Live From New York
Purely Honorable
David Mamet's martial arts film “Redbelt” takes a turn toward the tragic. And that's a good thing.
(Page 2 of 3)
p>
Redbelt
is still classic Mamet, to be sure, with the
requisite poetically off-kilter dialogue, turn-on-a-dime plot
twists and familiar ensemble cast. There has, however, been an
undeniable shift in thematic approach. Compare this paragraph from
a recent
New York Times
piece in which Mamet
unpacked his reasons
for making the film to the one
above from
Bambi vs. Godzilla
:
br>
/p>
Fight films are sad. There is nobility in effort, in discipline and, if not in suffering, in trying to live through suffering and endeavor to find its meaning. “Redbelt,” generically, is a fight film. The martial art film is about opposing strength to strength: two humans compete, and we are allowed to root for the underdog and enjoy his final victory. But the fight film is a celebration of submission, which is to say, of loss. As such, it finds itself on the outskirts of my beloved genre of film noir. The punchline of drama is “Isn’t life like that….” But its elder brother, tragedy, is the struggle of good against evil, of man against the gods. In tragedy, good, and the gods, are proclaimed winners; in film noir, which is tragedy manque, the gods still win, but good’s triumph gets an asterisk.br> The difference between being “allowed to root for” and “enjoy vicariously” is semantic at best. Such an ostentatious display of righteous violence “construed as just,” from a pure hero and presented as noble in the final third of Redbelt apparently suggests a turn toward the tragic, and with it a presumably less morally ambiguous Mamet.
About the Author
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator.
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