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‘How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer’ Review: A Haunting Doc Captures the Majesty of the Mailer Experience, and Its Dark Side Too
It channels Mailer the writer, the celebrity, the culture warrior and provocateur, the literary comingler of fiction and reality, and much more.
In Mailer’s case, however, the that they’re referring to could be any of the following things: his confrontational public statements; his misbehavior on talk shows; his ardent bad-boy meditations on subjects like sexuality and violence; his propensity to drink and drug and fight (he liked to literally butt heads with people at parties); and great lyrical swaths of his writing. Yet it was all part of his mission to make a difference in his time, to wake us all up — to what was happening in society (not just the busy surface but beneath it), to how the government and the corporation were working in cahoots to perfect a new brand of authoritarianism (something he was explicitly onto in — yes — 1948), to the secrets and mysteries we were living inside. It’s about Mailer the writer, the celebrity, the failure, the intoxicated underworld-of-the-’50s searcher, the culture warrior and provocateur, the literary comingler of fiction and reality, the filmmaker, the serial husband and paterfamilias, the talk-show firebrand, the self-dramatizing hoodlum who stabbed his wife…AND the obsessive artist.
Or read this on Variety
