2025]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-11T01:18:29Z

TPoole: /* Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"] and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-11T01:16:21Z

TPoole: /* Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"] and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [[Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|article]] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-11T01:15:48Z

TPoole: /* Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"] and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [[Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law|article]] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T01:07:49Z

TPoole: corrected citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}} 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility,{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body.” {{sfn|Metz|1982|p=61}}}} feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image. {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}} Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}} Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance. {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}} In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish. {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}} Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility, provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact.” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}} With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}} Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}} While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews. {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama. {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot.” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}} Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul.” {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}} Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray,{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}} suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}} have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}} The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}} It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-

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ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}} Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

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==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T01:03:17Z

TPoole:

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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

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voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}} 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility,{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body.”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}}} feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image. {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}} Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}} Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance. {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}} In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish. {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}} Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility, provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact.” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}} With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}} Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}} While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews. {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama. {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot.” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}} Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul.” {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}} Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray,{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}} suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}} have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}} The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}} It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}} Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:58:58Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}} 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility,{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body.”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}}} feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image. {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}} Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}} Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance. {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}} In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish. {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}} Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility, provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact.” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}} With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}} Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-

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ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:51:24Z

TPoole:

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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

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voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}} 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild'' and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987.{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}} Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods.”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}} Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps.” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}} Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:48:13Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}} For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereotypical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}} 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position.” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}} Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room. {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary. {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}} Here is an ex-

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ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:38:37Z

TPoole:

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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

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voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:37:48Z

TPoole: corrected citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'', {{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media| last = Hawks| first = Howard| title = Scarface| date = 1932| type = Film| ref = harv}}

* {{cite news|last=Hawks |first= Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-11T00:30:32Z

TPoole: corrected citation

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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

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voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Elmer|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T23:04:57Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),” and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror.”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}} More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T22:59:22Z

TPoole: corrected citation

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

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voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay.{{sfn|Mewshaw|2002}} For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T21:06:12Z

TPoole: corrected citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} For Brienes, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers.{{sfn|Brienes|1990|p=195}} Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T21:01:26Z

TPoole: corrected citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy.”{{sfn|O'Reilly|1974|p=198}} Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T20:53:02Z

TPoole: corrected citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1981|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy”{{sfn|o'Reilly|1974|pg=198}}{{efn| Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T20:49:05Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy”{{sfn|o'Reilly|1974|pg=198}}{{efn| Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T20:44:16Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|United States Federal Bureau of Investigation|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

{{pg|184|185}}

mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

{{pg|185|186}}

experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

{{pg|186|187}}

regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

{{pg|187|188}}

hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

{{pg|188|189}}

his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy”{{sfn|o'Reilly|1974|pg=198}}{{efn| Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

{{pg|189|190}}

''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

{{pg|190|191}}

almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

{{pg|191|192}}

tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

{{pg|192|193}}

to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

{{pg|193|194}}

avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |author1-link=Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |publisher=FBI |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

2025-04-10T20:42:39Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Cohen|first=Sarah Jo|abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen}}

{{dc|dc=N|ORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}}. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” {{sfn|Hoover|1962–1975}}. Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” {{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|}}. Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s

{{pg|183|184}}

voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices
in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.

Mailer reflects briefly upon his voice in his chronicle of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'', written in the third person with himself as its main character. Part IV of ''Armies'' begins with an apology from Mailer for bringing the story of the March on the Pentagon to a climax and then launching into a diversion about his relationship to film and the cameras following him through the melee of the march. Mailer writes of his relationship to film: “he had on screen in this first documentary a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away—he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}. For Mailer, the paradoxical experience of seeing his voice undermines the masculinities he works to materialize in his career as a writer and public intellectual, which he goes on to enumerate: “warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter.” As a result of feeling outed on film as a “nice Jewish boy,” “accustomed to mother love,” our presumptive general and champion of obscenity vows to “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|pg=152}}.

The problem of Mailer’s voice is intimately connected with both sexuality and masculinity. The adenoids, after all, are located in the nose, a stereo typical marker of Jewish otherness and degeneracy. We do not need Sander Gilman to tell us, although he does in the chapter of ''The Jew’s Body'' entitled “The Jewish Nose,” that the Jewish nose is the locus of redirected anxiety about the Jewish penis—both are body parts that develop and take shape at puberty—the latter of which is a threat to national purity through its potential to increase the Jewish population. The adenoidal voice signals a kind of impotence for Mailer, revealing him as accustomed to mother love, and functions as “the acoustic mirror in which the male subject hears all the repudiated elements of his infantile babble” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. The infantile babble here, the mother tongue of the mother’s voice, is Yiddish{{efn|Mary V. Dearborn writes that Mailer picked up Yiddish at home from his parents, “enough so that many years later, in Germany, he was able to ask for directions in this language and be understood”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|}}}}. 2 Kaja Silverman writes that the voice of the mother resonates in the male subject and that “the male subject frequently ‘refines’ his ‘own’ voice by projecting onto the

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mother’s voice all that is unassimilable to the paternal position” {{sfn|Silverman|1988|pg=81}}. Mailer is a case study in this relationship to the maternal voice; when Mailer first sees himself on film, he hears the adenoidal, Jewish, maternal voice within himself. Because the paternal position Mailer strives to create is distinctly not Jewish, or at least one that allies itself with Jewishness without performing it, the mother’s voice becomes unassimilable (or in his words, “unsupportable”) to his identity. Thus, while Mailer asserts that he will “[stay] away from further documentaries of himself,” he returns to film as both actor and director in order to refine his voice by expunging its maternal layers.

Norman Mailer’s film career, often dismissed as vulgar and/or irrelevant, was short but intense; he directed four films, two of which were released in 1968, ''Wild''
and ''Beyond the Law'', one in 1970, ''Maidstone'', and, after a long break, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' was released in 1987{{efn|Mailer was also featured in several documentaries during these years, including Dick Fontaine’s ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' (1968) and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.''
(1970); the former is a filmic companion to Armies, documenting Mailer’s actions during the March on the Pentagon, and the latter produces a record of Mailer’s
New York City mayoral campaign. Mailer was also documented in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s ''Town Bloody Hall'', a film of the debate between Mailer and Germaine Greer about women’s liberation at Town Hall in New York City.}}. Mailer’s first three films were largely influenced by John Cassavetes, although Mailer predictably argues that his mastery of what he calls “existential acting” makes him a much better filmmaker than Cassavetes {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. In his essay, “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer defines existential acting by addressing each of the terms that comprise the phrase. He notes that existentialism and acting exist at two opposite “poles,” writing, ''“If existentialism is ultimately concerned with the attractions of the unknown, acting is one of the surviving rituals of invocation, repetition, and ceremony—of propitiation to the gods”'' {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=104}}{{efn| It is quite possible that Mailer is thinking in part of Kenneth Anger here, the word “invocation” invoking Anger’s ''Invocation of My Demon Brother''(1969), as well as the ritual and ceremony of highly-stylized films like ''Kustom Kar Kommandos''(1965) and ''Scorpio Rising''(1964). Incidentally, in the Boulenger interview, a copy of Anger’s book Hollywood ''Babylon'' can be see on the bookshelf over Mailer’s shoulder, almost like a cartoon devil egging him on.}} His theory of existential acting, then, strives to collapse these two poles, freeing acting from repetition and ceremony, and liberating his actors (and himself) from the propitiation of the gods. Existential acting, he argues, works because in our daily lives we always pretend, lie, and act, and works by more effectively representing the chaos and “complexity of our century” than mainstream Hollywood cinema {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90,108}}. Unsurprisingly, from the man who gave us the genre-bending history as novel/novel as history, the true life novel, and the novel biography{{efn|''The Armies of the Night'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Marilyn'', respectively.}} existential acting collapses the cinema and the outside world, documentary and fiction, acting and existentialism, and masculinity and performance, the last of which Mailer explicitly connects, writing: “There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the hilt—for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be tough all the time...[s]o he acts to fill the gaps” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|pg=90-1}}. Thus, armed with the theory and methodology of existential acting, Mailer returns to the cinema as a filmmaker for the same reason he considers turning away from it after his

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experience in the above passage: at the same time the camera exposes one’s frailties and the identities one attempts to disguise; it bolsters the masquerade of masculinity by imprinting its performance in celluloid. The same voice that undermines Mailer’s masculinity becomes his primary means of constructing it.

