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| Rod |
 Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:42 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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On Raoul Walsh's Film of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead:
Slow pan onto a sandy beach. Rod Reviewer, a burly, tanned soldier, bends over the body of a broken, mangled comrade, Great Novel, affectionately nicknamed GN.
GN: I can't make it...Leave me, go on save yourself!...Those goddamned Hollywood fuggers have cut off my arms, legs, eyelids, testicles...It's no use, I'm tellin' ya!
RR: No, GN, I'm not leaving you here!...C'mon, man, stand up! No, you bastard, no, don't close your eyes - GN! Speak to me! GN!....
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Slow fade out to trumpeter playing taps. |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:58 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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| A neat conceit |
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My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 7:54 am |
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The movie Naked and the Dead was lousy and of course changed the whole point of the book. Mailer didn't have anything to do with the movie, they gave him $50,000 (I think that was the figure) which he accepted, agreeing to let them film what they wanted. I think my late buddy Norman  ) goes into that in Advertisements for Myself.
I saw the movie when it was current and read the novel about 10 years later. I didn't even realized that the movie I had seen was TNATD. Years later I came upon the movie on TV and that's when it hit me that the movie I had seen years ago was supposed to be TNATD. I hadn't remembered the name of the movie just some of the plotlines. That's how different it was. When I read about how the movie was made in Advertisements, I thought I'd have to see it to see what it became, not realizing that I had already seen it. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 1:31 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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| I don't remember him mentioning it in Advertisements. I know The Naked and the Dead ultimately meant little to him, as a book, though that doesn't mean he was okay with what the movies did to it. Maybe he was bothered that he was never received by the press as quite the giant of American literature with his subsequent works. Maybe that's why he had such a strong affinity for his follow up novel, Barbary Shore, a critical disaster and (I believe) a poor seller, often regarded as his worst. From then on he had to fight to retain his position as Great American Author, a fight he lost as often as he won. He says in Advertisements that his development as an artist was much more along the lines of what he was after in Barbary Shore than The Naked in the Dead. He almost seemed to be smirking at the people (and the critics, of course) who preferred the latter. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 1:39 pm |
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Joe Vitus wrote: I don't remember him mentioning it in Advertisements. I know The Naked and the Dead ultimately meant little to him, as a book, though that doesn't mean he was okay with what the movies did to it. Maybe he was bothered that he was never received by the press as quite the giant of American literature with his subsequent works. Maybe that's why he had such a strong affinity for his follow up novel, Barbary Shore, a critical disaster and (I believe) a poor seller, often regarded as his worst. From then on he had to fight to retain his position as Great American Author, a fight he lost as often as he won. He says in Advertisements that his development as an artist was much more along the lines of what he was after in Barbary Shore than The Naked in the Dead. He almost seemed to be smirking at the people (and the critics, of course) who preferred the latter.
Regardless if it appeared in Advertisements or not, which I believe it did because I remember a piece with Raul Walsh in it, the story is accurate just the way I described it. And I was also around when TNATD was published and he was hailed as a great author at the time. Trust me. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:50 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Having apparently read Advertisements more than either of you...
Mailer loved his The Naked and The Dead, he said so many times, but he also came to regard it as something of millstone around his neck. When he wanted to move into Euro-style symbolic and surrealist writing, he was under constant pressure to return to the great naturalist style of TNATD and make shitloads more money for everyone.
However the story he told about the film was in a letter to the NY Post, provoked by Paul Gregory, the producer, who called him insulting names in print, and Mailer stated he had only met Gregory once, listened to his clueless drivel, gotten drunk, and passed out: "Looking back on it, I would suspect he was that something honourable had worn out in me, and I knew I was going to sell my book to (which I loved so much) to a man who didn't know the difference between the Army and the Marines."
Nonetheless, even I wasn't prepared for what I got in the first ten minutes of the film - some hooting, hollering hick crawling and leaping through a group of strippers. Walsh must have been going mildly senile by then. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:59 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 14498
Location: Houston
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I'm pretty sure he says in Advertisments thatThe Naked and the Dead is his past as a writer, Barbary Shore indicates his future, and that it is the latter book that is more relevant to his development as a writer. I took that to mean he was dismissive of his first big success, but I'm willing to believe both of you that I misread his tone.
Rod,
If you've got the book handy (I wish I still had my copy) would you be willing to transcribe the comment I'm talking about, whether I got it right or not? It's going to irk me until I re-read what he acutally says. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:04 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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A couple of quotes: from the introduction to the extracts:
"Yet, it could be that if my work is alive one hundred years from now, Barbary Shore will be considered the richest of my first three novels....I would like to put in some pages of excerpts from the novel, because few people who like my work have read it, and yet much of my later writiing cannot be understood without a glimpse of the odd shadow and theme-maddened light Barbary Shore casts before it."
and from the endnote:
"...what can be underlined is that the direction I took in Barbary Shore was a first step toward work I will probably be doing from now on."
In fact it's a bad book that's badly derivative of Kafka, Nathaniel West, and half a dozen other writers, and Mailer later decided as much in the late '90s. But he is right, it is the richest in terms of potential, but he really wouldn't work out what to do with that potential for another decade. But, not wanting to repeat The Naked and The Dead isn't quite the same thing as "not thinking very much of it", 's'all.
I wish I could be bothered saying this much about my set texts... |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:38 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow is a 2004 film by multiple Palmes D'Or winner Theo Angelopoulos. Angelopoulos is the art-film maker your mother warned you about - his works are regularly four hours long, have little story, have twenty-minute-long scenes of people wandering about the landscape and then disorientating time jumps when you find half of the people in the last shot are now dead, and demand a working knowledge of eighty-year-old Greek history.
