Maidstone

I recently saw Maidstone in a French DVD and have to say this movie is nowhere as bad as its reputation would have you believe. In fact, in light of the now pervasive presence of 'reality' based TV, the kind which thrives on humiliation, preying on our secret blood lust for murder, Maidstone, like the best of Mailer's literary work, is outright prophetic. Mailer's ambition may not be as long as his reach, but flawed as it is, Maidstone still works like a cinematic Cassandra machine. Not only is it a fascinating dissembling of Mailer and his infamous ego, but it captures the apocalyptic delirium of that terrible year of 1968 better than numerous documentaries made around that time. A significant, tragically under-appreciated, work of the underground cinema that is ripe for rediscovery and re-evaluation!

I first learned of Norman Mailer from the documentary "When We Were Kings", about Muhammad Ali's Rumble in the Jungle. I later read about him in a book of famous people from 1981, and saw a picture that Annie Leibovitz took of him in 1974.

So now I've seen a movie that Mailer directed. What a strange one. The idea of a celebrity president seemed far-fetched half a century ago, but now we've had both Reagan and Trump. "Maidstone" is done mockumentary-style, even more so than Christopher Guest's movies; this almost looks as if Mailer got a bunch of friends together to party.

What I concluded is that Mailer was a 14-year-old boy trapped in a grown man's body; the depiction of gender relations certainly implies that. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a terrible movie - anyone who's seen Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You" knows the definition of a TRULY terrible movie - but not anything that I would recommend.

This film can be considered significant only as a tribute to Norman Mailer's monumental ego. It is a total bore, and there is hardly anything memorable about it. The only thing that is memorable is a scene in which Rip Torn unexpectedly bites Mailer on the ear, hard enough to draw blood. This causes Mailer and Torn to come out of character and have a real confrontation, in which Beverly Bentley, Mailer's wife at the time, inserts herself. Other than that, completely forgettable.

I first saw this at the London Film Festival (I think it was called that) at the Roundhouse with a pre-screening interview with a fairly sozzled Mailer, and a packed house of mainly hippies/freaks/students/literary folk. The general opinion was WTF was that ??? I think I've seen it since - late night on BBC2 I'd guess. But this really ought to be re-shown - because as I remember it, confessedly dimly, Mailer played a Trump-like egomaniac media star (film director in those days) so it definitely foretold the chaos we would be in (and not in a good way!). Someone, please smarten this film up and re-release it - my guess would be that today's audience reaction might be along the lines of, Mailer warned us but we didn't believe it!