In his first documentary Mailer sees “something in his adenoids” in a moment of slippage that renders the aural a visual prop. The experience of seeing his voice disrupts Mailer’s viewing experience by first troubling the traditional assumption that film is a visual medium and then forcing Mailer to confront himself as both image and sound. Mladen Dolar provides a means of understanding the revolutionary and revelatory potential of sound, in the form of the voice, in relation to both identity and film, as he writes:

<blockquote>|[T]he visible world presents relative stability, permanence, distinctiveness, and a location at a distance, the audible presents fluidity, passing, a certain inchoate, amorphous character and a lack of distance. The voice is elusive, always changing, becoming, elapsing, with unclear contours, as opposed to the relative permanence, solidity, durability of the seen. {{sfn|Dolar|2006|pg=79}}.</blockquote>

Here the visible is associated with stability, permanence, and distinctiveness—terms that are crucial to our understanding of cinema, but that mirror the ways we come to understand ourselves as selves. In film, the visible is assumed to guarantee presence, an assumption that stems from, among other things, the historical and philosophical privileging of the visual as a primary quality, and the problem of the voiceovers and voice-offs of sound film—which are often disembodied, absent, and coming from beyond the grave or before birth. Because the visual has historically been the privileged epistemological order through which we understand both film and identity, by focusing on sound, which is dynamic and playful, we can begin to dis
mantle both identity and film.{{efn|At this point in time, there is, of course, a well-established tradition of discussing sound and the voice on film—Pascal Bonitzer’s “The Silences of the Voice”(1975 ), Christian Metz’s “Aural Objects” (1980), Mary Anne Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema”(1982), and Silverman’s ''Acoustic Mirror'' (1988, just to name a few. It seems important for our purposes, however, to rehash the stakes of this discussion, especially in relation to deconstructing/reconstructing/constructing Mailer’s masculinity.}} As Mailer sees his voice, witnessing his in sides (in the form of his adenoids) undermining his outsides, the visual and audible come together, undoing the binary oppositions between seeing and hearing, insides and outsides.

Dolar contrasts the visible to the audible, arguing that the latter is associated with a lack of distance, a lack of distance perhaps best embodied by the uterine envelope created by the mother’s voice. This lack of distance with

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regard to the sound of the voice stems from the fact that the voice is simultaneously sent and delivered, thus folding back on itself and troubling the
boundaries between self and other. This lack of distance is also precisely what Mailer experiences when he sees himself in his first documentary, at once spoken and heard. While Christian Metz dismisses seeing oneself on screen as an impossibility{{efn|In ''Imaginary Signifier'', Metz writes that “there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in [the screen]: the spectator’s own body”{{Metz|Lennon|1982|p=61}}.}}, feminist film theory calls attention to the discomfort that comes from not being granted the distance that the visible demands. In “Film and the Masquerade,” Mary Anne Doane argues that the female spectator goes largely untheorized because the historical “imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman” leaves her too close to the image {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=76}}. Doane theorizes that in order to achieve the distance necessary to watch and appreciate film, female spectators assume a metaphorical feminine mask, which “in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=81}}. Doane then briefly considers why men do not have to masquerade as more masculine spectators, writing, “The very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to” {{sfn|Doane|1982|pg=82}}.

But using his body for particular gains is precisely what Mailer does, as exemplified in Diane Arbus’s photograph of Mailer. If, as Mailer quipped, “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,” this hand grenade caught an image that exemplifies how Mailer flaunts his masculinity by holding it at a distance {{sfn|Hagberg|2008|pg=211}}. In this photograph, we see Mailer is in his standard three-piece suit, sprawled out in a writerly looking high-backed chair. His right hand looks as though clasping an invisible cigarette, or pen, or as if gesturing to emphasize a point. His forehead is wrinkled in thought, and his blue eyes glow even in black and white. While his clothing, his chair, his furrowed brow, and his mouth, slightly agape in apparent mid-sentence, add up to an image we would expect of a great writer, his posture suggests otherwise; immediately, our attention is drawn to Mailer’s crotch. Thus, this image reveals both Mailer’s efforts to underscore his masculinity, placing his crotch front and center, and the vulnerability of this masculinity—in this moment, we wouldn’t need a grenade to cause Mailer a great deal of pain; a swift kick would suffice. The simultaneous power and vulnerability of Mailer’s crotch underscores his efforts to use the visibility of his body to counteract the invisibility of his voice, and his

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hidden adenoids. We see Mailer engaged in a manly masquerade, as his proximity to the image allows him to manipulate it.

So male spectators need to masquerade as well—especially male spectators who find themselves closer to the image than they would like. The Jewish male is one such figure, as a result of a history of anti-Semitic visual representations of Jews in both scientific and popular media. Sander Gilman argues that such visual representations are internalized by contemporary Jewish-American writers, registering most prominently in repeated anxiety about sounding too Jewish {{sfn|Gilman|1991|pg=10-37}}. Mailer’s anxiety about his adenoids is decisively Jewish, both because the adenoids are located in the nose and because they give the Jewish voice its stereotypical nasal quality. Mailer’s attempt to work through this anxiety in his films is twofold. First, he gets on the other side of the camera in order to see rather than be seen, and when he is seen (as actor), it is under his own direction. Second, Mailer employs his voice in order to intervene, destabilize, and distance himself from the power of the image.

''Wild 90'', as it repeatedly calls attention to issues of seeing and visibility,
provides the best examples of Mailer’s effort to seize control of his visual
representation in order to produce a record of his masculinity. Mailer accomplishes this task not only by “writing,”{{efn|The word “writing” is in quotes in this sentence because while Mailer is given credit for writing the film, for example on the ''Internet Movie Database'', existential acting relies on improvisation and thus has no script, per se.}} editing, and directing the film, but also, by playing a boxer in league with mafiosi, who have the police under their control. In this film the Maf Boys, three men who spend the film holed up in a Brooklyn warehouse, watch over the New York Police Department, a position emphasized by their location many stories above the city street. The NYPD, however, asserts that the Maf Boys would not have lived past thirteen had the Irish and Jewish cops not been watching out for them—so a network of interlaced looks, and interlaced ethnicities, emerges. But perhaps the most striking look is Mailer’s own. As a character known as “the Prince,” Mailer is perpetually at the mirror, greasing up his hair and combing out its kinky curls. This position is crucial to Mailer’s management of his visual representation: from the mirror, much as in his position as director, Mailer can see both himself and the actors behind him; he can also control his image, making sure his mane and signature sneer are exactly as he wants
them to appear. The metaphorical significance of Mailer’s mirror scenes almost goes without saying—at these times we are treated to moments of silence rare in his film (or writing, or political) career in which Mailer uses the visuality of film to construct and maintain the visibility of identity, to register

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his transformation here from nice Jewish boy to badass boxer. Despite this love affair with his image, Mailer shatters the filmic mirror when, at the conclusion of ''Wild 90'', the Prince demands to speak to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, and informing the audience that the CIA{{efn|Mailer had a strong distaste for the CIA, an organization that he saw as the paragon of both surveillance culture and WASP culture. Mailer’s-plus-page novel ''Harlot’s Ghost'' provides an extended though indirect glimpse into his dislike for the CIA and is almost agonizing to read because its narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a boring, WASPy, CIA agent. It’s also worth noting that Hubbard refers to the one Jewish agent in the CIA, Reed Arnold Rosen, as “adenoidal” (61).}} is watching all of us. He then goes on to tell us, in his garbled, drunken voice that his favorite author is Norman Mailer—presumably, because he is both his creator and a substantial part of his self.

