Word: mailer
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...