Norman Mailer (born in 1922, died in 2007) was the greatest, most fascinating and puckish cultural personality of the 20th century. The bulk of his work was being a writer: a novelist, journalist, essayist (producing brilliantly unusual social criticism), and sometimes poet and playwright. Mailer was a celebrity, a fixture on talk-shows, who had a significantly sized ego and a wonderfully mischievous style that was forcefully sincere to the horror of many a politically correct and puritan. The slightly less-known aspect of his ouvré was his career as a movie director, producing three autobiographical avant-garde features in the 1960's and one camp classic for the Cannon Group (!) in the 1980's.
The Cannon film Tough Guys Don't Dance -- the only one of his cinematic works that's based on one of his novels -- is easily through MGM - the campy outing features many enjoyable moments of the characters uttering mailerisms; the three underground features have only been available on dvd thus far from France, released by the Cult Underground label. These discs have been hefty in their price and hard to find. Now to set the record straight, The Criterion Collection is releasing Mailer's underground trilogy on their Eclipse dvd label. They have touted the forthcoming release quite lovingly as follows:
Norman Mailer is remembered for many things— his novels, his essays, his articles, his activism, his ego. one largely forgotten chapter of his life, however, is his late-sixties kamikaze-style plunge into making experimental films. These rough-hewn, self-financed, largely improvised metafictions are works of madness and bravado, all starring Mailer himself and with technical assistance from cinema verité trailblazers D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock.
Norman Mailer is remembered for many things— his novels, his essays, his articles, his activism, his ego. one largely forgotten chapter of his life, however, is his late-sixties kamikaze-style plunge into making experimental films. These rough-hewn, self-financed, largely improvised metafictions are works of madness and bravado, all starring Mailer himself and with technical assistance from cinema verité trailblazers D. A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock.
Mailer saw the world through his one-of-a-kind, spiritual, existentialist prism that's hard to define; endlessly provoking with his sometimes painfully sincere and unashamed remarks, which refreshingly lacked any rigid ideological ties and politically correct puritanism.
In addition to his artistic career, Mailer ran twice for the office of Mayor of New York, first in the early 1960's during the time that his infamous wife-stabbing incident happened, and later more famously in 1969. The economist of capitalistic libertarian persuasion, Murray Rothbard (the unofficial initiatior of anarcho-capitalism) lauded Mailer's campaign, and Norman became the first political candidate endorsed by Rothbard's newsletter The Libertarian, which normally did not dare to commit such acts.
Mailer defined himself politically first as an anarchist and a libertarian socialist (and as a Marxian anarchist, which is a contradiction in terms) during the 1940's and 50's; then he described his views as a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism, and starting from the 1960's, he used the label "Left-Conservative".
Starting from his breakthrough book, The Naked and the Dead, at age 25, Mailer created a prolific creative career through the help of his hard work ethic -- writing almost every day, sometimes for twelve hours straight, and treating himself as a working stiff with his own punched cards. Mailer's The Spooky Art, a guide to a writing career (containing about half new material, and half recycled old stuff, as many of his late books intended to do), contains many a intriguing trivia on his basic working habits.
Mailer wrote about politics, criminals, hipsters, grafitti, Picasso, boxing, poker, and Hollywood, amongst other topics. His novel An American Dream, overflowing with brilliantly self-indulgent metaphoric language, was characterized by one Finnish literary critic as the worst novel any major American writer has done, but it's a rather enjoyable package, filled with the kind of pseudo-deep remarks that a person high on pot could spew from his mouth - the only minus is that the story never rises to the level that it exhibits during its first 60 pages.
During the 1960's, in his own words, in an attempt to attack the nature of reality, Mailer started to create his underground features, all starring himself. These were the crime films Wild 90 and Beyond the Law, both shot in newsreel-like black & white 16mm film. Beyond the Law receives a wildly overblown movie review by Mailer himself in his chuckle-filled 1968 non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night, which features a cameo appearance by Noam Chomsky who ends up in the same holding cell with Mailer after the huge peace demonstration at the Pentagon that the book details.
Maidstone, Mailer's most ambitious underground effort, shot on color 16mm, features him as an arthouse-porny movie director Norman T. Kingsley running for president, with the supporting cast featuring a jumbled ensemble consisting of Rip Torn, some of Mailer's ex-wives and family, and Andy Warhol's starlet Ultra Violet (who can also be seen in the flashlight-horror flick Simon, The King of Witches). It's a heady and at times tedious mix of a John Cassavettes-style improvisation exercise, a hallucinatory avant-garde trip and a very narcissistic home movie. It sort of climaxes with the bare-chested Mailer lecturing his cast and crew about his aesthetic theories and approaches to the making of the film, and the brutal real-life fight between him and Rip Torn (now a YouTube favorite, thanks to the great Don Alex of Subterranean Cinema) ends things on a grave and suitably confusing manner. Speaking of Torn, one positive thing when the Great Man passes away might be that numerous Facebook updates will read RIP Rip.
Mailer's unique worldview makes, for me, him seem like a kindred spirit. Even those who detested him for his ego should acknowledge that he had no pretensions about this -- he was the first to admit it, and lampoon himself for it. Mailer has to be greatest in the art of both of glorifying, and making a fool of himself - on occassion, doing both at the same time.