Mailer’s appearance, particularly in the mirror scenes of ''Wild 90'', is crucial to his efforts to make masculinity and unmake Jewishness, two concepts at odds because of the internalization of a long history of popular representations and stereotypes of the weak Jew. While Mailer combats this weakness in part through his tough guy exterior—carefully cultivated through hard-drinking, hard-talking, and hard-fighting in an effort to make himself out as a latter-day Hemingway—Mailer’s voice registers this construction as well. In the notes taken during my first screenings of ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'', I repeatedly try to describe the voice of the characters he portrays. In my notes on Beyond the Law, I wrote that the poor sound quality of the film combines with Mailer’s voice to create the effect of almost incomprehensible yelling from Lt. Francis Xavier Pope for an hour and twenty-four minutes. My notes on Mailer’s gangster voice as the Prince of ''Wild 90'' remark that his accent makes him sound like a cross between Marlon Brando and Fred Flintstone with marbles in his mouth. In my second viewing, I crossed out this assessment and wrote that he sounded more like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion from the ''Wizard of Oz''. I am not alone in trying to describe Mailer’s voice. Michael Mewshaw describes Mailer’s voice as “the Irish brogue of a whiskey priest” coming from the body of a man who “looked about as threatening as a teddy bear” {{sfn|Mewshaw|2002|pg=14}}, and Jane O’Reilly notes that “words rumble and bubble and jump out, in a variety of accents: New York, faintly southern, all g’s dropped (as in ‘Ah’m talkin’) when he is particularly shy”{{sfn|o'Reilly|1974|pg=198}}{{efn| Salman Rushdie describes Bert Lahr’s lion voice is strikingly similar words, “all elongated vowel sounds (''Put ’emuuuuuuuup''),”and the Cowardly Lion’s personality as one that sounds a lot like Mailer’s: “transparent bravado and huge, operatic, tail-tugging, blubbing terror”{{sfn|Rushdie|1992|}}. More recently, in an article about the New York Mailer retrospective, A.O. Scott describes Mailer’s voice as a “rapid, forceful stream of half-baked nostrums and brilliant ''aperçus'' delivered in that inimitable accent, an audible palimpsest of Mr. Mailer’s Brooklyn childhood, his Ivy League education and his World War II combat service in an Army unit composed mainly of Texans and Southerners.”

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers {{sfn|Breines|1995|pg=195}}. Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” {{sfn|Dearborn|1999|pg=14}}. With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

Mailer’s essay, “The White Negro,” is the site most often returned to in order to discuss his contribution to the theories of tough Jewish discourse and of masculinity.{{efn|See Levine and Damon. Damon pithily writes that “The White Negro” “claims to be about how the white man envies the Black man’s sexuality and thus tries to emulate his style, but [its] subtext is about how the Jewish man envies and wants to emulate the gentile man’s sexuality, but can’t say so”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=337-358}}.}} This essay, which argues that the hipster’s existential, psychopathic masculinity is particularly well-suited for the Cold War political climate, is infamous not only because it espouses Reichian connections between sex and violence, but also because it argues that “the Negro,” who “relinquish[es] the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body,” provides a model for how to live violently and sexually {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=341}}. Both because of and despite its racist enlistment of African American men, Mailer’s essay celebrates and identifies with black masculinity as a means of embracing otherness without admitting Jewishness. With its repeated references to the figure of “the psychopath,” who “murders—if he has the courage,” however, Mailer’s essay is also about criminality, which is a crucial source of his on-screen tough Jewish persona {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pg=347}}. While this persona borrows its style and hipness from African Americans, it

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almost literally ventriloquizes through the voices of Irish Americans and Italian Americans, particularly those of Hollywood cops and crooks.

Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film,''Once Upon a Time in
America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay{{sfn|Mewshaw|2018|}}.For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews {{sfn|Fried|1993|pg=xv}}. While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar'' {{sfn|Little Ceasar|1931|}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'' {{sfn|Scarface|1932|}}, Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.

In a letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s[[efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See William F. Buckley, Jr., “Who Did What?”}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama {{sfn|Tanenhouse|2005|}}. When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:

<blockquote>|I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main-

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tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal. {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>

Perhaps as a result of their tortured psyches, Mailer repeatedly turns to cops and crooks as the focus of and source of conflict in his oeuvre. For Mailer, cops are men in power who are repeatedly outwitted by clever, hypermasculine, criminals: think Stephen Rojack and Gary Gilmore, the respective heroes of ''An American Dream'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'', who commit numerous crimes in single volumes, and the Norman Mailer of ''The Armies of the Night'', arrested by U.S. Marshalls for crossing a police line at the Pentagon. There is also the Norman Mailer who stabbed his second wife, and the one who nearly lost an eye after fighting a group of hoodlums who insinuated that his dog was a “faggot” {{sfn|Hitchens|2007|}}. Mailer, as his art and life suggest, sees the tension between cops and criminals as one that is inside of everyone. In a discussion of ''Beyond the Law'' in an interview with Gilles Boulenger, Mailer reveals that the film “had a notion at the core of it that worked— which is that everybody has a cop or a criminal in them” and that, “when you put people together—one playing a cop and one playing a crook—you get the dynamism that comes from the fact that every cop in real life has a potential criminal in him and every criminal in real life, or almost every criminal in real life, has a potential cop within their soul {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}.”

Mailer sees the conflict between cops and crooks as one that inhabits the film set as well. In “A Course on Film-Making,” he describes cameramen and union grips, who “usually dress like cops off duty and are built like cops (with the same heavy meat in the shoulders, same bellies oiled in beer), which is not surprising for they are also in surveillance upon a criminal activity: people are forging emotions under bright lights… [l]ike cops they see through every fake move and hardly care” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=133}}. Here the crew, who are equated with cops, are set up in opposition to the actors whom they put under surveillance and, more indirectly, to the director, who for Mailer is always an outlaw resisting the tyranny of the image, striving to disrupt the conventions of polite cinema through a refusal to use a script, and insisting upon including as much verbal and auditory obscenity as humanly possible. Thus, even when Mailer plays a cop in ''Beyond the Law'', this portrayal becomes an effort similar to that of the director whose film tramples upon respectability. Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope inhabits the body of the cop in order

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to mock him and to illustrate a psyche more tortured than that of the criminal.

