Over the Edge

stormin' norman: Norman Mailer as <i>Maidstone</i>'s mad hatter.

stormin' norman: Norman Mailer as Maidstone's mad hatter.

Norman Mailer's doomed Maidstone is the ultimate '60s hangover.

by Sam Adams

"At the time, I thought it was a remarkable film. No one else agreed with me."
--Norman Mailer

Either a cinema vérité experiment gone horribly wrong or a successful "attack on the nature of reality," Norman Mailer's Maidstone is the '60s hangover supreme — Easy Rider without the Byrds songs. Culminating in violence no less epochal than Gimme Shelter's climactic killing, the film finds the hollow center of the counterculture and takes its audience on the ultimate bad trip.

Drawing energy from the contemporary fusion of pop and politics, Maidstone is an avant-garde, unstable Wild in the Streets, a messy, disturbing exercise whose inevitable collapse only strengthens it. Filmed on the Hamptons estates of Mailer's patrons, shortly after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, the film stars Mailer as Norman T. Kingsley, an internationally renowned movie director who is at once preparing his next movie and mounting a run for the presidency. It would be fair to call Kingsley a thinly veiled Mailer counterpart (Kingsley being Mailer's middle name), except that Mailer parts the veil so frequently it's difficult to tell if we're ever supposed to buy the charade. Is that Kingsley crudely provoking the actresses auditioning for his film, or is it Mailer? Is Mailer satirizing his excesses or merely indulging them?

At first, the answer seems obvious. Mailer's behavior in the early reels is enough to make your skin crawl. In what appear to be unscripted, unrehearsed encounters, Mailer, in his Kingsley persona, confronts starlet after starlet, savagely pointing out their physical deficiencies and warning them that the film he's about to make will take them to "emotional and, I dare say, anatomical extremes." Incongruously adopting a Southern accent, Mailer tells a young black actress that "good acting comes out of tyranny — I would say slavery." Mailer unapologetically gropes women by way of "auditioning" them, and stages apparently real sex acts for the camera. (Most are shown from discreet angles, but given the otherwise amateur quality of the film's acting, the performances are notably convincing.) Later, he reclines on the grass and confesses, "I'm a narcissist by definition. … I simply adore shocking people." No wonder Kingsley's handlers, who have ostensibly gathered for a campaign strategy meeting, decide instead that their candidate is "ripe for assassination."

But in Maidstone's sixth section, titled "Politicking in the Grass," the movie starts to turn on itself. The happening that Mailer/Kingsley has staged starts to find its own rhythm, and the already tenuous barrier between the movie's fiction and its reality begins to erode. The black and Latin radicals who are squatting on the grounds confront Kingsley's ability to represent their interests, but they're also confronting the author of "The White Negro" on presuming to represent their realities. Meanwhile, the seemingly guileless starlets start to resist Kingsley's advances. "I've been giving about 10 girls a terrible time, and they just blossom," he says admiringly, "They're like old club fighters — they get mad when you miss."

By section nine, "The Death of the Director," any pretense at fiction has disintegrated. As Kingsley's life flashes before his eyes, the movie fixates on the image of Mailer's hand reaching toward a woman's low-cut blouse, at once vulnerable and exploiting, needy and culpable. The feminist movement hadn't yet made Mailer public enemy No. 1 (culminating in the public roasting captured in the documentary Town Bloody Hall), but Mailer could clearly see that his time at the top of the literary heap was fast ending. It's not a director that's been murdered, but "the director," the notion of a single (white, male) figure through whom society can be imaginatively rendered.

Shortly before his death, Kingsley admits he has put "dangerous forces" in motion, the most dangerous of which turns out to be Rip Torn. Torn's part in the fictional story never becomes clear, but after the story ends and Mailer debriefs the cast on camera, Torn seems unable to relinquish his role. "I don't want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in this picture," a wild-eyed Torn says ominously, shortly before he jumps on the author and apparently tries to throttle him, stopping only when Mailer bites off a chunk of his ear. Unsure if the act is part of the film, the cameras keep rolling, even when Mailer's offscreen wife and children begin to scream. "I'm taking this scene out of the picture," a panting Mailer tells Torn after the tussle, but Torn's words apparently carried the day: "The picture doesn't make sense without this. You know that."

Screened as part of International House's series "Caméra-Stylo: The Writer as Director" (whose first week also features Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance and Marguerite Duras' India Song), Maidstone recalls an era when the cross-pollination of film and literature challenged the boundaries of both. Rather than protecting their properties, Mailer and Duras used film to express ideas they couldn't get at in writing, creating a unique, if sometimes deadly, strain of film whose closest descendants are Masked and Anonymous and The Brown Bunny.