User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Line 107:

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, 14 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)15 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

Page break

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 ex

ample 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 di

rections to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature

of the movieart”(“Course” ).TheMarxbrothersareimportantancestors

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 broth

ers’ WASPyfoil.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 elab

orate 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 cinemaistounravel itself,to make and un

make 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 , and

uponbothhisownvoiceandthehumaneardrumwiththeperpetualyelling

of Lt. Pope in Beyond the Law. Mailer even tells us,“Wild seems close to

nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on Little Cae

sar with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to Naked Lunch orWhy

AreWeinVietnam?”(“SomeDirt” ).ItisasthoughMailer sees Wild as

an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vi

sion of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had

they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.

@@ Line 107: / Line 107: @@
 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, 14 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)15 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
+Page break
+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 ex
+ample 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 di
+rections to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature
+ of the movieart”(“Course” ).TheMarxbrothersareimportantancestors
+ 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 broth
+ers’ WASPyfoil.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 elab
+orate 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 cinemaistounravel itself,to make and un
+make 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 , and
+ uponbothhisownvoiceandthehumaneardrumwiththeperpetualyelling
+ of Lt. Pope in Beyond the Law. Mailer even tells us,“Wild seems close to
+ nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on Little Cae
+sar with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to Naked Lunch orWhy
+ AreWeinVietnam?”(“SomeDirt” ).ItisasthoughMailer sees Wild as
+ an almost unimaginable supplement to the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre—a vi
+sion of what their tough Jewish contribution to cinema would look like had
+ they ever assumed the roles of mafiosi.