In ''Beyond the Law'', as Mailer takes on the role of a cop, anxieties about Jewishness, being seen, and the voice come together. Beyond the Law tells the story of one night in a police precinct in which a number of criminals are interrogated, ranging from a motorcycle gang, to a man who murdered his wife with an axe, to the members of a sadomasochistic whipping club. The film takes us back and forth between the precinct, where we see the cops in action, and a bar, where we see the cops off-duty, having drinks. Toward the film’s conclusion, these spaces intersect as Lieutenant Pope brings one of the women from the whipping club, a stunning Syrian woman named Lee Ray Rogers, to the bar. Rogers’ tripartite name, cobbled together from pieces of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray{{efn|The name also refers to Republican luminary and soon to be Nixon Administration Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who would go on to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace treaty in 1973”}}, suggests that she too will be an assassin of sorts, or at least that she will bring the little death of orgasm to Lieutenant Pope. Just before Rogers arrives, Pope (Mailer’s Irish-American cop, whose rank and name suggest that he is only slightly less than the Bishop of Rome) and Mickey Berk (Mickey Knox’s Jewish-American cop, feminized through a last name that is cockney rhyming slang for cunt),{{efn|See also entry for “Berk” on ''London Slang.com: “Rhyming Slang'', short for ‘Berkshire Hunt’, meaning ‘cunt’. Most people go around calling people ‘berks’ for years not realizing that it is slang for one of the strongest swear words in the English language.”}}, have a heart to heart in the men’s room in which Pope remarks, “I used to have no respect for the Jewish cops until the Israelis showed the Arabs where to go. And then I said to myself, maybe Berk has more than even I thought.” Pope then mutters under his breath for a couple of minutes, and quietly says to himself, “The Irish never won a war."

Once Rogers arrives, Pope asks the other officers to leave them alone. An intimate conversation follows, during which the two imagine an S &M scene and Pope refers to his penis as “the avenger.” A difficult to obtain “blue” version of the film exists in which we presumably see Pope’s avenger in action. For our purposes, however, it is even more striking to see him ''voicing'' his potency and sexuality, while Mailer’s voice revealed him as soft in his first documentary, Pope tells us here that he is hard. Pope expresses the ethnic crossing that facilitates his hardness in this conversation as well, as he tells Rogers, “You bring out the Italian in me.” Ultimately, Pope’s blonde wife arrives at the bar, cramping his style, and commands him to end this conversation. Thus the film concludes with Pope at the nexus of several ethnicities: pitted against an Arab dominatrix and an emasculating ''shiksa'', the Irish Pope arms himself with an Italian libido, and metaphorically whips out his

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avenger in the name of both the Jews, who showed the Arabs where to go, and the Irish who never won a war.

In “A Course in Filmmaking,” Mailer argues that after the advent of sound, film started to mimic theater, and that the work of film should be to get away from this mimicry in order to accomplish things that can only be accomplished on film. As films that are uniquely filmic, Mailer gives the example of ''The Maltese Falcon'', but also of the Marx Brothers’ films, in which the brothers “stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=129}}. The Marx brothers are important ancestors in Mailer’s filmic genealogy, in part because they too are Jews who remix ethnicity on film, as Chico becomes Italian and Zeppo becomes the brothers’ WASPy foil. And like Mailer’s films, much of the chaos and anarchy that unfurls in the Marx Brothers’ films stems from sound, in the form of elaborate musical numbers, Groucho’s wordplay, Chico’s Italian accent and piano playing, Harpo’s horn-honking, and even his silence. For both the Marx Brothers and Mailer, the work of cinema is to unravel itself, to make and unmake a universe in the same space, to challenge conventions. Where the Marx brothers wreak havoc, for example, upon the university in ''Horse feathers'', and upon dictatorship in ''Duck Soup'', Mailer wreaks havoc upon language and good taste as he attempts to create the film with the most “repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made” with ''Wild, 90'' and upon both his own voice and the human eardrum with the perpetual yelling of Lt. Pope in ''Beyond the Law''. Mailer even tells us, “''Wild 90'' seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on ''Little Caesar'' with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to ''Naked Lunch'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=90}}. It is as though Mailer sees ''Wild 90'' as an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vision of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

In Mailer’s universe, the borders between Mailer and his characters are always fragile. He tells us in the Boulenger interview that in the making of ''Beyond the Law'' he would torture the actors playing the crooks, who were all friends of his, by interrogating them about things they had done in their real lives.{{efn|The best example of this existential interrogation occurs as Mailer’s Lieutenant Pope interrogates Peter Rosoff, whom Mailer asserts was a closeted homosexual, accusing him of soliciting sex in a subway men’s room {{sfn|Mailer|2018|p=25}}.}} In his writing and his introductory remarks included on the French DVDs of his films, Mailer repeatedly tells us that the goal of existential acting is to create a fictional documentary {{sfn|Mailer|2006|}}. Here is an ex-

{{pg|195|196}}

ample, taken from his discussion of the successes and failures of ''cinéma vérité'' in “A Course on Filmmaking”: “It was as if there was a law that a person could not be himself in front of a camera unless he pretended to be someone other than himself. By that logic, ''cinéma vérité'' would work if it photographed a performer in the midst of his performance” {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=147}}. Mailer’s films elaborate upon his ideas about existential filmmaking: it is only in the act of performing as a character (Lieutenant Pope) that the actor reveals himself (Norman Mailer). Pope/Mailer’s sarcastic comment about not respecting the Jews until they showed the Arabs their military might is a line almost directly out of Breines’ ''Tough Jews'', or vice versa, Pope/Mailer’s comment is part of the discourse surrounding the 1968 war that inspired ''Tough Jews''. Either way, with this line, Mailer introduces himself into the lineage of tough Jews but with his own spin. When Pope tells us that Lee Ray Rogers brings out the Italian in him, he speaks for Mailer as well. Because Jewish masculinity for Mailer is always borrowed from and channeled through other ethnic masculinities, Pope’s words are as good as Mailer’s saying that Rogers brings out the Jew in him, and Mailer’s (via Pope’s) tough Jew is always already fighting, whether he is pushing Arabs out of Palestine or fighting to defend his dog’s honor. Thus, much as Mailer helped to unmake cinema as he made it, Mailer makes Jewishness as he unmakes it— masculinity unravels as the film does the same, moving from real to reel.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Brienes |first=Paul |date=1990 |title=''Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry.'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Basic Books |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Buckley |first=William F. |date=2005 |title= “Who Did What?” |url= |magazine=''National Review'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Damom |first=Maria |title=“Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” |url= |journal=College Literature |volume=27.1 |issue= |date=Winter 2000 |pages=139-157 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=''Mailer: A Biography'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Doane |first=Mary Ann |date=1981 |title=“Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” |url= |location=''Screen 23'' |publisher= |pages=74-87 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dolar |first=Mladen |date=2006 |title=''A Voice and Nothing More'' |url= |location=Cambridge |publisher= MIT P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Fried |first=Albert |date=1993 |title=''The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America'' |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gilman |first=Sander |date=1991 |title=The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or the Penalties of Sounding too Jewish. |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hagberg |first=Gary |date=2008 |title=''Art and Ethical Criticism.'' |url= |location=Malden, MA |publisher=Wiley-Blackwell |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Hitchens |first=Christopher |date=2007 |title=Remembering the Pint-Size Jewish Fireplug. |url= |magazine=''Slate'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Levine |first=Andrea |title=“The Jewish White Negro: Norman Mailer’s Racialized Bodies.” |url= |journal=''MELUS'' |volume=28.2 |issue= |date= |pages=59-81 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Elmer |first=Clifton |date=1931 |title=''Little Caesar.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title='' The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History'' |url= |location=New York |publisher= New American Library |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=''Beyond the Law'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=“A Course in Film-Making.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=123-168 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=''Harlot’s Ghost.'' |url= |location= |publisher=Random House, |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2008 |title=“In the Ring: Grappling with the Twentieth Century.” |url= |magazine=''The New Yorker.'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=“Interview by Gilles Boulenger.” |url= |work= |location=Cinémalta |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Norman |title=.“Some Dirt in the Talk.” |url= |journal=''Existential Errands.'' |volume= |issue= |date=1972 |pages=89-123 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. |url= |magazine=''Advertisements for Myself'' |pages=337-358 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date= |title=''Wild 90'' |url= |work= |location=Supreme Mix Productions |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Metz |first=Christian |date=1982 |title=''Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Mewshaw |first=Michael |title=“Vidal and Mailer” |url= |journal=''South Central Review'' |volume=4-14 |issue= |date=2002 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1970 |title=''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City U.S.A.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=O'Reilly |first=Jane |date=1974 |title=“Diary of a Mailer Trailer.” |url= |magazine=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' |pages=195-215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Rushdie |first=Salman |date=1992 |title='' The Wizard of Oz'' |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Hawkes |first=Dir. Howard |date= |title=''Scarface.'' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Scott |first=A.O. |date=2007 |title=“Norman Mailer Unbound and On Film: Revisiting His Bigger-Than-Life-Selves.” |url= |magazine=''The New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Silverman |first=Kaja |date=1988 |title=''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.'' |url= |location=Bloomington |publisher=Indiana UP |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Sokolsky |first=George E. |date=1962 |title=“These Days: The First Lady.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stern |first=Steve |date=2010 |title=''The Frozen Rabbi'' |url= |location=Chapel Hill |publisher=Algonquin P |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Stevens |first=Joe |date=2008 |title=“The FBI’s-Year Campaign to Ferret Out Norman Mailer.” |url= |magazine=''The Washington Post'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Tanenhouse |first=Sam |date=2005 |title=“TheBuckley Effect” |url= |magazine=''New York Times'' |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=Pennebaker |first= Dir D.A |date= |title=''Town Bloody Hall.'' |url= |work= |location=Pennebaker Hegedus Films |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite report |last=Hoover |first=J. Edgar |author2=United States Federal Bureau of Investigation |date=1962–1975 |title=Memo to Staff |work=File on Norman Kingsley Mailer |publisher=Federal Bureau of Investigation |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Fontaine |first=Dir. Dick |date=1968 |title=''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? '' |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:MAKING MASCULINITY AND UNMAKING JEWISHNESS: NORMAN MAILER’S VOICE IN
''WILD 90'' AND ''BEYOND THE LAW''}}
[[Category:Book Reviews (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-05T01:38:07Z

