The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death

Description

The Cinema of Norman Mailer: Film is Like Death not only examines the enfant terrible writer’s thoughts on cinema, but also features interviews with Norman Mailer himself. The Cinema of Norman Mailer also explores Mailer’s cinema through previously published and newly commissioned essays written by an array of film and literary scholars, enthusiasts, and those with a personal, philosophical connection to Mailer. This volume discusses the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and filmmaker’s six films created during the years of 1947 and 1987, and contends to show how Mailer’s films can be best read as cinematic delineations that visually represent many of the writer’s metaphysical and ontological concerns and ideas that appear in his texts from the 1950s until his passing in 2007. By re-examining Mailer’s cinema through these new perspectives, one may be awarded not just a deeper understanding of Mailer’s desire to make films, but also find a new, alternative vision of Mailer himself. Norman Mailer was not just a writer, but more: he was one of the most influential Postmodern artists of the twentieth century with deep roots in the cinema. He allowed the cinema to not only influence his aesthetic approach, but sanctioned it as his easiest-crafted analogy for exploring sociological imagination in his writing. Mailer once suggested, “Film is legitimately more interesting than books …” and with that in mind, readers of Norman Mailer might begin to rethink his oeuvre through the viewfinder of the film medium, as he was equally as passionate about working within cinema as he was about literature itself. Cover page Halftitle page Author letter Title page Copyright page CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dedication Epigraph FOREWORD BY MICHAEL CHAIKEN 1 INTRODUCTION: MAILER’S FILM AESTHETICS Reinstating Being: Wild 90 and Beyond the Law Capturing subjective reality: Maidstone Tough Guys Don’t Dance: cubist noir Notes 2 SOME DIRT IN THE TALK 3 VISUALIZING BEING AND NOTHINGNESS: MAILER MEETS GODOT Part I: Visualizing Nothingness Part II: Visualizing Being Notes 4 MAILER INTERROGATES MACHISMO: SELF-REFLEXIVEC OMMENTARY IN WILD 90 AND WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM? Notes 5 TRANSCENDING THE FORMULA: BEYOND THE LAW AND THE OLD-FASHIONED COP MOVIE Notes 6 “ALL OF US ARE POLICEMEN, ALL OF US ARE CRIMINALS”: DISCOVERING DOSTOEVSKY IN A RE-EVALUATION OF BEYOND THE LAW Beyond the Law: Crime Beyond the Law: Motive Beyond the Law: Redemption Notes 7 A COURSE IN FILM-MAKING 1. On the theory 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. In the practice 2. 3. 4. 8 THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE CELEBRITY AUTHOR IN MAIDSTONE Black Brando as existential hero: “The White Negro” and the method actor Reality testing: the violence of the cinematic apparatus and the resistance of the fi lm actor Mailer’s Maidstone : “a commando raid on the nature of reality” Conclusion: authorizing the real Notes 9 MAIDSTONE: THE UNILINEAR ABSTRACT Notes 10 COMMANDO RAIDS ON THE NATURE OF REALITY Operation Leviathan Deep in my dungeon Mining for the ineluctable ore Notes 11 MAILER’S MOVIE MAJA AND DARK LADY REVEALED A review I was writing for a local newspaper Excuses Advertisements for myself The clothed and the live Beyond the Law goes to college And next: Paradise island Blue movie Devils and gods After the fall Other bits, a kind of epilogue After Armies 12 OVEREXPOSED: MY FIRST TASTE OF FILM-MAKING 13 NORMAN MAILER: INTERVIEW (1970) 14 MAILER, GODARD, AND COMPANY Notes 15 DANCE OF A TOUGH GUY 16 PULP FICTION IN PROVINCETOWN Notes 17 PARADISE LOST: NORMAN MAILER AND AMERICAN PURGATORY Note 18 TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE AND THE CINEMA OF REAGANISM Notes 19 NORMAN MAILER’S “WINDOWS” CONTRIBUTORS ILLUSTRATIONS Index