By Lita Eliscu

This article first appeared in the Evergreen Review, 1968

Norman Mailer's made a film. Norman-Mailer-has-made-a-film? What the hell for, I thought. (I was irritated.) Norman playing with--and for--movie cameras: the new parlor game. This moves you into a new profession besides, and still no fear of anyone thinking yo don't trust your future as a writer. And if you have a friend named D.A. Pennebaker (what kind of name is that for someone to have, anyway?), who knows, you might get some real Dick Lester kind of shots. Norman's last novel is done in classic, mainlining DJ style, leaning heavily on cinematic effects...so why not have a movie, based on what goes on in your mind just before you drop off (no, baby, I said drop off). After all, there it all is: light/sound/action with your head as executive producer and director. And if your mind is named Norman, how can you miss?

I looked again at the ad. Wild 90 starring Norman Mailer, some friends, Jose Torres--oh, OK, got it. We are gonna get a pre-game-time insight, head projection time: five minutes; screen time: oh, say ninety-minutes. This will be a right-before-bedtime-kissoff. Maybe even structured. We are going to see Norman making like George Plimpton making it like Norman would have if he had fought Archie Moore. All those intellectuals, nothing but Our Gang revisited (remember Spanky?). I have always wanted to know what a real smartass thinks about off-duty when he isn't interviewing himself. Epiphany: I am jealous. I am trying so hard to talk myself into this cocky sophisticated "position," when I have already bought my ticket and have no desire to get a refund. I am jealous right then because he has made a home movie, Norman and Friends At Play in the Fields, and the screen set (one) is a grungy, gummy room with a great albeit unseen view of the 59th St. Bridge. This is no Warhol home movies: color-Plus and the aesthetic bitchiness, determination, and pills to shoot twenty-five hours of film; this is Norman not even pretending he has an artistic excuse, but just having fun. And he gets audiences to come see the side show.

So I watch what is up there on the dinky screen. Black and white, the color of a Daily News centerfold photo, three months old. The sound track sounds as though my sister's kid sent away for Real Sound Equipment, kids! Just $3.95 and this coupon! and then donated the whole bag to Norman. I pay attention long enough to establish a semi-possible interpretation of the action, but when Norman talks, or mutters, the sound is totally unintelligible, so I switch gears to let my subconsious receive messages subliminally while I ponder the scene. A thought creeps by: perhaps he means to be this non-understandable, just as though there is a Gardol plate between us. If this were not N. Mailer, would I not think of this lousy sound as a verbal cue to the dream-state quality, a reaffirmation of the fuzziness in all our heads? His intellectuality is proclaimed so stereo-loud in so many other ways, it is impossible he would allow his brilliance undermined, unless on purpose. His character is a gangster, a sort of Jewish mother's boy-Mafioso who talkslike-dis wenne talkssoze ukin unner-stanim atall.

But his preoccupation with words--heer is the real Norman Mailer. In a fifteen-minute piece, he remonstrates with one of his cousins, the guinea asshole (whose name in the movie I can't remember, if he has a name). Norman tells him never to call Mickey a cocksucker again. (I'm not sure if the other cousin's name is Mickey, but everyone calls Norman "Fritz," and at least Mickey does not sound like Fritz.) The guinea asshole says it was an expression, like mother-fucker, or, I suppose, like guinea asshole. While Fritz should see the logic, Norman-baby points out that Mickey spent eight years in prison for not ratting on his friends and despite subsequent nastiness from this, he is entitled to respect from a guinea asshole. Only someone who spends time creating characters would realize that cocksucking, in Italian culture, is a highly frowned upon activity implying as it does a loss of masculinity almost paralyzing in its enormity. Two points in the chivalric Norman Code which says call a man by his true name.

There is a plot and I don't think it is too much to give it away for free. Norman and his cousins are holed up in this warehouse, trying to outwait and outwit the police. That's right, the ad does not lie. They are thre for twenty-one days and a night; another day, another night; another night; another night; and maybe another night, I forget. The refinements of this outline are of course dictated by the Mailer soul and body: cunt, lack of; fighters; ability relative to one's own. Now I lock my lips and throw away the key.

Most of the shape and content is indisputably the work of Mailer, but not in the orthodox sense of making a film. The script is largely the result of what goes on up there, hardly a cause. Norman is king of the mountain, or better, he is that little boy who, mysteriously enough, is somehow always unanimously considered the Ringleader. When the film opens, everyone is a little overbearing, too strident, emphatically playing a role. Swinging into the game gradually, they come around to a full acceptance of the reality they have worked out, and then they live within this framework totally, for the rest of those ninety minutes of time. Sensibilities mesh and the obviousness of the whole malarkey just shines through that worn velvet, so that it seems right to have them screaming "Watch Out!" to Jimmy Zapp when he goes to save Gloria Glorious--like kids, they believe, finally, in the reality they have created themselves, when they come to realize that they are exploring that Congo between myth-making and "reality," on whose boundaries we all live while trying not to let the myths dominate the horizon.

Much of the funniness of the film is the result of the obvious amateurishness. Even D.A. Pennebaker cannot stop grinning in his walk-on, as he looks around at the ridiculous set. You laugh from annoyance when a particularly funny dirty joke (or particularly dirty, funny joke) is garbled that you cannot hear the punch line. But the funniness in the film is a gentle humor which gradually permeates the whole screen. This is not, after all, a college underground experiment. The rough edges of bowled-over, cool wit are missing, the over-attempts to please both the audience and themselves. These are grown-ups--funny, intelligent men who had some film, some time, and plenty of egos. For most of ninety minutes, they exhibit a common belief in a fantasy they create themselves and do not mind showing the audiences.