TPoole: /* Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review */

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T01:36:19Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011a}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}}
It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Beyond the Law
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Maidstone
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011a
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media
|people=Mailer, Norman
|date=1967
|title=Wild 90
|publisher=CineMalta
|type=Film
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T01:29:47Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011a}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Beyond the Law
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Maidstone
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011a
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media
|people=Mailer, Norman
|date=1967
|title=Wild 90
|publisher=CineMalta
|type=Film
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T01:20:42Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011a}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Beyond the Law
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Maidstone
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011a
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T01:19:02Z

TPoole:

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011a}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Beyond the Law
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011a
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite web
|last=IMDb.com
|title=Maidstone
|website=Internet Movie Database
|publisher=IMDb.com
|date=2011a
|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/
|access-date=10 October 2011
|ref=harv
}}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-05T00:28:29Z

TPoole: /* Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review */

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. The ones for the films and web citations do not work and I can't figure out the correct code to fix them. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-05T00:27:01Z

TPoole: /* Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review */

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-05T00:24:50Z

TPoole: /* Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review */

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. The ones for the films and web citations do not work and I don't know how to fix them. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T00:11:44Z

TPoole:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR05}}


{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|Maidstone|2011}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T00:09:09Z

TPoole:

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|Maidstone|2011}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-04-05T00:03:05Z

TPoole: corrected citation code

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|Maidstone|2011}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|IMDb.com|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

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The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre.{{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}} Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com.{{sfn|Maidstone|2011}} Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort."{{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked."{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form."{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}} Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it."{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}} Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}} Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film."{{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-03-29T19:17:25Z

TPoole:

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history. And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-03-29T19:16:10Z

TPoole:

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, François Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-03-29T19:09:50Z

TPoole:

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{{Working}}
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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941). Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

2025-03-29T19:08:54Z

TPoole: added paragraphs

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{{byline |last=Rhodes |first=Gary D. |abstract=A film historian analyzes the quality of Mailer’s cinematic contributions in his four films. |url=. . .}}
{{dc|dc=Y|}}EARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User:TPoole/sandbox

2025-03-29T19:08:36Z

TPoole:

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of
itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}
. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches
to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument
but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer

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TPoole:

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of
itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pp=3–40}}
. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches
to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument
but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

{{Refend}}

User:TPoole/sandbox

2025-03-29T18:45:30Z

TPoole:

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of
itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pg=3-40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches
to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student
{{pg|170|171}}

that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument
but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
{{pg|173|174}}

the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

{{pg|174|175}}

Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

{{pg|175|176}}

The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

{{pg|177|178}}

blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

{{pg|178|179}}

those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

{{pg|180|181}}

to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

{{pg|181|182}}

But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

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User:TPoole/sandbox

2025-03-29T18:44:24Z

TPoole: added sources

YEARS AGO, I MET SOMEONE WHO HAD MADE A DOCUMENTARY FILM called ''How Much Paint Does a Painting Need?'' What a great title. It not only stuck in my memory, but it dovetailed with questions that have plagued me for years about the history of cinema, and, more particularly, the cinema’s history of
itself.

Consider, for example, Francois Truffaut’s remark that he liked Hollywood films because they were so similar to one another. Despite technological changes, aesthetic evolutions, and generic boundaries, it is easy to argue that Hollywood films always have more in common with one another than they have differences. By extension, the same could be said of all narrative cinema, whenever and wherever it is produced.

Mikhail Bakhtin once referred to the novel as a genre {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|pg=3-40}}. Foregoing my early devotion to auteur theory and the uniqueness of particular film directors, I might well be led to a similar conclusion about the cinema, at least on some days of the week.

In years past, I have given many lectures on the importance of modern
filmmakers recognizing and understanding film history. So many films have been produced over the last 120-odd years that they constitute not merely a well or a reservoir from which to draw, but oceanic depths of ideas and approaches
to consider and understand. I believed those words as I spoke them, and most of the time I still do. I am both a film historian and a filmmaker, so I probably have little choice in the matter.

After all, the best film education is viewing films, and viewing them repeatedly. Orson Welles did just that with Ford’s ''Stagecoach'' (1939) before he directed ''Citizen Kane'' (1941).Over six decades later, a graduating film student
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that I knew—one who was highly astute and very talented—told a university program director that he believed the money he spent on tuition would have more wisely been used to purchase the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. The program director did not appreciate or understand his argument
but, well, that is hardly surprising. Most of the stupidest people I’ve ever met have the letters “PhD” after their names.

At any rate, let’s come to the point and make sense of these random thoughts. Let’s ask a question that—in the tradition of the very best questions—
probably has no answer: ''How much film history does a film need?''

I like being winked at, whether in a pub or at a movie theatre. Filmmakers
have often winked at filmbuffs over the years, providing allusions in their
films to earlier films. Appropriation becomes homage. We are part of the
game of film history, the repurposing of some particular character name or
line of dialogue. During the lengthy crane shot in ''The Player'' (1992), we know that Altman is thinking about ''Touch of Evil'' (1958) and that, in turn, he knows that those of us “in the know” will be thinking about it as well.

In the past two decades, the environmentally conscious state of California’s most financially successful recycling project has been the Hollywood
remake. Old television programs into movies (the ''Beverly Hillbillies'' ride
again). Old movies into movies (there is more than one ticket on the ''3:10 to Yuma''). And even old movie genres into modern movie genres (The 1970s horror film is the horror film of today). These examples brim with film history.And then the cup overfloweth; it spills onto the floor with maybe little more than instant coffee from a cheap vending machine. In other words, we might also ask if a film has ''too much'' film history?

