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Mametfest Destiny

By Shawn Macomber on 7.15.08 @ 12:07AM

(Page 3 of 4)

"Is he cool?"

"My motherf---er is so cool, when he goes to bed sheep count him."

The system, in other words, has treated Mamet well. "Movies are a huge conglomerate, which is elected by the -- if you want to take the Darwinian view, it's elected by the country at large to talk to the country at large," Mamet told Jim Lehrer in 1987 shortly after the release of his first film, House of Games. "Every time we buy a ticket, we cast our vote in a very, very real way for the people we want to see next."

These votes have hardly benefited Mamet alone, who has been able to surround himself with a stable of talent as idiosyncratically brilliant as himself, from sleight-of-hand expert Ricky Jay and his beguiling wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, to swaggering muse Joe Mantegna and film editor Barbara Tulliver (to whom Bambi vs. Godzilla is dedicated). "People who were twenty when I was twenty are now forty when I'm forty, and it's tough to assemble a cast of friends of your to work cheaply and quickly, because they're all paying off mortgages just like I am," Mamet explained to Lehrer. "One of the reasons I'm excited about movies is they give me an opportunity" -- and the cash necessary -- "to get together and work time after time with people who I'd been working with before."

The happy family, which otherwise would have been torn asunder, existing only as a memory of youth's halcyon days, catapulted, united, into the future thanks to the free market.

As the title of Mamet's sweetest, most underappreciated film suggests, Things Change. In 1977 Mamet told an interviewer television would never supersede theater because it was "like masturbation, if you do it, you do it by yourself in a dark room." In 2007 Mamet was producing, writing, and directing episodes of the successful television series The Unit. And as things kept changing, as Mamet's artistic and financial success continued to build upon itself, the man was bound to become more amenable to the idea that perhaps his success was not at the failure of another. A market that nurtures niche audiences for iconoclasts cannot be all bad.

*****

The Rabbi had said that as one studies the Torah, as one reads the same portions at the same times of the year, year after year, one sees in them a change; but, as they do not change, it must be we who change.
-- David Mamet's 1997 novel, The Old Religion

During a 1998 BBC interview, Mamet described his upbringing in a family of "semi-observant Jews," one generation removed from Polish/Russian immigrants who had fled the 20th century's first wretchedly foreshadowing pogroms:

[My] parents and coterie and, perhaps, to a large extent a slice of their generation had really wanted to be Americans. They didn't want to not be Jews, but they wanted to be Americans. They were the kids of immigrants; they'd been poor. They lived through the Depression. They lived through World War II and found out about the Holocaust. And through it all they wanted to succeed at what they'd been told it's possible to succeed at: being an American, being part of a large nondenominational community.

Ira Nadel's recent illuminating biography, David Mamet: A Life in the Theater, relays a more complicated scenario. The Mamet home, Nadel writes, was "adjacent to the second-largest Jewish area in the city but the parents sought an assimilated life," which, oddly, included Mamet's mother's refusal to react to the anti-Semitic violence and taunts her children regularly endured. Young David's Bar Mitzvah was held in a private room, Nadel reports, unbeknownst to his mother, with only his father, sister, and secret tutor present for the ceremony.

It should come as no surprise that under the circumstances Mamet, as he told a San Francisco audience during a City Arts & Lectures appearance, "didn't see a lot of upside" in his cultural/religious heritage until he grew older. "I was a nice Jewish boy, and I think I probably am a nice Jewish boy, and I wanted to be anything but a nice Jewish boy," the playwright told NPR's Terry Gross in 1994. "I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. Or Jack London. Or someone named Jack."

He eventually ended up more like Bobby Gold (Mamet regular Mantegna), the tougher-than-thou cop of Mamet's 1991 rumination on identity, Homicide, a proudly assimilated Jew who slowly begins to ache for a connection with his heritage. For Gold, the spark is the investigation of the murder of an elderly Jewish candy shop clerk who once ran guns to Zionist forces in the Israeli War of Independence and whose life story subsequently inspires Gold to join forces with an underground Jewish Defense League-type group. Mamet's prompt was a little less dramatic: while attending his niece's Bat Mitzvah, it dawned on him that he hadn't been in a synagogue in decades.

Homicide ends on a tragically ambiguous note, with the Zionist group encouraging Gold to blow up a back-room neo-Nazi print shop, only to use photographs of him setting the bomb to blackmail him into tampering with evidence, and he soon finds himself abandoned and betrayed by both his cultural and professional cohorts.

Mamet's reacclimation, under the tutelage of a Reform rabbi named Lawrence Kushner with whom he would eventually co-write the 2003 book-length Torah commentary Five Cities of Refuge, was much less rocky, if a still profound experience. As in all other things, Mamet came out of his religious studies swinging. "The way to combat anti-Semitism, religious abuse, or his own neglected Judaism," Nadel observes, "was to become more Jewish." In the mid-1990s, in the moving novella Passover, Mamet wrote of the pogroms his family suffered, but the truth of Nadel's statement is nowhere more boldly advertised than in the playwright's at times shocking 2006 polemic, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews, in which he charges the "scoffing 'ex'-Jew" with what amounts to secular heresy:

To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who, in the nineties, envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israeli Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises tradition but fidget through the seder; who might take their curiosity to a dogfight, to a bordello or an opium den but find ludicrous the notion of a visit to the synagogue; whose favorite Jew is Anne Frank and whose second-favorite Jew does not exist; who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of TuBi'Shvat; who dread endogamy more than incest; who bow the head reverently at a baptism and have never attended a bris -- to you, who find your religion and race repulsive, your ignorance of your history a satisfaction, here is a book from your brother.

Mamet's conversion to a libertarian form of philosophical conservatism -- not political Republicanism -- is almost certainly connected to this passionate reaffirmation of his Jewish heritage and faith. One of the first examples Mamet gives in his Village Voice piece of his changing ideology is his view that NPR might as well stand for "National Palestinian Radio." (Really, how long can one rail against the international slander the IDF endures without recognizing the U.S. military has perhaps been similarly railroaded in the court of world opinion?) Later, when explaining the spark behind his political-philosophical self-inventory, he notes that it was his rabbi who reminded his "exclusively liberal" congregation "that Jewish law teaches that is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out."

When that intellectual dust settled, Mamet had been sold on what he calls the "conservative (or tragic) view" over the "liberal (or perfectionist) view," wherein everything is "magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost." The tenets of Judaism opened Mamet's mind to other perspectives he very well may have shunned in his earlier assimilated years. In the end liberalism became a kind of cousin to performance art to Mamet, who many years ago told New Theater Quarterly of the latter, "You have to ignore a hell of a lot to enjoy yourself at such a performance. You have to pretend you are something that you are not."

*****

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