Mailer didn’t just want to write the world—he wanted to enter it, physically, as a performance. On January 7, 1967, his film Wild 90 premiered. It’s easy to treat this as a curio (Mailer the novelist playing director, actor, impresario), but the deeper point is how seriously he took the idea that art is not merely representation—it’s a risk.
For Mailer, cinema wasn’t a side hustle. It was another arena where the self could be tested, humiliated, inflated, punctured. The films of this period are not “polished” in the classical sense; they’re closer to a public experiment: What happens when you remove the safety rails? What happens when the ego has to improvise in real time?
There’s a continuity here with his prose. Mailer’s nonfiction—especially after the mid-1960s—often behaves like performance: he writes the self as a character under pressure, then watches what the character does. Wild 90 externalizes that. It’s Mailer insisting (again) that the artist has to step into the room and risk being ridiculous.
If a writer’s public self is always a kind of “role,” is the honest move to hide it—or to stage it so openly that the staging becomes part of the truth?