The American Spectator

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.”