The Triteness of Trauma and Time

Non-Linear Narrative in Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Abstract

In Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Mailer did engage in the addition of some meaningful tropes and methods for creating and producing the time-distorting, trauma-focused, porno-violence genre that so captured the attention of audiences in the later parts of the twentieth-century film community and provided the foundation for the twenty-first century’s focus on the weird intersection between trauma and time in the sub-genre of film that follows the non-linear narrative tradition.