Brando, Mailer and Liberalism

...Unable to write a good serious novel, he has turned to a less demanding craft, journalism, and, with the help of some trick mirrors and slight-of-hand publicity, made his efforts in the new journalism seem to be a continuation of rather than a break with his work as a creator of fiction...

...just isn't very interesting, and I think his books must embarrass him more than anything else...

...It may be tremendously self-satisfying to know that the film critic of Esoteria Quarterly just loved your work or that some deranged British critic in the New York Review of Books found your latest light-hearted tale of sodomy just three degrees south of the best of Andre Gide -but it doesn't cut any ice with the people who buy tickets and books...

...They had seen his photograph in all the magazines - the torn teeshirt picture, with Brando folding his well-muscled arms across his chest, scowling into the camera...

...The decline of Brando and Mailer has not had any great effect on the history of our nation...

...Liberalism which could once claim to speak for the working man became increasingly alienated from him...

...but why go on...

...He was the New Actor -- and America wondered what he would do next...

...Yet President Kennedy was ill-served: despite the untiring efforts of the Mailerites to make The Deer Park seem to be an Important Novel of our Times, it is really a failure...

...He will be to the fifties and sixties what Dos Passos and Hemingway were to the twenties...

...It daringly used almost-curse words ("fug") and had explicit sex scenes (explicit for those innocent days...

...The masochistic tendencies previously noted in Brando's characterizations are evident in almost every major Liberal politician, along with the running-off-at-the-mouth messianic delusions noted in Mailer...

...Utter disasters...

...It is all but impossible to remember the names of the films, let alone the roles he played...

...Such a prediction would have seemed quite safe...

...They make headlines - but not for their artistic creativity...

...He was sullen, moody, sensitive, and altogether excellent as a crippled soldier...

...the frustrated Irish-Catholic...

...There simply were no other young men in the fields of acting or writing who had so completely captured the imagination of the public...

...Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is the representative protest novel of the thirties, yet it is a veritable hymn of praise to the capacity for self-renewal in the United States compared to Mailer's dreary, sullen, vicious portrayal of his country in fiction and non-fiction...

...A masochistic messianic politician doesn't stand much of a chance with the average voter no matter how much the intellectual left may love him...

...Today, at a time when one might have expected Brando to have become sort of an American Olivier and Mailer an authentic successor to Dos Passos and American Liberalism a realistic political alternative for thinking human beings -- what do we have...

...If anyone had been asked to predict a future for these two, it might have sounded something like this: Brando will go to Hollywood and become a star...

...Mailer finally turned his back on fiction and tried social prophecy...

...But what has he done since then...

...The decline was momentarily halted in 1960, with the help of some gracious Democratic voters of Cook County, Illinois, who so loved John F. Kennedy they voted for him more than once...

...A similar comparison of FDR's speeches with those of contemporary Liberall spokesmen shows the same change from supreme self-confidence to doubt, from optimism to pessimism...

...People who had never been within a thousand miles of the Broadway theater knew of Brando...

...Brando's is unsure, moody, introspective and bewildered...

...It is a movement which can be seen in politics and in the popular arts...

...The Democratic Party, through which the Liberal establishment makes its wishes known, began to slowly but inexorably lose its historic association with the working class and lower-middle class American just about the time Brando and Mailer were turning their backs on "popular" success...

...Then he became a routine television talk-show bore, then a wife-stabber, then...

...Instead of building on their initial popularity, they decide to become fashionably alienated...

...His career has been a sacrifice to the fashion that a film simply must have some kind of allegorical significance, preferably related to some fashionable Liberal dogma...

...Yet, within less than ten years, things got so bad that midway through the Presidential campaign of 1968 some polls showed Hubert Humphrey, the ultimate late-forties Liberal, with less than thirty percent of the vote, an astounding political phenomenon...

...In 1948, the publication of The Naked and the Dead made Norman Mailer a literary celebrity, the American left had a third party -- the Progressive Party -- and Liberals scored an amazing political victory when Harry Truman defeated Tom Dewey...

...He will grow in stature as an actor and probably be the leading American actor by 1960...

...Thus, Liberalism has become the common scold of national politics...

...Mailer will write long, multi-character novels of social protest and become a popular as well as critical success...

...It has only one trouble, but that a fatal one: Norman Mailer has nothing to say...

...It is difficult to explain to those who did not directly experience it the impact Brando and Mailer made during the late forties and early fifties...

...It is interesting to note similarities in the manner in which Brando, Mailer and Liberalism declined...

...Yet, within a few years, Brando began his decline and Mailer never artistically recovered from his second novel, a fiasco titled Barbary Shore, which, despite the efforts of the Mailerites to give it some kind of critical standing, is a dreary, unconvincing, pretentious, leftist tract disguised as a novel...

...His sycophants in the world of literary criticism have heaped him with praise, but his latest fiction (An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam...

...He then repeated his stage success in the film version of Streetcar...

...his lead in Viva Zapata...

...Mailer was the writer the left had always said would come...

...It was a political version of Brando and Mailer artistic alienation: to hell with popularity and the masses, it's more fun to preach than to listen...

...For one thing, he had achieved fame by writing a novel - and there weren't that many Americans then (or today for that matter) interested in somebody who writes books...

...Gable's Christian is virile, confident, optimistic and outgoing...

...Notice: two gifted young men who begin their careers with enormous popular and artistic success, each of whom becomes, with time, less popular and less artistically successful...

