Norman Mailer was a hero to many. He never meant shit to me. Straight-up Neanderthal, that sucker was simple and plain, fronting like a more masculine John Wayne. Though I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone with Mailer's genius for self-promotion (as seen in his seminal tome, Advertisements For Myself), I have a hard time getting past all the tough-guy posturing. Given Mailer's reputation, it's a miracle that he made it well into his 80s without dying of testosterone poisoning or meeting an undignified end wrestling an alligator or mountain lion. If Ernest Hemingway is the God of the great literary church of machismo, the great alpha-male all other two-fisted, hard-drinking wordsmiths prostrate themselves before, then Mailer is at least a minor saint, especially now that he's bare-knuckle brawling the angels up in heaven.
I always thought there was something perversely redundant about Neal Pollack's shtick. Why bother creating a larger-than-life parody of Norman Mailer when Mailer was doing such a bang-up job with that gig himself? Mailer toiled diligently to create the impression that he wrote with a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand, a half-empty sawed-off shotgun in the other, and a dead hooker at his feet. Acolytes could be forgiven for imagining that he had gasoline and bourbon running through his veins instead of the blood of mere mortals.
I, on the other hand, do all my writing clad in a flowing lavender muumuu. And I take regular breaks to watch Oprah and my stories, steal sips from a nearby teacup full of Celestial Seasonings, and giggle girlishly whenever one of my cats does something amusing. Okay, that's not even remotely true, but if Mailer could spend his entire life and career pretending to be Mike Hammer, then I reserve the right to channel Quentin Crisp whenever the spirit moves me.
Mailer remains one of my more glaring pop-culture blind spots. So I figured I'd try to correct that by ordering Advertisements For Myself from Ama… I mean, purchasing it at full price from an independent bookstore—and writing up Tough Guys Don't Dance for My Year Of Flops. The widely mocked 1987 thriller was the product of a brief epoch when beloved Israeli schlock merchants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the super-geniuses behind The Apple and Over The Top, tried to buy a little respectability by throwing money at famous (or at least notorious) figures, and hoping against hope that great art (or at least healthy commerce) would ensue.
So in the space of just a few magical years, Golan and Globus produced Barbet Schroeder's Charles Bukowski adaptation Barfly and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear and Braddock: Missing In Action III, and last and almost certainly least, Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance and Masters Of The Universe. It's tempting to place Mailer, that distinguished man of letters, on the side of artists and deep thinkers, but Tough Guys Don't Dance isn't even smart, pretentious trash. It's pretty much just trash.
Some DVDs are worth renting just for their trailers. Tough Guys Don't Dance is such a film. In the theatrical trailer, "America's most controversial author," who both wrote and directed Tough Guys, addresses the camera directly while clutching a fistful of comment cards from a test screening. "Bold, innovative, wonderful!" crows the first one. "Stinks!" jeers the second. The comments that follow oscillate wildly between rapturous praise and scathing condemnation. "A movie not to miss" is followed by "a giant death orgy with lots of maniacs." "One of the best, most original films I've ever seen" is chased by "One of the worst ever. My grandmother could do better."
I could go on, but I'll skip over the praise—much of which I suspect was furtively written by Mailer and his immediate family—and center on the hateration. "Whoever wrote this has never read a good book," Mailer reads from one card, before hurling it aside in a manner that unmistakably conveys, "Read a good book? I've only written, like, every good book, ever!" Ever the showman, he saves the best for last, literally winking at the screen after rasping "The devil made this picture." Why do I suspect that Mailer sees that as the highest praise he's ever received?
Sadly, this ballsy "You're probably going to hate this filthy, disgusting, hateful movie, which is an affront to good people and basic decency" approach was probably the smartest way to sell Tough Guys. Like so much of Mailer's turbo-charged oeuvre, the trailer isn't selling quality so much as danger, image, attitude, sex, sleaze, and Mailer himself. Mailer's performance throughout is a marvel: he's deadpan, but a shameless ham. If the film that this trailer so indelibly promotes were half as entertaining as its auteur reading comment cards, it'd catapult instantly to the upper tier of Secret Successes. Then again, it's hard to argue with success. Audiences were so won over by the film's deliciously passive-aggressive ad campaign that Tough Guys recouped almost a full fifth of its reported $5 million budget at the box-office.
So it pains me to report that as far as giant death orgies with lots of maniacs go, Tough Guys Don't Dance is unforgivably dull. Or at least that's what I would have told you after seeing it for the first time. At the risk of contradicting myself, I would like to officially take back everything I've said so far. For I was shocked and delighted to discover that upon repeat viewings, nearly all of Tough Guys' flaws become subversive strengths. I knew going in that Tough Guys was a polarizing film. I couldn't have imagined that my opinion of it would shift so radically the second time around, from visceral hate to warped appreciation.
My response represents in microcosm the public's bifurcated response to a lot of cult movies and notorious failures: loathing and ridicule, followed by revisionist acclaim. Cult films often fail in their initial release as art and drama, only to succeed with future generations as camp and comedy.
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