Performing Norman / Norman Performing

Wild 90 as Disruptive Narrative

Authors

  • Robert Singer Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York Author

Keywords:

Wild 90, Mailer’s films, improvisation, auteurship, gangster film, performance

Abstract

Perhaps the single most remarkable quality of Norman Mailer’s experiment in promiscuous auteurship, Wild 90 (1967), his initial foray into filmmaking, is its improvisational tone infused with a generic hybridity, in which an essentially untraditional gangster narrative alienates while it fascinates the audience. We are not exactly sure what it is we are seeing, or hearing, or even thinking, but Wild 90 achieves a classificatory status, fifty years after its debut.

Author Biography

  • Robert Singer, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York

    Robert Singer is a Professor of English at Kingsborough, CUNY, and Professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received a PhD from New York University in Comparative Literature. His areas of expertise include literary and film interrelations, interdisciplinary research in film history and aesthetics, and comparative studies. He co-edited The Brooklyn Film (2003), Zola and Film (2005), and he also co-authored the text, The History of Brooklyn’s Three Major Performing Arts Institutions (2003). He is currently working on a book on naturalism and film interrelations, and he is the coeditor of the ReFocus volumes in both American and International Film Directors, a series of multiple editions, published by Edinburgh University Press. He has also written articles on the Faust myth for the Mellen Series in Comparative Literature, the Rodopi Perspectives in Modern Literature, and the Centennial Review, as well as articles on film studies for Film/Literature Quarterly, Griffithiana, Dedalus, Act 4, Teaching English in the Two Year College, and PostScript.

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Published

2016-09-28

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): 10th Anniversary Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Singer, Robert. “Performing Norman Norman Performing: Wild 90 As Disruptive Narrative”. The Mailer Review, vol. 10, no. 1, Sept. 2016, pp. 156–166, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/565.