As fascinating and as maddening as these questions of film history are to me, I do know whether they held much interest for Norman Mailer. As a writer, Mailer towered over the twentieth century. That he is not more studied in Departments of English at American universities is to their discredit, not his. But I suspect that his novels will outlast his critics. They already have a good track record in that regard.

Mailer’s film career is another matter. Cinematic adaptations of his literature
began with ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1958), and continued with such films as ''See You in Hell, Darling'' (1966), ''Marilyn: The Untold Story'' (1980), and ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1982). But then there is also the quartet of films that Mailer directed over a period of two decades: ''Wild 90'' (1968), ''Beyond the Law'' (1968), ''Maidstone'' (1970), and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987). At the
{{pg|171|172}}

time of this writing, the first three are not available on DVD in the United States.

''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is readily available, as are its many bad reviews.
In fact, it is easier to find to negative reviews of all of Mailer’s films than
worthwhile analyses of them. “Not the most wretched movie ever made, but
close,” so claims one ''Maidstone'' viewer on the erstwhile ''InternetMovie Database'', that regularly inaccurate online encyclopedia which doubles as a commercial for Amazon.com {{sfn|Maidstone|2011}}. Of ''Beyond the Law'', another amateur reviewer tells us it is “a vanity project of the most arrogant sort” {{sfn|Beyond the Law|2011}}.

But enough of self-anointed internet critics. Their ease of accessibility on
the World Wide Web is matched by their equally limited depth and shelf life.
And judgments of what is “good” and “bad” are all-too-often opinions that say as much about the persons who offer them as they do about the work of art under consideration. Instead of ill-formed posts on the internet, Mailer’s
four films need something else. They need to be reclaimed by film historians, because, while they have held a place in Mailer’s biography, they have usually been ignored in tales of the cinema.

The first three of Mailer’s films bear a great deal of commonality to one another, but—at least in his mind—little resemblance to most, if not all, of the films that preceded them. Recounting the production of ''Wild 90'', he claimed, “We got the idea we would do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. The specific documentary form he had in mind was direct cinema as practiced by D. A. Pennebaker, who had directed ''Don’t Look Back'' in 1967 and ''Monterey Pop'' in 1968, a film that Mailer greatly admired. Pennebaker shot ''Wild 90'', which came—as the film’s credits tell us—“from a script which did not necessarily exist.” Pennebaker also later worked as one of the cinematographers on ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''.

Mailer later admitted that ''Wild 90'' was “tremendously amateurish,” but he was also firm in his belief that there were “elements in it that . . . were different from all the movies” he had ever seen {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. “Together with all the rough hewn sloppiness of the film,” he said, “there was also in it something vital that I liked” {{sfn|Mailer|1967}}. It was that same kind of vitality that he tried to explore in ''Beyond the Law'' and ''Maidstone''. As he claimed onscreen during a scene in ''Maidstone'', “We made a movie by a brand new process.”

In his published essay “A Course in Film-Making,” which was ostensibly about the production of ''Maidstone'', Mailer modulated his position. He noted
{{pg|172|173}}

that he was not the first to “do fiction in documentary form” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Some person or group of persons had evidently brought this fact to his attention. Various filmmakers had worked without scripts, including the likes of Charlie Chaplin. The faking of non-fiction footage had long roots, ranging from the early cinema period (with its fabricated images of the Spanish-American War and famous boxing matches) to newsreels of the thirties (as lampooned in MGM’s 1938 feature ''Too Hot to Handle'' with Clark
Gable). And fictional films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) had employed documentary
film aesthetics nearly three decades before ''Wild 90''.

In some respects, John Cassavetes’ ''Shadows'' (1959) was a particularly important link to the chain that led to Mailer’s first three films. Shot on location in New York with an improvised story, the fictional film exemplifies the
kind of raw and authentic vitality that Mailer would seek a decade later. However, Mailer’s visual style would be quite different than Cassavetes’ style.

Mailer’s departure from all of these earlier examples came in part due to
his embrace of direct cinema. Handheld camera and existing lighting mark
his first three films. While Pennebaker and others had already made direct
cinema documentaries, they were still exploring its possibilities when Mailer
began his filmmaking career. He directed ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' in
1968, the same year that the Maysles Brothers completed ''Salesman'' (1968).
Two years later, Mailer finished ''Maidstone'' at roughly the same time that the Maysles Brothers finished ''Gimme Shelter'' (1970).

In other words, rather than simply being inspired by a movement that had stopped moving, Mailer conducted his own fictional experiments while direct cinema was the prevailing force in documentary film. His films not only appropriated then-recent film history, but also engaged in a conversation with the unfolding present. Perhaps that is why, as Mailer tells us in “A Course in Filmmaking,” his ideas were a “conception which was more or less
his own, and he did not feel the desire to argue about it” {{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=217}}. Put another way, he did not believe his films incorporated very much film history.

Of Mailer’s first three films, the inaugural ''Wild 90'' is the most austere. Onscreen text informs us, “Once three guys from Brooklyn were hold up in
a room and couldn’t get out for various vague reasons.” These guys, who are
“Maf Boys,” have already spent 21 days in that location when we meet them. One is Prince, played by Mailer. Another is Buzz Cameo, who shares his first name with Buzz Farber, the actor who portrayed him. The third is Mickey (aka, “20 Years”), who also bore the same first name as the man who assumed
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the role: Mickey Knox, the only one of the three who was a professional film actor.

The trio pass the time by talking, by arguing, by fighting. “If you ever find
yourself in shit, don’t sing,” Mickey tells them, giving sage advice to the room’s prisoners. But they are not always alone. An array of guests visit the apartment, ranging from Mickey’s wife to a “bunch of bulls” who speculate that at least one of the three wouldn’t survive if he left the room. Someone wants to kill him (or them), and it isn’t the police, at least not the officers in the scene.

We have no idea how long we are in the room with the trio. Ranging from the nickelodeon era to the present, onscreen titles in films have usually been
pedagogical. They teach us information we need to understand film narratives.
In ''Wild 90'', a repeated use of the same title cards tells us “Another Day”
and then “Another Night.” We see these six times, but their appearances are
spaced so randomly throughout the film it is difficult to trust them, or even—as a first-time view—to count them.

To a degree, time has lost its meaning. Like the characters, we the observers
become lost in the relentless monotony of living in a single location. ''Wild 90'' is boring, perhaps excruciatingly so, but in a manner that the Italian
neo-realists would likely have appreciated. We share the boredom of the
main characters. We experience the meaningless activities and trite conversation of criminals who, since they are not committing crimes, are in fact very dull, just like so much of everyday life.

Acting styles in the film vary from Hollywood norms (Knox) to the forced
and exaggerated (Mailer). Together, they draw constant attention to the fact that what we are seeing is fictional, but that realization collides with the film’s
aesthetics, which suggest that what we are seeing is genuine. Some of this is
due to the handheld camera; some of it due to the use of imperfect audio and
existing lighting. At one point, for example, we see a light bulb shadow on
Cameo’s head. It is distractingly authentic.

Paranoia reigns as Mickey repeatedly worries about the lights in an adjacent
building; he believes that they are being observed from afar. And indeed
they are, but not by rival gangsters or by the authorities. A film camera watches them. Prince acknowledges that fact at the film’s conclusion, when he looks directly into the lens and says, “Goodnight,” thus violating a longstanding Hollywood taboo. The observed has become the observer. It is in that moment that Mailer best captures the tension between fiction and nonfiction
filmmaking.

