Defective Detectives

Generic Tension in Beyond the Law

Authors

  • Robert Singer Graduate Center, City University of New York Author

Keywords:

Beyond the Law, Mailer’s films, police film, genre, Wild 90, improvisation

Abstract

Beyond the Law (1968) is film director and performer Norman Mailer’s reflexive rendering of urban criminals and cops, set during the violent space and time of the late 1960s. Beyond the Law documents one night in the lives of the socially disparate and disordered inside the police precinct. This analysis interprets Mailer’s film as a uniquely layered series of generic citations from post-war American police films and television culture and suggests that Mailer’s initial foray into the criminal maelstrom, the experimental film Wild 90 (1968), might be read as the first half of a unique whole completed by Beyond the Law.

Author Biography

  • Robert Singer, Graduate Center, City University of New York

    Robert Singer is Professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center [ret.]. 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 co-editor 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

2017-10-26

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Singer, Robert. “Defective Detectives: Generic Tension in Beyond the Law”. The Mailer Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Oct. 2017, pp. 86–96, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/613.