Town Bloody Hall (1979) documents a singular historical moment, a “dialogue on women’s liberation” that took place on April 30, 1971, in New York’s Town Hall. The event was staged by the Theater for Ideas as an opportunity to keep the organization financially afloat. Although it was a comparably early moment in second-wave feminism, the movement had already gained so much momentum that even Norman Mailer had felt the need to weigh in. The occasion for this event was Mailer’s longform article, “The Prisoner of Sex,” written in response to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, which included a chapter about Mailer. Many prominent feminists had declined invitations to serve as panelists, including Millett herself. In the end, it featured Jacqueline Ceballos (president of the New York chapter of NOW), Germaine Greer (best-selling author and eventual TERF about to appear on the cover of Life magazine), Jill Johnston (culture critic for the Village Voice and lesbian separatist), Diana Trilling (an older and more established literary critic, or “our leading lady critic” according to Mailer), and Mailer himself as the chair of the panel. Each speaker was given 10 minutes to make their case and would then be subjected to Mailer’s improvised questions. The audience, which was chock-full of early seventies literary celebrities, would be allowed to ask questions, too. I first encountered the film through a clip of Susan Sontag asking Mailer from her front row seat why he insists on referring to women as ‘ladies.’ He responded that he wanted to pay Trilling a compliment for being the best “of her kind.”
The documentary, a collaboration between D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, is assembled from chaotically filmed footage that Pennebaker had at the time dismissed as unwatchable. Mailer knew Pennebaker and asked him to document the event, but Pennebaker never got permission from the venue, so he had to film while dodging security. In the late seventies, Hegedus returned to this footage and began editing it, cutting the three-and-a-half-hour event to 85 minutes. She said that she was so struck by the sexual tension between Mailer and Greer that she was tempted to tell it as a love story. In many ways, it is a story about a gorgeous, glamorous feminist and a diminutive chauvinist and curmudgeon responsive to her charm. But it is also a story about a crowd that gathered to partake in a theater of ideas. Although the finished product is anything but unwatchable—it’s almost impossible to look away—it makes me feel a bit seasick every time I see it. Melissa Anderson has described it as a “work of oceanography,” capturing “one splashing moment in the cresting and crashing of American feminism’s second wave.” It not only records but also induces a feeling of unstable ground. No one knows what exactly is happening and where all of this is heading, including someone like me, more than half a century into the future. Though any viewer would have had at least some hindsight, Town Bloody Hall sweeps you up in this sense of pervasive uncertainty. There is a rush of open-endedness, the hope that gender relations will be rethought and remade, and the fear that they won’t. It’s hard to watch without a pounding heart.
I imagine it bears some similarity to what it must have felt like to participate in women’s consciousness-raising groups at that time, though this is surely not the kind of group in which consciousness raising was likely to take place. For one, the whole atmosphere is too combative to count as a safe space. For another, there is a lack of agreement about who is there to speak and who to listen. Whenever the women on the podium or the audience try to point out to Mailer that there are things he does not understand, he insists on his epistemic equality, shouting things like, “I’ll teach you and you teach me! Fuck you! I want to teach you too!” But his eagerness to dominate the discussion suggests that he is convinced of his epistemic superiority, and that he believes he has deeper truths to teach, though what these are is very difficult to discern. Elizabeth Hardwick reminds him of something he wrote in “The Prisoner of Sex,” which begins with the story of his wife leaving him and saddling him with domestic chores. The camera zooms unstably on Hardwick’s coiffed look. She says in her Southern drawl, “I was very interested in your experiences about doing the dishes.” As it turns out, Mailer only did dishes for two weeks, at which point he asked his mistress to come up and take over. He nevertheless wanted to communicate the “particular bit of knowledge [he] got out of it,” whatever that was. When Mailer feels left out, he decides to put his domestic skills to use and pours the panelists glasses of water. But even then, he cannot remain successfully in the background. Pennebaker cuts to him lifting the jug, distracting from the conversation that is taking place behind his back.
Town Bloody Hall has as its subtitle “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation.” Framed as a dialogue, the documentary raises questions about the promises and drawbacks of conversations, especially of debates between political opponents. Georgia Warnke has argued that public deliberation, which is so often treated as a paradigm of rational persuasion, is highly restricted in its capacity to get people to reflect critically. She points out that debates often take place on distorted terms, displaying widely shared prejudices without being able to bring them up for review. The documentary highlights some of these terms, which would have been obvious to everyone present at the event. It opens with a woman in the lobby shouting “Women’s lib betrays the poor!” while New York’s elite file into the venue, each with a $25 ticket. The documentary also allows us to see terms that were maybe less obvious to the debates’ participants. As the camera pans across this sizable audience, it shows us a sea of exclusively white faces. Jacqueline Ceballos even makes her limited perspective proudly explicit. When the beat poet, Gregory Corso, storms out of the hall shouting “All of humanity! Not just half of it!” Ceballos responds that while NOW does not divert its time fighting for the peace movement or the civil rights movement, it is because the organization believes that the root of everything is women’s liberation. She does not seem to notice that by excluding the concerns of these other movements, she clearly could not even mean all women, let alone all of humanity. This paints a picture of political progress as less of a well-lit stage on which people spar, and more of a dark corridor through which people stumble.
If conversations take place on distorted terms that are not coming up for review, it might seem like conversations will be as limited as the perspectives of their participants. But the course of a conversation is also shaped by the chemistry between people, their attraction or repulsion to one another, which can exceed the sum of its parts. An erotic charge brews between Mailer and Greer, and between the audience and the podium. What makes Town Bloody Hall so grippingly destabilizing is a sense that anything could happen that night. The sources of exhilaration are interruptions, which sway the crowd in unpredictable directions. You have the feeling that this event is one interruption away from exposing and maybe even combusting some ground that everyone takes for granted. In fact, this dialogue on women’s liberation arrives at its peak not when mutual understanding is reached (it never is), but when conversation breaks down. Jill Johnston’s poetic manifesto, which opens with the line “All women are lesbians except those don’t know it, naturally,” runs over her allotted 10 minutes. Mailer insists that she wrap her speech up. The crowd becomes a rowdy interlocutor not playing by the rules but intervening through cheers and jeers. Although the camera centers Mailer’s ill-tempered figure, it cuts to a shot of Johnston rolling on the floor, embracing two women from the audience who have jumped onto the stage. When Mailer refuses to let her finish her speech, she and the two women simply leave. As Johnston’s exit illustrates, not every conversation is worth having, not every battle worth fighting. So, one way for such a dialogue on women’s liberation to come to an end is through lesbian separatism.
By the end of the film, I am left wondering whether anyone’s mind was significantly changed. Perhaps the purpose of such an event (and such a film) is not to change minds, but to put ‘ideas’—whether good or bad—on theatrical display. But the film also suggests that these ideas are so attractive or repulsive to us because they are represented by attractive or repulsive people. What is on display are not the ideas themselves, but their charismatic embodiments, whose gestures, postures, grumpy interruptions, and spontaneous laughter linger in our memory long after we’ve forgotten what any of them said.
