Mailer on the '70s—Decade of "Image, Skin Flicks and Porn"

This story originally appeared in the December 10, 1979, issue of U.S.News & World Report.

"Curiosity must attach itself to something"
The '70s was the decade in which people put emphasis on the skin, on the surface, rather than on the root of things. It was the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on.

If there is nothing happening in the depths, then people pay a great deal of attention to the surface. The human energy that is grounded in curiosity must attach itself to something. If nothing is going on down below, we will look very carefully at the skin of things. That is why skin flicks and pornographic magazines have been so successful.

Carter: "Not philosophical" can mean "dangerous"
Leaders today are much less philosophically oriented than they used to be. They lack the sense that there is a world beneath the world of appearances.

To be philosophical, you need to have some sense of responsibility to matters other than the immediate social problems before you. You need to see what you do in perspective against a historical framework or social setting rather than just as a technician who is tightening nuts and changing gaskets.

A leader who does not have some philosophical turn of mind is a dangerous leader. If there is anything dangerous about Jimmy Carter, it's that he is not a philosopher. But everything in the scheme of things today tends to destroy what little philosophical potential a leader has. You can't be very philosophical if the most exciting event in your day is to get the news out for the evening TV shows. What does that—finally—have to do with anything?

Journalism's "psychopathic appetite"
The press is like a doctor who gives you too many injections. It is a bad physician who won't let the patient arrive at anything by himself.

I'm terribly cynical about the way the press works. I know enough about writing to be pretty certain that very often you can't find a story even after months of the hardest work. You can't be too certain about what happened. So I believe there is a fundamental irresponsibility in the very act of journalism. The idea that news can be reported on the same day it happened has something monstrous about it.

There is an appetite in journalism for immediate satisfaction. When we find that appetite in an adult, we call it psychopathic; we say that anyone who can't wait for satisfaction is unbalanced. Yet when it comes to journalism, we insist that we get our news immediately. That has to destroy all sorts of careful social processes: It makes people who are engaged in these processes more secretive than ever; it institutionalizes paranoia in government behavior.

Superhighways vs. "spiritual well-being"
There is something about technology that is insidious, debilitating and depressing. But the worst things technology does are so subtle that if one fulminates against it, one is in danger of always sounding hysterical.

No one in power seems to have any political concept that can deal with the impact technology is having on our spiritual well-being. It is hard to conceive of a responsible politician getting up in Congress and saying: "There may be something fundamentally wrong with superhighways. They may be deadening to the human spirit." If anyone spoke that way, his qualifications for office would be questioned.

Yet there's a profound question about whether the superhighway makes any sense whatsoever. It's the most disagreeable way to pass through a landscape. You've also got the totally disagreeable experience of traveling at 55 and 65 miles per hour on a road designed for cars moving at 70 and 80.

The sense of adventure we're deprived of by traveling on a superhighway, the sense of satisfaction one gets from navigating by a road map and figuring out how to make three or four highway changes—these small demands and stimulations have been removed. All this saps the spirit slightly.

"Totalitarianism is natural for technology"
Totalitarianism is the natural form of government for technology. Technology prides itself on making immense moves, in performing feats.

You can perform a large collective feat in a society only if you have an emergency or a dictatorship. Otherwise, it's just too difficult. The process of democratic argument blunts the attempt.

An idea to "restore nervous tissue to the city"
There are very simple, profound steps that can be taken to deal with many of the nation's problems.

For example, years ago when I ran for mayor of New York, I had one particularly happy idea: "Sweet Sunday." Once a month, everything would stop except what was needed for absolute emergencies. The only cars that could move would be ambulances and, conceivably, a police car or two. Everybody else would walk because there would be no subways. The idea was to let the city have a sense of peace once a month. I thought that this stoppage might restore an awful lot of nervous tissue to the city.

Something of that sort could be applied to America as a whole if we wanted to save energy. Just think—nothing moving one day a month! It would be a formal holiday. These are the kinds of changes that are needed. But I see nothing in the political atmosphere that would lead to such changes.

Mailer's metamorphosis of motive
I once had the vanity or the conceit that I could comprehend the country. I dared to present myself as a doctor with prescriptions. I don't have that arrogance any longer. I've come to the point where I don't even know what the trouble is, so I have lost a certain interest in writing about problems in this country. They're almost too large.

I used to write with the idea of changing the ways in which other people think, but now probably what I am most interested in is the way in which I think. The only way I can come close to understanding how others think is to discover what the nature of my own thought is.

Literary style: "A tool for exploring reality"
The world is more mysterious than our assumptions about it. The only way to try to find out what it is all about is to come to know something very well, and it may be that the thing I am closest to is the process of my own thought.

That's one reason why I injected myself as a central figure in my books for so long: It seemed to me that the best way I could show others what an event was like was to show them the way I perceived it and thereby enable them to look at it with a certain perspective.

When you get into doing a book, you find each has its own life—or lack of it. You have to almost invent a strategy for writing a book. The style you choose is a part of that strategy: It is a tool for exploring reality. Different realities call for different styles, different modes of perception.

Impact of "blockbusters"
The emphasis on the big blockbuster book is harmful to serious writing. If you can't earn money at a certain kind of writing, then there's a tendency not to write that way.

For example, I was never tempted to explore the possibilities of the short story because, economically speaking, it was just not terribly feasible. So if authors simply can't make a living by writing well-turned novels that don't sell a great deal, then that type of writing is going to disappear.

If the focus continues on blockbuster books, then writing is going to become a little bit more like producing movies: There'll be more and more people in on it, and it will become a collective effort. To that extent, the aesthetics will be leeched out.

But resistance to blockbusters may develop.For one thing, it's probably less agreeable for authors to work for a big publishing house that manufactures blockbusters than to work for a house that, at least in part, has a serious literary intent.

I also think that if the country heads into a large depression, the age of the blockbuster may be over. We may go back to the kind of publishing we had in the '30s, when small houses put out a few books.

Finally, publishers are reasonably literary people. About the time they realize that they're putting out a product that they don't enjoy any more, the change may come from within.

But, in the meantime, the problems of publishing are profound. There's a real question of whether people will even be reading books in 100 years.