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Shortly after completing ''Wild 90'', Mailer wrote and directed ''Beyond the
Law''. In it, he plays Pope, a police lieutenant; his acting style is much more restrained than in ''Wild 90''. Once again, he cast a combination of professionals and amateurs. Rip Torn notably appears as Popcorn. Mickey Knox (as Mickey Burke) and Buzz Farber return. Farber plays “Rocco Gibraltar,” a character name that highlights the film’s fictional roots.

Once again Mailer plays with onscreen titles. A series of different title
cards tell us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a film with various alternate titles, perhaps more than any other in film history. The blank spaces below indicate
the numerous changes of title cards:

<div style="text-align:center;">
BEYOND THE LAW
 
 
alias
 
 
BUST 80
 
 
ALIAS
 
GIBRALTAR, BURKE AND POPE
 
 
alias
 
COPPING THE WHIP
 
 
or
 
A Fantasy
 
 
of the Angels,
 
 
The Downtrodden
 
 
And The Dispossessed
 
 
otherwise known as
 
 
THE VELVET HAND
 
and
 
THE IRON TONGUE
</div>

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The fact that one of these title cards uses the very word “fantasy” indicates
from the outset that the film is a fiction, but collectively the title cards suggest that it is a fiction drawn from the factual: an opaque background on
the titles ever so slowly reveals an image of a New York skyline.

''Beyond the Law’s'' structure departs from the purely observational. The entire film takes place in one long night, with most of its running time devoted to a police line-up and the grilling of individual crooks who range
from murderers to a man arrested for soliciting a “young boy.” But all of
those scenes are merely flashbacks. The film begins with two of the policemen
(Rocco and Mickey) on a double date. They review what has just happened
at the police station; later in the film, Pope joins them. The result allows for a multiple locations, both within the police station and without.

Direct cinema guides the shooting and editing style. Handheld camera shots unfold in long takes, occasional zooms, and jump cuts. Camera glare also invokes the appearance of authenticity. Mailer allows for a great deal of overlapping dialogue, as well as—during the police interviews—the intrusion of offscreen voices (and shouts) from elsewhere in the police station. But here we also feel the presence of a director more than in ''Wild 90''. For example, at the line-up, the handheld camera situates its point of view over the shoulder of Mailer, who is neatly silhouetted on screen left. Such composition hardly suggests the random.

Other aspects of the cinematic style repeatedly remind us that ''Beyond the Law'' is a “fantasy.” Music is used more prodigiously than in ''Wild 90'', punctuating important moments of action, such as when a cop pushes a crook down a hallway and threatens him with a police baton. And then there are numerous different wipe transitions, ranging from one that looks like a splash of paint to another that resembles a car’s windshield wiper. Once again, it is as if fiction and non-fiction wrestle in a cinematic competition.

If ''Wild 90'' is little more than a record of three men trapped in a room, ''Beyond the Law'' attempts to convey a clear theme. All of the horrible things that crooks do are matched, at least to a degree, by all of the horrible things that the police do. “There is no police brutality in this precinct,” one cop ironically tells a criminal while roughing him up. The mayor (George Plimpton) calls Pope “sadistic,” and Pope himself announces that it is “time to become
corrupt” when he meets a woman at a restaurant who has earlier been arrested for taking part in an S&M party.

''Beyond the Law'' ends with Lieutenant Pope, Mickey Burke, and Rocco

{{pg|176|177}}

Gibraltar staring into the camera. Like ''Wild 90'', the taboo is violated, but here it is more pronounced. Three characters acknowledge us, the audience who has been staring at them.

For Mailer, the complicated interplay between documentary film aesthetics and fictional film narratives culminated in his third film, ''Maidstone''. Much as Oliver Stone’s work with fact and fiction (as in his use of mixed media and what he termed “vertical editing”) moved from ''JFK'' (1991) through ''Natural Born Killers'' (1994) to ''Nixon'' (1995), so too did Mailer’s interest in filming “fiction in documentary form” move from experimentation to mastery.

Using no written script, ''Maidstone'' tells the story of famous film director
Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer), who considers a run for the presidency even
while he begins production on a new movie set in a bordello. Various persons
plot against him, ranging from a number of “high officials” to the “Cashbox,” a group of Kingsley’s cronies headed by his half brother Raoul Rey O’Houlihan (Rip Torn).Kingsley’s assassination seems inevitable, but it never happens.

Once again,Mailer combined professional actors (Ultra Violet and Hervé Villechaize) and amateurs (including two of his ex-wives and his then current
wife, as well as the owner of the ''Maidstone'' estate where the film was
shot). He also drew upon cast members from his prior films, including Rip Torn, Buzz Farber, Mara Lynn (from ''Wild 90''), Peter Rosoff (from ''Beyond the
Law''), and Beverly Bentley (''Beyond the Law'' and ''Wild 90'').

For much of its running time, ''Maidstone'' relies upon direct cinema. A failed attempt on Kingsley’s life all too readily recalls the assassination of
Bobby Kennedy. At the same time, the film’s editing occasionally drifts into
experimentation. Some footage appears to be repeated, but under scrutiny, it becomes apparent that Mailer gives us more than one take of the same shot, placing pressure on us to consider whether or not any are “real.” Title
cards divide the film into sections, though they also place some strain on
our memory. Each is numbered, though curiously only one of them (''EIGHT: Return of an Old Love'') spells out the number.

''Section 9: The Death of a Director'' intercuts images of nudity and sex with
shots of animal bones and Kingsley laying on the ground, as if he has been
murdered. The section also features Jeanne Cardigan licking a microphone before smearing a baby doll (and then herself) with what appears to be

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blood. Here ''Maidstone'' aligns itself more with the avant-garde movement of the sixties than it does with any documentary film tradition.

Whereas Mailer’s earlier films only allowed actors to acknowledge the camera as their narratives concluded, ''Maidstone’s'' ostensible plotline ends
with ''10: The Grand Assassination Ball'', but two more sections follow. ''11: A Course in Orientation'' features Mailer (not playing Kingsley, but rather playing Mailer the film director) explaining the process by which he made the film to its cast and crew, some of whom voice disappointment that the narrative drive towards Kingsley’s assassination was all for naught.

And then, famously, there is ''12: The Silences of an Afternoon''. In it, Rip
Torn–disappointed by the lack of an assassination in the film’s narrative—makes an apparently unexpected attack on “Not Mailer,” but on “Kingsley.” After announcing that he “must die,” Rey/Torn twice hits Mailer/Kingsley with a hammer over the head. The two struggle with each other until falling onto the ground. Mailer bites Torn’s ear, drawing blood. They grab at each other’s necks, with Torn gaining an upper hand just as Mailer’s wife and children arrive.

Even if (at first, at least) it is Rey the film character attempting to assassinate Kingsley the film character, it is also Mailer the man (no longer Kingsley and perhaps no longer the film director) who struggles with Torn, an
actor who has seemingly run amok. But here my description is admittedly simplistic, as their roles could have reconstituted themselves repeatedly during the apparently spontaneous and authentic encounter.

“I’m taking that scene out of the movie,” Mailer yells at Torn shortly after the fight ends. They continue to talk, trading barbs and insults in between Torn’s attempts to explain that he did what he had to do. Writing about the event later, Mailer admitted “Torn had . . . been right to make his attack. The hole in the film had called for that. Without it, there was not enough” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}. Onscreen, the attack and struggle lasts roughly two minutes, with another six minutes covering Torn and Mailer’s ensuing and heated conversation.

The fight scene gave Mailer “a whole new conception of his movie.” He believed that his filmmaking process had created a “presence” that outlived the conclusion his original storyline and what had only seemed to be the end of the shoot. It was an event that took ''Maidstone'' closer to the “possible real nature of film” {{sfn||Mailer|1971|p=238}}.

