Norman T. Kingsley (Mailer) is an experimental filmmaker/presidential candidate planning a remake of Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. Under the protection of an elite security force led by his brother (Torn), Kingsley barrels through the production set at a palatial Hamptons villa and much of his cast (including three of Mailer’s ex-wives), spouting existential philosophies of politics and sexuality. Both the film within the film and the film itself are works of excess built on exhausted hippie ideals culminating in the final confrontation between Torn and Mailer, in which the line between fiction and reality is bludgeoned with a hammer.