Norman's Phantasmagoria

Bodyguards plotting to assassinate the presidential candidate. Black revolutionaries seducing debutantes. Nubile whores lounging around a swimming pool. Moans of lovemaking. Grunts of violence. Novelist Norman Mailer's Maidstone is a bombardment of sense impressions and fragments of fantasy, a collage that its author has quite aptly subtitled "a mystery."

After more than a year of appearances at film festivals, museums and private screenings, the mystery is finally being made public. But it comes with no simple solution. Maidstone has no real narrative line. It is an inkblot test of Mailer's own subconscious, which the director is using both to taunt his audience and to challenge it.

The focal point--one can hardly say hero--of this phantasmagoria is a movie director named Norman T. Kingsley (played by Mailer), who is also a candidate for the presidency of the U.S. While a shadow cabinet of kingmakers sits in his house discussing his future, Kingsley is out on the lawn auditioning young actresses for a new movie. Parts of that film--conceived of as a kind of satire on Belle de Jour in which men run a brothel catering to perverse women customers--becomes a movie within Maidstone. It is, indeed, often impossible to discern which of the two films we are watching.

To make his Pirandellian conceit even more elaborate, Mailer has Maidstone introduced by a saucy English television correspondent named Jeanne Cardigan (and played by Lady Jeanne Campbell, Mailer's third wife). Appearing from time to time to interview Norman Kingsley and his colleagues, she finally bares her breasts on a live telecast, smears her face with blood, licks the microphone, and moans: "I love Norman T. Kingsley." Such fantasies seem attributable both to Mailer and the character he is playing. They are intermingled with scenes that Kingsley shot for his movie, that Mailer shot for his, and incidents that happened spontaneously during the filming of Maidstone.

Mailer has never been a man of small ambition, and the point of all this is nothing less than to present an alternate image of reality. "You can't say that this is real now, what we're doing," we watch Mailer explaining to his cast and crew after the film is supposedly completed. "You can't say what we were doing last night is real; the only thing you can say is that the reality exists somewhere in the extraordinary tension between the extremes."

Moments later, Actor Rip Torn, who has played a bodyguard called Raoul Key O'Houlihan, goes after Mailer (or Kingsley) with a hammer. "You're supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley," Torn yells. "You must die, not Mailer." The director stares at him in frightened disbelief. At that moment, Mailer later said, it was impossible for him to tell whether Torn was serious or only acting. Torn claimed he was acting, but audiences still cannot tell as they watch the episode. In this scene Mailer achieves his objective: the melding of screen illusion and reality.

Public Ego. He is not always so successful. At another point in the film, Mailer announces to the cast that the "one single thing" he is attempting to show is "the incredible contradictory qualities" that a presidential candidate must have. Unfortunately they seem not so much contradictory as comic. Mailer's improvisational style of shooting also makes for some passages of irredeemable confusion. But the film is brilliantly edited (by Jan Pieter Welt, Lana Jokel and Mailer) in a relentlessly hypnotic rhythm that sustains interest even through the most opaque episodes.

Mailer, of course, has a prodigious public ego, and Maidstone is partly an exercise in self-glorification. Weirdly, this is also part of its attraction. Mailer risks everything, frequently looking foolish in the process, and he fails more often than he succeeds. Yet it is his gleeful willingness to run risks, take absurd chances, that is appealing. Maidstone looks rough, sounds rough, and many people are likely to be put off (as perhaps the director intended) by Mailer's indulgence. But as another vision of An American Dream (his 1965 novel), as a feverish compendium of fantasies of power and paranoia, Maidstone is an astonishing adventure.

Movies, for Norman Mailer, are a risk. Not very different from boxing, or writing, for that matter, and it is the element of tangible risk that has always drawn him. "Writing is a very spooky activity," Mailer says, "and when you get to film making, you realize the spookiness is tripled." Typically it is the spookiest movie style of all--improvisation --in which Mailer chooses to work.

"Maidstone is structured, not scripted," he explains. He invited further chaos by enlisting a cast that consisted, apart from a few professional actors (Rip Torn, Harris Yulin), mostly of drinking buddies, hangers-on, three of his four ex-wives and some of his offspring. In a caper that has become legendary. Mailer called them all together in the early summer of 1968 at an opulent estate on eastern Long Island, originally called Maidstone by the early settlers. Spontaneity was crucial. Mailer even instructed some of his actors to go off on their own and surprise him--a technique that culminated in Tom's wrathful hammer. Mailer's five camera crews eventually shot some 45 hours of film. The director quickly discarded two-thirds of the footage, then settled down to pare the remaining 15 hours into something approaching manageable length.

"I loved editing Maidstone," Mailer commented. "At the cutting stage you are really writing, only with film instead of words. You put scenes next to each other, just as an author works to put one sentence next to another, but you are working with a language not learned in school." The result in the case of Maidstone is, for its author, "a revolutionary film." Mailer hopes grandiosely that its effects on film making will be roughly equivalent to the effect that Cubism had on postImpressionism.

"Cubism cut away enough points of reference in painting so the viewer couldn't tell if he was looking at a concave or a convex object," Mailer elaborates. "In Maidstone, I was making an attack on reality. Fact and fantasy keep coalescing." Mailer admits that he is not the first to have made such an assault on tradition. Although the names of Bunuel, Dreyer and Antonioni are evoked in Maidstone, Mailer believes that his strongest single influence was the San Francisco film maker Bruce Conner, whose dazzling short works (A Movie, Cosmic Ray and Report) constantly explore and test the limits of illusion.

Dead Serious. Clearly Mailer has been screenstruck for years, and he maintains that "films speak to a deeper level of the unconscious than writing." But his immediate plans are to write a new novel --and high time too. Just possibly he is a little weary of moviemaking. His first picture effort, Wild 90 (an hour and a half with three hoods on the lam), was hardly seen, while his second, Beyond the Law, received only limited distribution despite its director's claim that it is "one of the best pictures ever made about cops and crooks." Perhaps the most striking demonstration of Mailer's passion for film is that he financed Maidstone largely by himself, selling some of his shares in New York's successful ex-underground newspaper the Village Voice to raise the money. Before he embarks on another film, he would like Maidstone to achieve even a small measure of popular success and perhaps recoup some of that expense. He realizes that some people, at least, will take the film as a put-on. But he is dead serious about it and has seen it at least 150 times. "I love it,'' he says. "For me it ranks along with the best of my writing."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.