...In the public mind, the party of Al Smith became the party of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith and other assorted Liberal academic zanies, men who mocked the values, openly scorned the lifestyle and derided the intelligence of the average big-city Democratic voter...

...the cruel Texan...

...Democratic spokesmen began to sound like dime-store Jeremiahs, scolding the nation, demanding great sacrifices for alleged wrongdoing, calling down vengeance from heaven upon the hapless taxpayer who, according to the Democratic leaders, simply wasn't doing enough...

...A comparison of Clark Gable's portrayal of Fletcher Christian in Mutiny On the Bounty and Brando's Christian a generation later is revealing...

...They strike poses...

...Here, at last, was the super-writer of the left that American Liberals had been waiting for since the nineteen-thirties...

...Why did Liberalism die...

...Today almost every political observer has noted the movement of the bluecollar worker and the middle class away from Liberalism...

...Brando, Mailer, Liberalism: What happened to these three gods of the late nineteen-forties...

...Whatever the cause, the result has been the same for Brando, Mailer and Liberalism: a slow slide into decadence and disrepute, a loss of creativity and imagination and a tendency to shower maledictions upon ordinary people for not applauding when their values and interests are ignored or abused...

...There was a time when people of taste and intelligence took them quite seriously...

...Then he tried to become a Certified Public Nuisance...

...All of this was in the early fifties...

...Here was a good, Liberal-minded, progressive young man with his roots, so to speak, in the concrete...

...He made his first movie appearance in The Men, a low-key story of paraplegics...

...There are those among his admirers who will admit Barbary Shore was a disaster but who will claim that his next novel, The Deer Park, is a neglected masterpiece, proof of Mailer's great genius, etc., etc...

...But the decline of Liberalism is one of the great historical mysteries that scholars will ponder for years to come...

...But what was more important was the quality of the writing...

...The further he removed himself from the rather simple but believable characters of his first novel, the more absurd his artistic life became...

...kinds of attitudes...

...The same is true of actors and writers...

...What about Brando...

...Mailer and Brando have discovered this in art...

...If you seek an answer to that question, simply go to see the latest Brando film -- or read Mailer's latest "new journalism'" piece -or listen to Charles Goodell...

...re-read Advertisements for Myself and you simply wonder...

...He has become addicted to seeing himself as a Christ figure and even On The Waterfront was marred by the battered, bloody, look-mom-I'm-a-holy-masochist ending...

...During the past ten years, every time a Liberal opened his mouth, out dropped a complaint about the racial attitudes of the white working class, the tyranny of the police or some other fashionable doctrine of doom and despair...

...He was, again, excellent as Stanley Kowalski...

...and his magnificent interpretation of the longshoreman in On The Waterfront, a movie which, despite a few overly melodramatic scenes, is one of the few great American films made during the nineteen-fifties...

...Re-read The Naked and the Dead and you wonder how anyone twenty-five years old could have written so well...

...But this was a different kind of book...

...ah, the delicious fakery of it all...

...the Mexican-American who couldn't find his way in Anglo society - and, on the officer's level, the semi-facist General Cummings and the Liberal Lieutenant Hearn...

...A psychologist could probably find the cause of this deliberate alienation from the mass audience and the Democrats' suicidal impulse to shove guilt and despair down the throats of an unwilling electorate...

...All three chose what might be called the road of alienation...

...What is bad about the novel - the turgid philosophising and the adolescent crush on fashionable leftist attitudes, is all Mailer...

...Thus the decline of Brando and Mailer parallels a more disastrous and more significant decline in what was once the single greatest ideological force in the free world...

...He has set some kind of world record for making movies that fail to make much or any money for their producers...

...From then on he went into a steady and horrifying decline with four exceptions: his very good Antony in Julius Caesar...

...the Democratic party to suicide...

...Volumes could be written on this scene: a President whose favorite fiction was the James Bond series, having been briefed by his staff to say just the right thing to this distinguished representative of the leftist intellectual establishment...

...The Democratic Party would have been wise to study the decline of these two giants of the late forties and early fifties, for in their decline can be seen the same historical process that is now leading the Democratic party to suicide...

...Mailer didn't make the same kind of direct impact on the American consciousness...

...That Mailer has lately received praise and even the Pulitzer Prize for his work does not seem to me to contradict the theory that he is artistically out of gas...

...Here was a young man from Brooklyn (forget about the Harvard part) who exposed the hypocrisy and boredom and fear of army life by telling his story through the eyes of many kinds of Americans: the white-southern semi-literate...

...In their private and artistic lives, they become obsessed with the fashionable trappings of the American left: "causes" and social significance in his films for Brando and psuedo-philosophical leftist - Freudian - Marxian -you - name - it ravings in and out of print for Mailer...

...He could write like hell and he had all the right - or is it left...

...Paralleling their decline is a similar decline in the political fortunes of American Liberalism...

...Whatever is good in the book - the use of the Hollywood milieu as representative of what the author thinks is the worst in American culture - was done infinitely better by Nathaniel West in The Day of the Locust...

...This theory received an extra-critical boost when, allegedly, President Kennedy greeted Mailer at the White House by mentioning The Deer Park...

...He must realize he has never fulfilled his promise as a novelist and fifteen Pulitzer Prizes won't change that...

...The mass audience - and the voting public - just won't endure self-indulgence and cynicism and pseudo-intellectual posturing on the part of artists or politicians...

...his motorcycle chief in The Wild One...

...Perhaps the secret can be found in an examination of Brando's films and Mailer's books...