"Achieving madness"

Aug 26, 2007, The New York Times Book Review unexpectedly gives up a reminder of why we think “Performance” was a movie of some profundity. Wild violence and drugs and sex, too, in plenty, but some moments of philosophy. This comes from the Essay at the end of the weekly book review, this week by Gerald Howard, an editor at Doubleday Broadway (whatever that is), about the movie Norman Mailer made in 1968, two years before “Performance” came out. Its title is “Maidstone,” and it was seen only for two weeks in 1971, thereafter becoming part of the Mailer legend.

In this excerpt, Gerald Howard cites a philosophical moment in our favorite movie while describing the unscripted violence that erupted as the filming of “Maidstone” was almost complete:

“Much of this and more unfolded on the screen like some long-delayed acid flashback to a bad trip I had never taken. Then came the last three minutes, which guarantee “Maidstone” a kind of immortality. The filming proper was supposed to have ended one very late night in a so-called “Assassination Ball,” where Mailer/Kingsley, in top hat and tails, delivered a vainglorious speech to the assembled cast, though disappointingly to many, no attempt on his life was staged. The next day the cast went to rustic Gardiners Island to decompress and use up some leftover film. Pennebaker’s camera captures them strolling about the fields and then focuses on Rip Torn, who removes a hammer from a backpack, strides over to Mailer and hits him on the head twice, announcing: “You are supposed to die, Mr. Kingsley. You must die, not Mailer. I don’t want to kill Mailer, but I must kill Kingsley in the picture.” Shocked, Mailer wrestles him to the ground, and they roll down the hill in an ugly tussle, Mailer biting Torn’s ear as Mailer’s wife and children scream. Finally separated, the two bloodied men walk at a wary distance from each other, Mailer hurling curses, Torn explaining calmly: “When — when is an assassination ever planned? It’s done, it’s done.” The sequence ends with Torn calling Mailer “a fraud” and pointing a finger at the camera, taunting, “Hoo hoo!”

“In the film “Performance” (1970), the reclusive rock star played by Mick Jagger declares: “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” Rip Torn took Mailer’s premises more seriously than Mailer himself did and acted them out, in the process both stealing Mailer’s film and making it for him. Over the next two years, as Mailer struggled to edit his 45 hours of footage into something workable, he was forced to accede to Torn’s logic and made his attack the centerpiece and culmination of the film. “

Yes, achieving madness is a heck of a performance, and the trip up to the edge of madness and perhaps beyond is what makes the movie “Performance” such an exciting trip.

I’ll leave a link here to the full writeup in the Times Book Review, and hope it doesn’t fall into the archives too quickly.