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Mametfest Destiny

By Shawn Macomber on 7.15.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 4)

You see, in my trade, this is called -- what you did -- you cracked out of turn. Huh? You see? You crumbed the play.
-- Mike, teaching the con as part of a con, House of Games

In his 2007 essay collection, Bambi vs. Godzilla, Mamet argued that every successful scene in a screenplay will "stringently apply and stringently answer" three questions:

Who wants what from whom?
What happens if they don't get it?
Why now?

Let's set the scene according to his rules: Mamet wants from the literati to be recognized as separate from an ideological myopia even his most ardent (former?) admirers assume he has been struck with. We already know what he will do should he not get said recognition: publish a declaration of independence in one of liberalism's pride and joy publications. This act of defiance, essentially, leaves the shot all over save the crying and that last niggling little question: Why now?

Some conservatives reacted to Mamet's essay with a Manifest Destiny attitude -- providence long ago deemed he would be ours; it was just a matter of time. True, the former Chicago cabbie's rough-hewn, workman attitude toward the craft of writing ("You know...you need to build a garage but you can't afford a bricklayer," he once told the New Yorker's John Lahr. "Well, hell, figure out how to lay bricks. You need a script, well, hell, figure out how to write one"), his crew cut ("the haircut of an honest, two-pair-of-jeans working man, a man from Chicago, a man without vanity whose being stands without need of either introduction or apology," he wrote in a 1992 New York Times essay), combined with a pronounced distaste for pretension -- all this suggested something more substantial than fey liberalism. Consider, as further evidence, the following exchange from his one-act play Bobby Gould in Hell:

Bobby: "Nothing's black and white."

The Devil: "Nothing's black and white? What about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb f--k!"

No moral relativism here. Mamet may have attended Goddard College in the 1960s -- a "hippie, radical, drug-infested school for f--k-ups like myself," he once told the Guardian, preparing students for "no society more exclusive than the criminally bohemian" -- ushering in a lifelong love affair with flinty rural Vermont, where the writer still maintains a home, but he never romanticized the era. Asked by New Theater Quarterly in 1988 whether he felt the performance art of the 1960s served an artistic end, Mamet sniped, "It had a purpose in the way a guy goes into McDonald's, pulls a gun, and kills a bunch of people. Obviously, there is some meaning. But it's not very constructive." In his book On Directing Film, Mamet likewise excoriated filmmakers who indulge in overwrought shot set-ups, likening it to useless counterculture architecture and zinging, "And to you lovely enthusiasts who will aver the purpose of modern art is not to be liked, I respond, 'oh, grow up.'"

Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory of Mamet as a closeted conservative can be easily dispelled. Perusing Bambi vs. Godzilla and you will find a comparison of the fights between "Acting President Reagan," as Mamet was fond of calling him in the 1980s, and organized labor to the Pharaoh's treatment of the Israelites ("Capital, if it cannot call Labor 'Reds,' will call it 'Thugs,'" Mamet adds). To be fair, this union love probably has its roots in the fact that Mamet's father was a hard-charging lawyer for United Steelworkers Union and the AFL-CIO, but that hardly explains Mamet's praise of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 as a film in which "the unsayable is said and which, thus, for a moment, breaks the corrosive cycle of oppression."

Contra the Guardian's Billington, Mamet has always insisted that political interpretations of his work were a case of ignoring his dramatic intent, which necessitates creating conflict, in favor of adopting a convenient political takeaway message. Worse, such literary lecturing was predictable -- a high crime in Mamet's mind. Here's how he put it in a 1994 interview with Playboy:

I've noticed over the past thirty years that a lot of what passes in the theater is not drama but, rather, a morality tale. "Go thou now and do likewise." When you leave the theater and you say, "Oh, now I get it. Women are people, too." Or, "Now I get it, handicapped people have rights," then you feel very soothed for the amount of time it takes you to get to your car. Then you forget about the play.

Even with regard to Exhibit A in the conservative case for Mametfest Destiny, the 1992 play Oleanna, the playwright told Playboy in 1995 that this tale of a smug college professor brought down by a patriarchy-obsessed female student's false accusation of sexual harassment was simply a "tragedy about power"; a play "about two people, and each person's point of view is correct." (My colleague John Tabin nonetheless has a valid point when he argues, "You can't observe a milieu that keenly without noticing the flaws in its worldview." Eventually.) Others have pointed to Mamet's 1982 play Edmond -- adapted for the screen in 2005 by Re-Animator horror director Stuart Gordon -- in which the angry-white-male title character snaps under the weight of political correctness, as a signpost. Yet Mamet described the story to the New York Times as "very, very hopeful," in large part because the grossly racist, homophobic title character "resolves...basic dichotomies" by falling in love with his black male cellmate after being convicted of murder -- a good twist, if not exactly a moment pregnant with latent social conservatism.

It's fair to say, certainly, that Mamet's body of work is less difficult to square with a turn toward conservatism than that of, say, Michael Moore. But how would we have read the same tea leaves sans the Village Voice piece? To double up on clichéd metaphors, the eye of the beholder cuts both ways, and there are many reasons to suspect something new is happening here.

*****

Hollywood is capitalism at its best: opposing forces working it out, using the tools of the marketplace. As such, it's vastly messier than totalitarianism, but it kills a lot less people. -- Mamet, interview, TimeOut New York, 2007

David Mamet appears to be a liberal who has been mugged...by success.

Through his early years of struggle and even well into his most successful theater years, Mamet, who only began writing seriously when the Chicago theater company he founded with his former student William H. Macy in 1972 couldn't afford to pay royalties, harbored serious doubts as to whether modern capitalistic America had the capacity to reward a unique vision. This led to the writer spending much of his career throwing around terms such as lumpenproletariat and disdainfully shellacking the American ethic, which he distilled in Studies in American Drama (1984) as, "Your extremity is my opportunity.... One can only succeed, at the cost of, the failure of another..." A few years later Mamet confided to New Theater Quarterly, "In a very, very strictly structured, increasingly authoritarian environment, which is life in this country, if one pursues a career one of the main aspects of which is being an iconoclast one is not going to have the happiest time of it."

Mamet, of course, proved spectacularly wrong on this point. While reasonable people may dispute the merits of his distinctive approach to dialogue -- Ben Brantley praised it as "ingeniously ordered American street phrases and cadenced slang," while Mamet told the Guardian he intended to create "a poetic restatement of my idea of how people talk" -- few serious critics disagree that Mamet has created a world unto itself, fantastically intricate and instantly recognizable. Try to imagine the following lines from his 2001 film Heist, for example, in any other filmmaker's work:

"I'm going to be as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton."

"I want you to be as quiet as an ant not even thinking about pissing on cotton."

Or:

Letter to the Editor

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