Do you enjoy guilty pleasures? For me, it’s consuming tell-alls about the private lives of geniuses, such as Françoise Gilot’s Life With Picasso and May Pang’s Loving John: The Untold Story of life with Lennon. A new documentary is the latest member of this exclusive tattletale club.
A renowned 101-year-old, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author is continuing to sing the “elocutioner’s” song in the nonfiction film How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer, a rollicking rumination on and chronicle of the eponymous word slinger-cum-gunslinger’s personality, persona, life and work. Directed by Jeff Zimbalist, the fact-based biopic’s talking heads include some of the oft-married Mailer’s nine children, such as John Buffalo Mailer, who has an executive producer credit. The influence of those close to the film’s subject provides access and insight that presumably wouldn’t be available to outsiders; however, this is hardly an objective overview of the controversial writer and public figure. Nor is it a hagiography of the man who rather infamously stabbed one of his six wives. (I can’t remember which one—there were so many of them – but what a pity that she didn’t direct a “gossipalooza” about life and near death with the abnormal Norm. What a story she had to tell! Move over Françoise and May!)
Whatever it is, Alive is heaps of delicious, good fun. Love him or hate him, Norman Mailer was one of the most colorful in the cast of characters who dominated the literary and public intellectual sphere in the mid-to-late 20th century. The man who wrote 1959’s aptly monikered Advertisements for Myself was certainly a publicity hound who—since the 1948 publication of the WWII novel The Naked and the Dead—commandeered (hijacked?) lots of attention, as a gifted man of letters who also said and did outrageous stunts in public. To many, Mailer raised self-indulgence and obsession to an art form.
Zimbalist’s 102-minute documentary about one of the literary Left’s titans of publishing (and, lest we forget, of the talk show and lecture circuits) covers the waterfront. Although How to Come Alive focuses on the psychological aspects of Norman Mailer and his work, the author’s lefty politics also come into play, including: Mailer’s co-founding of the Village Voice, which helped launch America’s alternative newsweeklies; his anti-Vietnam War coverage about the march on the Pentagon in Armies of the Night (which, in addition to the Pulitzer, won the George Polk and National Book Awards in 1969); his anti-establishment run for NYC Mayor along with running mate journalist Jimmy Breslin in 1969, etc.
The recent war of words between and about the visibly weakened Biden and the fascistic Trump is not the only debate debacle that was a much-discussed public spectacle. The purportedly male chauvinist Mailer’s tête-à-tête with feminist icons Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Susan Sontag at Manhattan’s Town Hall in 1971 is also justly famed—although much more fun to watch.
Alive also has a strong section on the scribe and the death penalty, given Mailer’s writing about Gary Gilmore in Executioner’s Song, which snagged him a second Pulitzer in 1980, plus the lethal role Mailer personally played in seeking and securing murderer Jack Abbott’s release from prison—only to kill again, while on Mailer’s watch. Yikes!
And there are segments that explore Mailer’s avant-garde independent filmmaking. If you haven’t already heard what actor Rip Torn did to the producer/director/co-star of 1970’s Maidstone on camera, I won’t spoil your fun by revealing it to you here. You’ll just have to see this riveting doc for yourself to find out—and be careful not to laugh your head off.
Besides relatives, commentators in Alive include Oliver Stone, Gay Talese, and other literati. This film is particularly relevant, as Mailer penned The Siege of Chicago about the August 1968 Democratic Convention, and the Democrats are about to hold their National Convention there again in August. I just read The Siege of Chicago, which is part of Four Books of the 1960s, a handsome compilation of Mailer’s oeuvre published by the Library of America circa 2018, which contains Mailer’s firsthand, gripping accounts of police brutality, along with the National Guard’s violent repression. At one point Mailer deftly describes their assault on unarmed antiwar demonstrators at “the intersection at Michigan and Balbo like a razor cutting a channel through a head of hair…with the absolute ferocity of a tropical storm” that had “an abstract elemental play of forces of nature at battle with other forces, as if sheets of tropical rain were driving across the streets in patterns….”
But Mailer isn’t content with his up-close and personal observations of the “Czech-ago” cops running rampant, of candidates Sen. “Clean Gene” McCarthy, Sen. Hubert “The Hump” Humphrey, despicable oinker Mayor Daley, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, and this dramatic collection of dramatis personae. No, our man Norman has such an oversized ego and personality that Mailer—who refers to himself as “The Reporter” throughout this lengthy dispatch originally written on assignment for Harper’s Magazine—has to, but of course, put himself into the action, making the story as much about himself as it is about the-whole-world-is-watching historical events he is supposed to be reporting on.
For some inexplicable reason, early on in The Siege of Chicago, the then-married (with six, count ’em, six wives, when wasn’t he wed?) Mailer confesses to committing adultery. It’s a completely gratuitous confession, but by doing so, Mailer developed the then-literary trend of blending novelistic and journalistic styles with his first-person version of events. At one point, the drink-addled scribbler gives a speech to the protesters, as the lines between “newscaster” and “newsmaker” are blurred in what could be called a “nonfiction novel.” But of course, his was such an egregious, unique personality that Mailer can more often than not be forgiven for perpetrating this, as it makes for such compelling telling and reading.
However, I do wish Alive had focused more on Mailer’s left-leaning politics than on the often rambunctious ravings of someone with a man-you-love-to-hate persona.
Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director/co-writer Jeff Zimbalist, who also helmed the docs Favela Rising, The Two Escobars, and Pelé: Birth of a Legend, captures the tone and tenor of his controversial, egocentric, larger-than-life subject. Did I come alive while viewing How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer and thoroughly enjoy it? Guilty as charged! Although Mailer died in 2007, he remains vividly alive in this entertaining documentary that may make you scream at the screen, laugh out loud—or both.
How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer is in theatrical release now. The trailer can be viewed here.
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