Commando Raids on the Nature of Reality

Films exist in many places. A film is in a reel stored inside of a can. A motion picture is encoded onto a shiny DVD that sparkles like a rainbow when held up to the light. But at the same time, those are just objects that contain films. We experience films not by staring at a reel or at a disc, but by gazing elsewhere, at a screen. But even the theatre or television screen is not a film's permanent home, certainly not in the same way that a frame provides to a painting. No, at best it is a fragile, temporal relationship, with the film bounded by opening credits and fades-to-black. The film exists for a short while, until it reaches The End and the screen goes dark. That is not to say that we don't try to provide frames for our cinematic paintings. We attempt to fix them in our memories, honing in, for example, on particular scenes that we like to recall, over and over again. Lines of dialogue as well, even when the memory that we create constitutes something different from our original experience with the film. Humphrey Bogart's Rick never actually said, "Play, It Again Sam" in Casablanca (1943), but he certainly did--and continues to do--in our cultural memory. But perhaps our favorite way to combat the temporal is to hinge particular adjectives onto films, as if a single word or two can encapsulate what they are. Movie X is "heartwarming," it is "uplifting," it is--like so many other films before it, of course--"inspirational." By contrast, Movie Y is "bold" and "daring" and "original." And then of course there is the darker underbelly of cinema, as exemplified by Movie Z, which is "shocking" and "graphic" and--egad--"titillating." Running time runs, but we can screech the experience to a halt with such adjectives, equally suitable for use in our own conversations as they are for the text on movie posters and videotape boxes. If most films exist (at least when they are not being viewed) as adjectives, I would argue that a small number are verbs. They just are. In some cases, like Bob Quinn's Poitin (1979) and the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men (2007), perhaps it is because they are so unadorned, so unvarnished, so raw, that they require no flowery adjectives. In other cases, ranging from The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Citizen Kane (1941) and A Bout de souffle (1960), they exist as if they have always existed. And they exert a gravitational pull, causing so many other films to orbit around them, tied irrevocably to the gravity of their influence, which is so strong as to just be. And then, well, there is Norman Mailer's 1970 film Maidstone. He directed the film and starred in it, both as the fictional character Norman T. Kingsley, a movie director who runs for President of the United States, and as Norman Mailer, playing himself as the director of Maidstone. After limited engagements in 1971, the film essentially disappeared from sight until a DVD was released in France in 2006, which was followed by a number of public screenings, such as at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theatre in 2007. For over three decades, then, Maidstone had no screen on which to appear; its running time had stopped, and words were all that it had. Though Mailer would insist that the medium of film was "once removed from words," the words through which Maidstone existed during its hiatus were largely his own ("Course" 232). Mailer's essay "A Course on Film-Making," published in the New American Review in 1971, described his theory behind shooting Maidstone. A slightly different version of the essay appeared that same year in his book Maidstone: A Mystery, which also printed the film's dialogue and stage directions, transcribed after the fact since Maidstone did not have a shooting script. Many words, to be sure, but one in particular surfaces repeatedly. Not an adjective or even a verb, but a noun: for Norman Mailer, Maidstone was a "raid." More specifically, it was "analogous to a military operation, to a commando raid on the nature of reality--[the persons involved in making the film] would discover where reality was located by the attack itself, just as a company of Rangers might learn that the enemy was located not in the first town they invaded but another" ("Course" 201). …