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MARSHALL COHEN
greedily upon Andrea's goose: the image of his humiliation, and its cause.
The Linc,oln Center group claims to
be
performing the Laughton
version. In fact, there are many additions from the far more explicit
Berlin version (prepared for a plebian audience), and a number of
serious omissions, including the "plague" scene, which shows that
Galileo is no coward when he wants to get on with his physics. More
importantly, the "carnival" scene is badly cut, obscurely set forth and
foolishly employed as a curtain-raiser to the arbitrarily selected second
act. This scene is critically important in establishing the revolutionary
potentialities of Galileo's new science, and it suggests the disastrous
consequences of his abjuration. The final scene is omitted as well. The
burden of ushering in the new age, of building a land that needs no
heroes, has passed to Galileo's disciples and by implication to Brecht's
audience. Galileo's betrayal has made the task more difficult, and the
little boys still believe in witches. There are no disciples, or little boys,
in Hirsch's VistaVision finale; only a pitiable old man, alone with the
stars.
Galileo's collapse before the Inquisition merely delays the dawn of
the new scientific age, and the task of his disciples, Andrea and Feder–
zoni, is simply to bring that age to birth. Eitel's capitulation to the
Senate Investigating Committee in Mailer's
The Deer Park
marks the
death of liberalism, and Eitel's disillusioned admirers, the ex-Army flier,
Sergius O'Shaughnessy, and the post-Nietzschean pimp, Marion Faye,
must discover the new dispensation for themselves. Hiroshima is a
critical event for Mailer, as it is for Brecht. For Mailer, however, it sig–
nifies not the corruption of reason, but the sickness of feeling and the
longing for nihilistic destruction. (Sergius falls impotent after shower–
ing the Japanese with atomic "radiations of hate" and Marion, dressed
in a shiny
S/M
leather suit, calls upon the atomic "Sun God" to
cleanse the corrupt City.) Sergius and Marion can now be seen as
anticipations of later developments in Mailer's thought. Mailer sup–
poses that inside every liberal a hipster is trying to get out, but Sergius
emerges convincingly only in Mailer's subsequent short story, "The
Time of Her Tune." Marion Faye is plainly struggling toward the
Nietzschean view that whatever is done out of love is done beyond good
and evil--or toward Mailer's Reichian restatement of it. Faye has em–
braced the vulgar paradox that vice is identical with virtue, having
sensed Nietzsche's finer point, that both are conceived in hate. But
he
has
yet to make Rojack's discovery that hatred must be purged,
if
necessary by murder, before orgasm is possible. In their inchoate state
Sergius and Marion fail to carry the philosophical burden placed on
