John Menick

The following short piece was written as part of the screening series “Goddammed Films” at Petra gallery, February 6, 2010. Follow the link for screening times and films. The series is part of SITAC happening this week in Mexico City.

A guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. That’s how the director billed it. Whose reality, and the whether the mission was a success, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Maidstone, Norman Mailer’s 1970 film. For enthusiasts of artistic infamy, the film is a fetish. It has screened a few times recently in New York, and I could say I never got around to buying the tickets because other plans intervened. But I’m probably not being honest with myself. I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to. To see it would be to ruin it. I read about Maidstone and had described to me the film’s hipster pretensions, the on-set sexual domination, the broken jaw, the narrative incoherence, the casting for the brothel, the dropped acid, smoked weed, botched leftism, the improvised idiocy. In short, I knew its infamy, and infamy survives best when hidden from view.

The origin of that infamy is, of course, Norman Mailer. But this isn’t about him. I’m interested in what has surfaced into the public consciousness about this film. After Maidstone enjoyed a short and successful run at the Whitney Museum in 1971, Mailer tried to rent a more public theater to show his deformed creation to the general public. They stayed away. The film disappeared. Decades later Maidstone resurfaced on the Internet as a dozen dirty fragments. Most of those fragments have also disappeared, but one remained: the concluding scene, where Rip Torn, stoned and crazed, tries to kill Mailer with a hammer. And with this clip somehow the film took on a second life. Like Mauss says in his study of magic, in the practice of black magic, the part becomes the whole, helps us know and overcome it. A lock of hair becomes the person. Lizard eyes become blindness. And for most of us, this scene, for better or worse, becomes Maidstone.

But what are we watching? Are Mailer and Torn pretending to kill each other? Or is this something worse? Is this the near-snuff video it purports to be? Let’s agree with the common reconstruction: the scene was planned as an fictional assassination attempt on Mailer’s character, Kingsley, but Rip Torn went the extra measure. He really hit Mailer with the hammer when he was supposed to only fake it. I want to kill your character, Kingsley, not you, Mailer, Torn says. The assassin Torn enters from the edge and takes the author out in one blow. Torn took Mailer at his word: a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. It’s the actor, Torn, who understood the tactics needed to do so. Torn was the filmmaker, and most likely Torn was the true madman.

One last point: the film was shot like a cinéma vérité documentary. Pennebaker and Leacock and others provided all of reality’s tropes: handheld cameras, quick zooms, fitful focus, unstable framing. But that’s not what this footage gives us. It presents another reality, something the filmmakers couldn’t have understood. It shows us a moment in a culture that took a turn for the worse – the sad machismo, the cosmic pretensions, the grim willingness to kill – qualities as foreign to contemporary counterculture as a Victorian drama. The filmmakers wanted a siege on reality, but time has done it for us. Give a film enough time and the fiction falls away, and all that’s left is an unexpected and troubling reality.