Mailer’s interest in film dates back to his early career, when he went to Hollywood in a failed attempt to work on a screenplay with friend and mentor Jean Malaquais. Despite this failure, Mailer did return to filmmaking in the 1960s, ultimately making Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone – three films that exemplify the kind of ambitious experimentation that defines so much of Mailer’s career. None of these films contain what could be considered a straightforward narrative; rather, Mailer instructed his actors to improvise around a theme while he let the camera run, later editing together hours of footage to create a more constrained piece. This chapter discusses Mailer’s journey to make these films, their reception, and the philosophy of cinema that influenced their creation, which Mailer outlines in his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk.”

Interlude II, ‘Lord Viscount Maidstone’s Address’, pursues Chapter 2’s themes of localised community formation and articulation through close analysis of a single election ballad of 1852, set to a popular political tune of the late eighteenth century, ‘Bow, Wow, Wow’. I situate the song within the political and spatial context of the Westminster election, and demonstrate its suitability as a satirical form based on both the tune’s associations and its innate melopoetic properties. In contrasting the Liberal party’s continued use of such songs with the Tory preference for more modern campaign media, I apply the chronological contentions of the previous chapter to this mid-century case study, demonstrating the continued effectiveness, within a spatially contained neighbourhood, of this early modern form of political expression.