The Frame Around the World

     Norman Mailer directed four films.  I watched part of the third one, Maidstone (from 1970) on YouTube several months ago.  All I know about this movie comes from the scene I watched, and also a brief description of the premise on IMDB: "Norman T. Kingsley, famous movie director, runs for President."
     Given Mailer's rock hard ego, I'm not surprised he put the word King in his character's name, nor that he gave the man his own first name.  Kingsley is also Mailer's middle name.  By the time he began directing films, Mailer was already a famous novelist.  Like James Jones, another U.S. Army World War Two veteran turned writer, Norman Mailer wrote a bestselling novel grounded in his Pacific Theater of War experiences.  The edgy rawness of Mailer's writing (I've read Tough Guys Don't Dance, Harlot's Ghost, and his peculiar biography of Marilyn Monroe) makes for thick reading.  I admit I've enjoyed his work while simultaneously finding it bizarre and hyper-focused, uncomfortably at times, on his own obsessions with sex, power, and the male psyche.  It's not a bad thing, necessarily, for a writer to focus on his or her obsessions (I do that fairly often, so did Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, and Arthur C. Clarke, to name a few among a multitude), but Mailer's obsessions bring us close to a violent core inside himself, maybe in humanity.
     In a book about Marilyn Monroe written by someone who claims to have known her for a while (I've forgotten the name and author of the book), the author recommends to Monroe that she read Mailer.  He loans her his copy of Mailer's novel, Barbary Shore.  The next time they meet, Marilyn Monroe hands the book back to him and remarks, distastefully, "He's obsessed with power."
     That could've been a TV show in the 1950's: Four Word Book Reviews With Marilyn Monroe.
     Apocryphal or not, this story about Monroe's disdain for at least that one Mailer novel offers a contrast between a man living in and commenting on a male-dominated world, a place where expressions of violence are sought after as ways toward solutions of problems, and a woman living and working within that male world, gaining some power through submitting to the process of objectification, but always needing to strive because she can never wholly satisfy the demands of money and power.
     Mailer's later obsession with Marilyn Monroe, expressed in his biography of her, reveals more about himself than it does about the actress.  He pines romantically that he never met her; he writes about how their names, Mailer and Marilyn are musically similar.  Norman can be spelled from her full name.  Kismet operates in Mailer's mind when dealing with his subject.  Like many men contemplating Marilyn Monroe after her death, Mailer projects himself into the possibilities of her life, as if he might've "rescued" her, even though he, as part of the power trip complex that ruled Monroe's life, would've probably misunderstood her just as another writer, Arthur Miller (her third husband), did.
     The one clip of Maidstone I've seen is thus described in the IMDB "Trivia" section for the film:
     "The fight between Norman Mailer and Rip Torn was real.  Torn was outraged with Mailer's direction and attacked Mailer with a hammer.  Mailer bit Torn's ear during the fight and the blood shed by both is real."
     In the midst of the fight, Mailer's then wife enters the "scene," saying frantically to Rip Torn, "What did you do?"  The hammer blow to Mailer's head, an actual act of violence caught on film and preserved in the final cut, is painful to hear and watch.  I've wanted to see the film from start to finish, but I've held back, the real violence of that scene concentrating for me a film within the film, just as a single scene in a movie, taken out of context, can seem to exist as a separate and fascinating work of art.
     That Mailer left the scene in the film fits his character.  He got to show himself wrestling with Rip Torn, biting his ear, struggling in real rage, a shock to the audience's nerves preserved on film, on DVD, on YouTube, everyone able to see a terrible dispute between actor and director, naked and free reality.

                                                                              Vic Neptune