Sometimes, not everybody is as finely attuned to the improvisational air as they might be. Mickey's younger cousin pays a nighttime visit, bringing another bottle of wine. Looking at Fritz in the corner, he says, "What's that you're drinkin', poison?" Fritz tells him to shut up, get out, and he's a no-nothing (or know-nothing) punk. The two engage in a " 'Yeah?' 'Yeah.' " session. Time for exit; no go. There is very little tension, more a sense of panic as it becomes clear the cousin is too taken by the camera to leave under his own power, so Norman and Mickey combine to push him out the door, out of camera range, at least. A different test of supremacy occurs with the sudden entrance of a German shepherd, Jose Torres, and his manager.

The addition of three good props and Norman practically outshines Jonathan Winters. First, the dog. Intermittently, Norman stops mumbling at everyone (including his reflection in the mirror) in order to really growl and snarl. With all this road practice, he figures the dog as an even match and gets down on his hands and knees for a fair fight. It ends in a draw only because Norman gives the dog points. In the back of the shepherd's mind, you sense, is that this could be a case of man bites dog and he is at that stage in his career where he doesn't want to risk his face. The one with the silk ascot and hat (which he removes reluctantly after some nasty urging from Fritz) turns out to be the manager....He introduces Jose Torres as a young fighter on his way up and would Fritz condescend to offer an opinion on this boy's future. The looks on faces, at this point, run from simple distrust on the dogs through no-shit disbelief on Norman's. Jose mainly giggles. Grudgingly, Norman agrees to spar with said young fighter. Guess who fights with his palms out and laughs for most of the two-minute round. Suspense is introduced for the frist and last time: will Norman allow himself to win or not? Jose is obviously not too sure what is supposed to happen. Twenty-five years from now, when some college senior does his thesis on Norman Mailer, A Startling Example of Ego in Conflict, will this film be included in the bibliography?

The final scenes are the best for many reasons, not least because the problem of cunt, lack of, is satisfactorily resolved. The three leads are beginning to tire or one another and the introduction of females revitalizes the whole improvisation. It is not fair to say what happens near the end of the film, but think back to all those great gangster movies, and the gun molls, and then try to cross-bread Bette Davis with Mrs. Adam Clayton Powell, and this gets you openers. This part of gun moll extraordinaire is played by Mrs. Norman Mailer, and her professionalism in this sea of amateurs makes her stand out like Esther Williams doing a guest appearance at the high school aqua-nette performance.

The two introductory shorts remain irrelevant, naturally, until the conclusion of Mailer's film, which is why I refrained from any reference to them until now. In an incredible color short, Zal Yanofsky gives a pop-op view of love, sex, and ego. Zal is seen (and sees himself) in countless shots as a teenie-idol. This is followed by a slow-motion treatment of the-closer-she-gets, the-better, etcetera, starring Zal and willing girl, together with a cast of thousands, in the springtime-fresh, mentholated countryside grass. The witty-wise flipness of these two shorts contrasts strangely with the man-woman situation presented in Mailer's fantasy, a world more hard-bitten, vulgar, and stark, and yet much more romanticized and sentimental, after the fashion of Lassie, Come Home, or Wallace Beery in some version of Riders of the Purple Sage. Mailer, after all, while a contemporary and current writer, has his roots back there in that literary underground which idolized action, and whose heroes were named Sugar Ray, Lou Nova; Hemmingway was not then referred to as Papa. Love was not a shot of two birds flying in perfect unison, or a building like the Astor Hotel crumbling in a mighty crash. Love was something for adults, and in the movies it was mushy.

The second short also serves to locate more precisely Mailer's film both spatially and temporally. In black and white, it is a slapsticking harty-har-har of an ostensibly famous marimba band, popular in the 1940's. The women wear black frowzy organza gowns, the sound is rinky-dink, and the humor is pure Katzenjammer Kids. Coming right after a short produced by people who don't even know who Krazy Kat is, the sharp time-gap becomes even more pronounced. In retrospect, Mailer has never seemed more vulnerable than in this silly, fictional fantasy which does not try to hide emotions in a thick screen of sound effects, color, and hip-a-dip wit. After all, Norman Mailer is no longer a boy, or boy-genius. His film, home-made and -produced as it is, is the work of adult artists, and one must believe him when he says, "Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body (or artistic consciousness)--it just wears it out."

Each time I breathe in, to say something about the validity of this film as cinema, Norman grins back from the mirror he keeps looking in throughout the movie. He knows: this is a Supreme Mix Production whose immediate pedigree may read by Norman Mailer Out of His Mind, but it goes further back, and the records are lost. The loose, almost nonconscious use of film and camera techniques, let alone the blatant disregard for audience ears, may be a faint but mocking homage paid to the origins of underground dada films, with a side salute to the home movies mania of the 1950's, as Donn Pennebaker's camera makes great sweeping shots across the room like when Daddy tries to get Baby beetling it across the living room floor. The language, however, is pure Mailer consciousness, reveling in and revealing his feelings about sex, and is not subject to the regressive fantasy limits of the 1940's version of the movies. This is not a Polaroid Excalibur trained on the kid, and this is not a finger to a whole industry. This is just Norman's first film. Remember his first novel?