Novelist Mailer Turns His Latest Book into a Movie

Written by
David Sterritt

“I think a film should be as sinister and lively, as odd and riveting . . . as a dream,” says Norman Mailer, novelist-turned-moviemaker. “A good powerful dream.” Mailer’s own movie, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” has the makings of a bad powerful dream. Based on his 1984 novel, it turns a murder-mystery plot into a melodramatic fandango so dark and delirious that it’s hard to know whether he wants us to laugh, cry, or cringe.

The answer is all three, of course. This is the kind of film that begs to be called controversial — and surely will be, by reviewers and publicists alike. Just as surely, the term will imply automatic praise in many cases, as if its meaning didn’t include a critical “con” as well as a promotional “pro.” Mailer has benefited from that careless use of “controversial” as much as any writer in memory, using it to build a feisty media presence that has rivaled — many would say outstripped — his accomplishments on the printed page.

His most respected works (such as his 1948 first novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” and some highly praised nonfiction books) have made him a major figure whose influence must be acknowledged. Yet it’s hard to imagine a third-rate book like “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” getting a fraction as much attention if it weren’t the product of a self-aware celebrity with — in addition to two Pulitzer Prizes and a literary ambition that seems as genuine as ever — a knack for turning the trashiest accomplishments into media-hyped gold.

The screen version of “Tough Guys,” written and directed by Mailer, serves up a string of weird variations on the book’s sordid plot. It’s about a lovelorn man (Ryan O’Neal) who finds two severed heads in his Cape Cod marijuana cache and can’t figure out — his memory is too fogged by alcohol — whether he’s a villain or a victim. In a printed statement on the film, Mailer says he wants it to embody a “strange and sinister fever” that he suspects is rampant among “the pleasure-loving classes.” Interviewed in the attic studio of his Provincetown, Mass., summer home, near the locations where “Tough Guys” was filmed, an affable and talkative Mailer says that statement was “cooked up” as a promotional ploy — the kind of thing you write “to get people to read your script” and then forget about. Still, he doesn’t disavow it. “It is a picture about America,” he says in the gruff but friendly voice that’s one of his talk-show and interview trademarks. “It’s not a realistic picture,” he adds. “These are not typical American citizens. But I do think there’s been a kind of greed and irresponsibility loose in American life in the last four or five years. . . . This is a vision of some of the worst things that are going on in America now, and what could possibly happen to us if we keep going.”

No amount of cautionary intent will get many filmgoers to swallow the grisly episodes in the “Tough Guys” movie, even if it does slightly tone down the novel’s hard-boiled sexuality. In any case, Mailer says the tale’s cautionary aspect is only marginal. For this aspiring auteur, the purpose of cinema is dark and dreamlike, not enlightening and instructive. “I think fiction can intensify the moral consciousness of a time,” Mailer says. “I think theater can enlarge one’s emotional appreciation of social situations. (But) film doesn’t work on our minds. It works on all the places that have never been worked on by other art forms — all the synapses between our memory and our emotions and our nerves and our sense of time.” Hence the connection Mailer sees between film and dreams, which he calls “the interface, if you will, between life and eternity, between life and death. . . . Dreams, to me, are a dialogue between your soul and your self. It’s a way for the soul to say, ‘Look, you’re not living in the proper fashion at all. These are some of the disasters, metaphorically speaking, that attend you.”’ Mailer sees a “dream logic” at work in every film, good or bad. “If someone throws a hand up like this,” he says with an appropriate gesture, “and the next (shot) is some birds taking off like that . . . there’s a connection. You might not be able to name the connection. But somewhere in that deep, mysterious world of signs, portents, images, and hints, there is a connection that makes sense to us.”

Whether the signs, etc., of “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” make sense to moviegoers will be known Sept. 18, when the picture has its theatrical premiere.