The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/The Last Night: A Story

Written by
Norman Mailer

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Note: Mailer’s only science fiction story (with the exception of “The Martian Invasion,” which he wrote when he was 10) was written in late 1962, and appeared in Esquire’s December 1963 issue. It is the last short story that he wrote. The impetus for the story was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, which is borne out by his statement preceding its 1966 reprinting in Cannibals and Christians. It is further reinforced by a plot of “prophetic fiction,” as he describes it, which imagines what might have occurred if Premier Khrushchev had not backed down and removed Russia’s nuclear-tipped warheads from Cuba: an environmental cataclysm that makes Earth inhabitable. Before the showdown between Premier Khrushchev and President Kennedy, Mailer’s early enthusiasm for JFK had been diminished by the President’s disastrous indecisiveness during another crisis a year earlier, the CIA-sponsored, failed invasion of Cuba (The Bay of Pigs). But the “iron nerve” displayed by JFK in the nuclear poker game with Khrushchev reestablished Mailer’s profound admiration for the risk-taking President, and gave him the opportunity to explore the psychology of a hero ready to die in a nuclear war. Mailer's unnamed President in the short story displays the same cool determination as JFK. In the mid-1990s, Mailer and his wife, Norris Church, reworked “The Last Night” into a screenplay which he at first planned to re-title “1999,” but decided against it feeling that comparisons with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would be inevitable and invidious. The screenplay remains unpublished. Mailer’s incisive comments in his prefatory note before the original story on the nature of successful film treatments would be a worthy addition to the reading lists for film-writing courses. —J. Michael Lennon

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Maybe, it is appropriate to conclude with a piece of prophetic fiction. Assume

then that the errors in reasoning and/or judgement you have detected for yourself in these pages are equaled only by the numerous errors you failed to detect. That, scientist and friends, is bound to be the measure of the error in the next prophecy.

The story was written in 1962, therefore was written with the idea of a President not altogether different from John F. Kennedy. L.B.J., needless to say, is altogether different. Go back, if you would go forward in time.

The original prefactory note is also reprinted. It may help to elucidate the style.

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Note to the Reader: Obviously a movie must be based on a novel, a story, a play, or an original idea. I suppose it could even derive from a poem. “Let’s do The Wasteland,” said a character of mine named Collie Munshin. The novel may be as much as a thousand pages long, the play a hundred, the story ten, the original idea might be stated in a paragraph. Yet each in its turn must be converted into an art form (a low art form) called a Treatment. The Treatment usually runs anywhere from twenty to a hundred pages in length. It is a bed of Procrustes. Long stories have their limbs lopped off. Too-brief tales are stretched. The idea is to present for the attention of a producer, a director, or a script reader, in readable but modest form, the line of story, the gallery of characters, the pith and gist of your tale.

But one’s duty is to do this without much attempt at style and no attempt at high style. The language must be functional, even cliché, and since one’s writing prepares the ground for a movie script, too much introspection in the characters is not encouraged. “Joey was thinking for the first time that Alice was maybe in love with him,” is barely acceptable. An actor on contract could probably manage to register that emotion in a closeup. Whereas,

. . . the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate

in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; a margin was left for a form of enjoyment which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior

to that of other concrete things,

would bake the clay of a producer’s face a little closer to stone. A producer is interested in the meat and bone of a story. His question as he reads a treatment is whether he should go on to assign a writer to do a screenplay of this story with specific dialogue and most specific situations added, or whether he should ask for another treatment with new characters and plot, or whether indeed he should write off the loss and quit right now. So a treatment bears the same relation to a finished screenplay as the model for a wind tunnel does to the airplane. Since a treatment is functional, any excellence must be unobtrusive. In fact, a good director (George Stevens) once told me that good writing in a treatment was a form of cheating because it introduced emotional effects through language which he might not as a director be able to repeat on film.

So, thus modestly, I present here a treatment of a movie. It is based on an original idea. It is a short treatment. Only a few of the scenes are indicated. As an example of the art of the treatment, it is not characteristic, for it is written in somewhat formal prose, but it may have the virtue of suggesting a motion picture to your imagination.

Best wishes. See you in the morning after this last night. —N.M.

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We’re going to describe a movie which will take place twenty years from now, forty years from now, or is it one hundred years from now? One cannot locate the date to a certainty. The world has gone on just about the way we all expected it would go on. It has had large and dramatic confrontations by heads of state, cold wars galore, economic crises resolved and unresolved, good investment, bad investment, decent management and a witch’s bag full of other complexities much too numerous ever to bring into a movie. The result has been a catastrophe which all of us have dreaded, all of us expected, and none of us has been able to forestall. The world in twenty or forty years—let us say it is thirty-six—has come to the point where without an atomic war, without even a hard or furious shooting war, has given birth nonetheless to a fearful condition. The world has succeeded in poisoning itself. It is no longer fit to inhabit. The prevalent condition is fallout radiation, anomalous crops, monstrous babies who grow eyes in their navels and die screaming with hatred at the age of six weeks, plastics which emit cancerous fumes, buildings which collapse like camphor flakes, weather which is excruciatingly psychological because it is always too hot or too cold. Governments fall with the regularity of pendulums. The earth is doomed. The number of atom bombs detonated by the Americans, Russians, English, French, the Algerians, Africans, the Israelis and the Chinese, not to mention the Turks, Hindus and Yugoslavians, have so poisoned existence that even the apples on the trees turn malignant in the stomach. Life is being burned out by a bleak fire within, a plague upon the secrets of our existence which stultifies the air. People who govern the nations have come to a modest and simple conclusion. The mistakes of the past have condemned the future. There is no time left to discuss mankind's guilt. No one is innocent of the charge that all have blighted the rose. In fact, the last President to be elected in the United States has come to office precisely by making this the center of his plank: that no one is innocent. The political reactions have been exceptional. Earlier in the century the most fundamental political notion was that guilt could be laid always at the door of one nation and one nation only. Now a man had been elected to one of the two most powerful offices in the world on the premise that the profound illness of mankind was the fault of all, and this victory had prepared the world for cooperative action.

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