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

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 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 dismantle 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), Michel Chion’s ''The Voice
-in 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.
+in 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 insides (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}}
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 ister 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 1300-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}} {{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.”
+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}} {{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|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.
+''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}}
+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.
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 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:
+In a 1965 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}}
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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."
+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}}
+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.