And perhaps closer to real the nature of the filmmaking process. After all,

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those eight tense minutes between Mailer/Kingsley and Rip/Rey include six
edits. Something is there for us to see, whatever it is and whatever it depicts,
but something has been left out as well, removed from our view.

After ''Nixon'', Oliver Stone largely eschewed his work with mixed media and vertical editing, opting instead to return tomore traditional Hollywood
filmmaking in films like ''UTurn'' (1997) and ''Any Given Sunda''y (1999). Stone’s
choice was as inevitable as it was regrettable. Mailer did the same after ''Maidstone''. His only other directorial effort came in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1987) with Ryan O’Neal and Isabella Rossellini. To employ the much overused phrase, the film represents another side of the Mailer coin. And, as a big budget film featuring star performers, it represents the obverse side of that coin. It does not employ direct cinema and does not attempt to convey fiction through any kind of documentary filmform. In appearance, it aesthetically smacks similar to many typical Hollywood films of 1987, including Oliver Stone’s ''Wall Street''.

One brand of film history would tell us that this approach is a bad idea, at least if a director hopes to be dubbed an auteur. John Huston, notably overlooked by adherents to auteur orthodoxy, once remarked that he could
find no more similarity between his films than he could between his wives: they all seemed different to him. Likewise, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' bears little
resemblance to Mailer’s earlier films.

Critics have not generally been kind. Mailer’s complicated tale of lust of
murder combines with a style of direction that pushed the actors to a level of heightened exaggeration. In some ways, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' could fit within David Lynch’s canon, but in his hands it still would have been more restrained. Perhaps there is a subtle intrusion of film history, as ''Tough Guys'' also smacks similar to a number of exploitation films of the sixties and seventies, such as those directed by Russ Meyer. However, Meyer’s world never featured storylines as complicated as Mailer’s.

Does Mailer push things to the edge, or does he (and his actors) fall over the cliff and explode in the canyon below? Viewers will differ on this point, as well as on whether careening off the cinematic road is necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, such a conversation drifts into the realm of opinion, and
opinions should not conceal the kind of important experimentation at work in ''Tough Guys''.

The art of adaptation is much studied. So many books and essays (and, for that matter, entire journals) have concentrated on the rather common

{{pg|179|180}}

practice of one author adapting the work of another—the Book-into-the-Film. However, self- (or “auto-”) adaptation is rare, particularly in Hollywood with a writer of Mailer’s stature. For ''Tough Guys'', Mailer (with uncredited assistance from Robert Towne) translated his own novel into his own script and, finally—given his role as director—his own film.

Even well planned experiments yield unexpected results. Nowhere is the gulf between written word and live performance more evident than in Ryan
O’Neal’s infamous performance of Tim Madden, particularly when he learns
his wife has been unfaithful. Standing on a bluff at the ocean, he cries out to
himself: “Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God! Oh, Man! Oh, God!” On paper the words not only reveal the intensity of a moment, but they also operate on more than one level. These are two exclamations common to everyday speech. But together, repeated in alternation, their literal (and opposite) meanings come to the fore.

However, once enacted by Ryan O’Neal, the words seem detached from intentionality. Their impact is cumulative, and it is extremely memorable, but certainly not in a way that O’Neal appreciated. Touted for its awful acting, the scene has become a favorite “so bad it’s good” clip for the YouTube crowd. But rarely do viewers stop to ask whether any actor could have read those lines in accord with what passes for believability in Hollywood films. Many persons involved with ''Tough Guys'' urged Mailer to remove the scene,
but he would not budge. His cinematic laboratory not only recorded his experiments, but also required their dissemination.

When I began this essay, I proposed the question, “How much film history does a film need?” Norman Mailer believed that ''Wild 90'', ''Beyond the Law'', and ''Maidstone'' represented a unique approach to filmmaking. They were distinct, and so for him they bore little relation to what had gone before.
However, a conscious decision to break from the past is still engaged in a conversation with it.

In Mailer’s case, that conversation was complicated. However original those three films were (and remain), there is no doubt that certain elements of them—including the basic idea of tackling fiction in the guise of documentary—
had many important predecessors. And Mailer’s films constituted a small part of their own history. ''Wild 90'' influenced ''Beyond the Law'', and
both of those influenced ''Maidstone''.

With all of this I mind, I believe that another, related question is now in
order: ''How many film historians does a film need?'' The past needs a present

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to remember it: that much is clear. Many films have been forgotten because they were forgettable. But others have just slipped through the cracks. No one can watch every film. Some are lost, and even some of those that are found sit comfortably in archives without attention from viewers. They await rediscovery, their joys currently imprisoned in aging film cans. And they
await interest from enough film historians (and theorists and critics) to be chronicled in studies of the cinema.

Regrettably, only a few of us have examined Norman Mailer’s films in any
depth. Herewith we announce an open call for membership in our small club. We seek allies and enemies alike. The ranks need to swell. After all, even in the space of just a few words, it is possible to suggest why Mailer’s films
deserve intervention by historians (and others) who have to date neglected
them.

''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law'' are mockumentary films, important if for no
other reason than the fact that they helped initiate a genre that did not yet
even have a name. They predate Mitchell Block’s ''No Lies'' (1974), which has
sometimes incorrectly been called the first mockumentary. They anticipate
the large numbers of mockumentaries that have been produced from the eighties until the present day. And, rather than retrospectively copying the aesthetics of direct cinema, they were produced while its style was still being forged.

Long before most persons even knew what amockumentary filmis—and even some time before Orson Welles’ important cinematic experiment ''F for Fake'' (1975)—Mailer tore down the genre’s walls. With ''Maidstone'', he marched into a more complicated terrain, one that proposed to re-examine the very nature of the cinema. Here Mailer chased the authentic, an elusive property that seems to be chimerically reconstituting itself in front of his cameras.

I submit that Mailer’s first three films are important to film history and that their general absence from discussions of documentary film, mockumentary film, and the films of the sixties represents a gap that limits those of us interested in the cinema far more than it does Mailer.And while ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' never rises to the level of importance of Mailer’s earlier films, I believe that it can speak volumes about the rarely discussed issue of self-adaptation.

In ''Wild 90'', Norman Mailer (as Prince) asks who invented the hammer.
Norman Mailer did not invent the hammer. Nor did he invent the wheel.

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But in the best tradition of films like ''Citizen Kane'' (1941), he borrowed various elements from prior films and reassembled those ideas anew. Rather
than regurgitate via remake and rather than appropriate via homage, Mailer
reinvented past practice. He reinvented a cinematic wheel, and more film historians need to keep it turning.

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last=Bakhtin |first=Mikhail |date=1981 |chapter=Epic and Novel |editor=Michael Holquist |title=The Dialogic Imagination |location=Austin |publisher=University of Texas Press |pages=3–40 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169606/ |title=Beyond the Law |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064625/ |title=Maidstone |date=2011 |website=Internet Movie Database |publisher=IMDb.com |access-date=10 October 2011 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |chapter=A Course in Film-Making |editor=Theodore Solotaroff |title=New American Review 12 |location=New York |publisher=Simon |pages=200–241 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Beyond the Law |type=Film |publisher=Evergreen |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1970 |title=Maidstone |type=Film |publisher=Supreme Mix |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1987 |title=Tough Guys Don't Dance |type=Film |publisher=Golan-Globus |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=Norman Mailer (director) |date=1967 |title=Wild 90 |type=Film |publisher=CineMalta |language=English}}

* {{cite AV media |people=François Truffaut (director) |date=1959 |title=The 400 Blows |type=Film |publisher=The Criterion Collection |language=French}}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}