Norman Mailer discusses his protagonists and their penises

A short clip from the terrific documentary "Town Bloody Hall" (available at phfilms.com), which chronicles Norman Mailer's raucous debate with a group of feminists (Germaine Greer is featured in this clip) at NYC's Town Hall in 1971. Here he is asked about the names his characters give their penises.

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[MetaMorphy]

Sorry, but not being able to distinguish between what a character is saying and what the author believes is REALLY FUCKING STUPID.

[Ted Burke]

Mailer is in top form here, and there wasn't another writer willing to tackle Feminism as straight on as he did. Prisoner of Sex is a wonderfully fucked up document of his own notions of what being a straight male artist requires , and in his defenses of Miller, Lawrence and Genet develops a bracing aesthetic. He was the fool and the asshole much of the time, but these issues mattered to him. Truth mattered to him, and I'm glad he was around for so long to yell shit when shit was served.

[Paglia444]

Mailer is fantastic. It's like performance art: he is saying this so outrageous he can't possibly believe them, yet there's also a thread of common sense. It's like the best of stand up comedy.

Germaine Greer, though: ugh. I'm so disappointed in her. She's been built up as some strong, Amazonian feminist yet she has to have another woman sitting beside her to sneer and chuckle with, like a teenage girl. Only Mailer is willing to sit there and take on EVERYBODY.

[Flippaarn]

Norman Mailer, what a stupid fuck...

[steve conn]

That's why he's on the panel, idiot - because he's a famous writer

(And you can't even write 'whether.' Who cares what your opinion of Mailer is?)

[minaroar]

okay thanks for that, because I care so much about Norman Mailer and wether the guy can write

[steve conn]

He was high you twit. Has nothing to do with his ability to write and reason.

[blacknganga]

god, Mailer total arsehole.

[Ted Peters]

As someone who observed Norman and his work for years, I don't feel that it's a stretch to say that he has some very strong fascist, chauvinist personality traits, and that his exaggerated machismo was a sure sign of latent homosexuality... not unlike the author he tried to hard to emulate, Ernest Hemingway.

[RollingBottleFilms]

Sorry, milady, but Norm had many diverse characters in the novel that is being discussed (The Naked and the Dead). Yes, the General was basically a fascist and a chauvinist, but he also a closeted homosexual. He was a power hungry, psychopathic fraud meant to represent war and the mentality of the Army.

But there were characters like Goldstein and Hearn who were on the other side of the spectrum. One could make the argument that those characters also represented aspects of Mailer's personality.

[minaroar]

why did Germaine Greer waste time with this idiot, he stabbed his wife for God's sake

[pape37]

Does anyone have any idea why in the hell this entire film was taken off Youtube? It was a fantastic documentary that was up for years, and tonight I go to look for it again and find nothing.