Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays by Norman Mailer

Author:Norman Mailer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Literary Collections, Literary, Literary Criticism, Books & Reading, Biography & Autobiography, Essays
ISBN: 9780679645658
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Yet as the film progresses with every skill in evidence, while Brando gives a performance that is unforgettable (and Schneider shows every promise of becoming a major star), as the historic buggeries and reamings are delivered, and the language breaks through barriers not even yet erected—no general of censorship could know the armies of obscenity were so near!—as these shocks multiply, and lust goes up the steps to love, something bizarre happens to the film. It fails to explode. It is a warehouse of dynamite and yet something goes wrong with the blow-up.

One leaves the theater bewildered. A fuse was never ignited. But where was it set? One looks to retrace the line of the story.

So we return to Paul trying to rise out of the bloody horizon of his wife’s death. We even have some instinctive comprehension of how he must degrade his beautiful closet-fuck, indeed we are even given the precise detail that he will grease her ass with butter before he buggers her family pride. A scene or two later, he tricks forth her fear of him by dangling a dead rat which he offers to eat. “I’ll save the asshole for you,” he tells her. “Rat’s asshole with mayonnaise.”† (The audience roars—Brando knows audiences.) She is standing before him in a white wedding gown—she has run away from a TV camera crew that was getting ready to film her pop wedding. She has rushed to the apartment in the rain. Now shivering, but recovered from her fear, she tells him she has fallen in love with somebody. He tells her to take a hot bath, or she’ll catch pneumonia, die, and all he’ll get is “to fuck the dead rat.”

No, she protests, she’s in love.

“In ten years,” says Brando looking at her big breasts, “you’re going to be playing soccer with your tits.” But the thought of the other lover is grinding away at him. “Is he a good fucker?”

“Magnificent.”

“You know, you’re a jerk. ’Cause the best fucking you’re going to get is right here in this apartment.”

No, no, she tells him, the lover is wonderful, a mystery … different.

“A local pimp?”

“He could be. He looks it.”

She will never, he tells her, be able to find love until she goes “right up into the ass of death.” He is one lover who is not afraid of metaphor. “Right up his ass—till you find a womb of fear. And then maybe you’ll be able to find him.”

“But I’ve found this man,” says Jeanne. Metaphor has continued long enough for her. “He’s you. You’re that man.”

In the old scripted films, such a phrase was plucked with a movie composer’s chord. But this is improvisation. Brando’s instant response is to tell her to get a scissors and cut the fingernails on her right hand. Two fingers will do. Put those fingers up his ass.

“Quoi?”

“Put your fingers up my ass, are you deaf? Go on.”

No, he is not too sentimental. Love is never flowers, but farts and flowers. Plus every superlative test.

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