I love the work of his I've seen, even the awkward Ulysses's Gaze. The Weeping Meadow is in largely the same style at his great The Travelling Players (1975), featuring a tapestry-like telling of ordinary people being fucked over by history. Some directors who may owe something to him include Hsiao-hsien Hou, Michael Cimino, and Gus Van Sant. The Weeping Meadow is a sad, slow, tragic work spiked with moments of joy, concluding on a note of total devastation. It tells the story of a young man and his girl, Eleni, who are thrown together as children and grow up to be lovers, despite the fact that his father, her adopted father, has forced her to marry him; they run off and live in abandoned buildings in Thessaloniki, are adopted by rambling Rembetika musicians, and eventually lose everything as Fascism and war come to Greece. Angelopoulos channels the mood and sensibility of folk myth with uncommon fidelity. It's not as vivid and alive as The Travelling Players, but an hypnotic and haunting experience all the same. |
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| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 10:58 pm |
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Joined: 30 May 2004
Posts: 12533
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I have to softly chuckle when I compare John Woo's women to the Hawksian woman.
Hawks' women included Elsa Martinelli (HATARI!), Rosalynd Russell (THE FRONT PAGE), Lauren Bacall, Jean Arthur (ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS), Paula Prentiss (MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT), Angie Dickenson (RIO BRAVO), Barbara Stanwyck, etc. etc. Please forgive misspellings, etc. These were very gutsy types and tho' sexy often came across as one of the boys. They had butch names like Dallas.
Coming from an Asian background, Woo's women are very different but I guess you'd have to say they _are_ gutsy compared to the rest of the women in the HK milieu. I'm thinking of Sally (the drug addict/lounge singer/whore) the leading men fall for in A BULLET IN THE HEAD. Also I'm thinking of the police woman in HARDBOILED. And finally the lounge singer in THE KILLER. OK, these aren't exactly the "women professionals" of the Hawks world, but I'd venture to say they come close in Wooian terms. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:19 am |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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Thanks, Rod. Personally, I liked it. I didn't think it was a successful book, the dialogue argument that provides its climax is pretty weak. But I found it interesting. I also like The Deer Park (the novel, not the play, which I couldn't finish). I thought I liked An American Dream until I read a critical analysis of it. The critic loved the book, but took it to mean almost the direct opposite of what I did, and since the guy sounded like a Mailer expert (something I am not), I figured he was right and I was wrong and I didn't like the novel, after all.
For what it's worth, I teach his short story "The Language of Men" almost every semester. I think it's magnificent. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 2:08 am |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
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Location: Lithgow, Australia
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| An American Dream is my favorite of his novels (though possibly Why Are We In Vietnam? is his actual greatest) and one of my favorite novels, period. I'm interested - what did the guy suggest was the meaning, and what did you think? Considering it has the texture of a fever dream, it's easy to see how people can come away from it with totally different impressions. |
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| Joe Vitus |
| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 3:48 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Houston
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I had thought the point of the book was to chart the protagonist's mental deterioration. And his "proof" of success by walking along the balcony railing was a sign of his complete dementia. I thought it was a fascinating look at a fractured personality, one of the best since Doestoevski. Maybe the best since then. And it seemed to fit so perfectly with the general insanity of the times, the complete confusion and chaos and violence of the era, that I thought it was maybe the best novel that attempted to chronicle the era.
But the piece I read, which was in a book on Mailer's work, I think the Twain series on American authors, claimed that this was his final test, and he really was somehow singled out for greatness or success or something. It seemed to be saying that all the signs and portents he was reading throughout the book were accurate, whereas I had read them as signs of his developing insanity. I hate to be vauge about what the critic said, and hate I can't even direct you to the piece (I'll try to track it down, if you want), but I read it three or four years ago and it's hard for me to be specific. Essentially, it seemed to invert everything I had percieved in the novel.
Maybe I'm right after all (or maybe "right" isn't applicable to this particular work). I just figured as I hadn't read a lot of Mailer, and in general our view of life is now really in synch, that I was likely to have misread him. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:11 pm |
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That was the book he wrote like Dickens with a new part every month in Esquire. He wanted to see how he would do under a rigid timetable. That's where I read it. Month after month in Esquire. I always looked forward to the next month. It is sort of autobiographical.
And that thing about walking on the balcony is actually soimilar to what Mailer has done. He even had a thin walkway up high oin his Brooklyn Heights apartment that he would like to walk across and down the the next level or something like that. |
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| Rod |
| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 8:22 pm |
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Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 2944
Location: Lithgow, Australia
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Yes, Mailer was fond of such tests of nerve. Actually, so am I. I've walked along foot-wide dam walls, hung off balconies by my fingertips, etc. Mailer also said that scene when Rojack is having the psychic battle in the nightclub was based on a real experience of his.
But in terms of the novel, it's very important to remember that Mailer, as well as having a deep interest in the supernatural, was strongly influenced not just by Dostoievski but also by Kierkegaard, whom he was very fond of quoting, and especially his assertion that the individual cannot in themselves be certain whether they are 1) mad, 2) blessed by God, or 3) being manipulated by the Devil, if they begin to perceive themselves as being indeed singled out for greatness, and receptive to broadcasts from on high (Mailer also used this argument to mock Bush's pretensions of being divinely advised - what if it's Satan, pretending to be God, inspiring you?).
So within the texture of An American Dream, one will pretty well judge the nature of the hero's struggle from one's own perspective. If one is fundamentally rational, you'll take the view that he's crazy. If you have a bit of the pagan in you, you'll think he's on an psychic journey. I think the most telling moment for that isn't the balcony scene but that right at the end when he receives the phone call from Cherry - he's either deep in a psychosis by that point or has transcended nominal space/time boundaries. |
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