Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American war novels so far have ranged from broad-gauged pop, with legions of far-flung participants (Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, 1948), to hysterically myopic, if sometimes heartbreakingly funny indictments of war as madness (Catch-22, 1961). In between, slogging platoons and companies (led by Sergeants Mailer and Jones) glumly pressed military microcosms into the service of an important but dreary message: combat is sheer hell...
...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...
...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 Buñuel, 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...
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...