A life in the theater

I don’t know what kind of person playwright and filmmaker David Mamet is in his real life.  He could be charming, kindly, tender, and thoughtful, careful of everyone else’s feelings, and the soul of generosity.  That’s just not the kind of person he likes to present himself as being.

I’m going to echo James Wolcott here.  Mamet has always wanted us to see him as a street-smart tough guy who’d figured out all the angles and knew the real score.  A hardcase strong enough to look the world square in the eye and not afraid to say what he saw.  He would tell it like it is, even if you didn’t want to hear it. 

Mamet’s a pretty good playwright.  He’s a fairly decent movie director.  He’s a rotten actor.

I don’t mean he’s rotten in the way you don’t believe a rotten actor’s performance because you don’t believe it resembles the way a real person in that situation would feel and think and speak and behave.  I mean that Mamet isn’t playing his character as he thinks he’s playing him.  Instead of coming across as a tough guy, he comes across as a swaggering jerk and a punk.

Lately, he’s added to the character.  Now he’s not just a swaggering jerk and a punk, he’s a swaggering rich asshole and a jerk and a punk.

Not only does he know the score and have all the angles figured out, it’s made him piles of cash he has no intention of sharing with anybody, not even his own kid, so suck on that, you fucking losers.

The persona is nasty and repulsive, but I get the feeling that at some level he knows that and likes it.  It’s like he’s getting a kick out of the thought he’s driving people away.

Now, what I’m going on here is Mamet’s own portrayal of himself in this interview he did with Andrew Goldman for the New York Times.  Like I said, I don’t know what he’s really like or how much of this act is an act.  But he’s been at it for a long time now and it’s beginning to seem convincing.  Too convincing.  To the point that if it ever was just an act, it’s not seeming so much like one anymore, and you wonder if his friends are starting to say to one another, “What the heck’s got into David?”

I can’t help imagining that if he was ever good and decent, if he was ever fun to work for and work with, if he was ever enjoyable company, if he was ever a comfort and rock to his friends, family, colleagues, employees, and other dependents, being around him these days is like what it must have been like being around Scrooge in the months leading up to Belle’s breaking off their engagement.

People who knew him from the old days and liked and admired him don’t know what to make of it as they watch him growing more squeezing, grasping, covetous, solitary, secret, and self-contained.  He’s saying things about what he’d do to idiots going about with Merry Christmas on their lips and suggesting methods for decreasing the surplus population and his friends are telling each other he must be joking but they’re thinking they’re really not sure he is.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into Ebenezer lately.  He used to be such a Fezziwig kind of guy, but more and more you know who he’s reminding me of?”

“Marley?”

“Marley!  Exactly!”

Fifteen or so years from now after the Republicans have held the White House and both houses of Congress for a while and Social Security has been privatized and all the money in the personal accounts has been gobbled up by the banksters, supposedly “lost” in the bursting of another bubble, and the Ryan Plan has kicked in and Medicare is gone, and some sixty-five year old stagehand  with bad knees and a bad back, whose union was broken a long time ago, who’s still working because he can’t live off the little he’s managed to scramble to save in place of his looted pension, breaks his leg falling off a catwalk while working on Mamet’s latest play about what manipulative weaklings and whiners cancer victims are, maybe Mamet will swoop in and pay all the poor guy’s hospital bills and after the guy gets out of the hospital and while he’s recovering Mamet will pay his rent and then when he’s ready to come back to work Mamet will find him a job where he gets to sit down his whole shift, reading the newspaper in a booth just inside the stage door, and every Christmas Mamet will slip him a few thousand bucks, muttering embarrassedly from behind the cigar clenched in his teeth, “Take care of those grandkids, willya, Joe?”

Maybe he’s been doing this kind of thing all along.

But that’s not the kind of rich guy he presents himself as.  That’s not the kind of rich guy he wants his son to admire and emulate.  That’s not the kind of rich guy he thinks we should expect other rich guys to be like.

“I fucking got mine, they fucking got theirs, you fucking get yours, if you fucking can, you weak and stupid fucks.”

Though who can tell if he means it.

This has been Mamet’s shtick for as long as I can remember.  He’s always seemed to enjoy holding some opinions and mouthing off about them because he enjoys how much it pisses certain people off.

And his career has depended on his being thought controversial.  He’s a good playwright, but he’s not that good.  You don’t go to his plays---or his movies---to learn any secrets of the human heart.  You don’t go to care about his characters, not deeply at any rate, and if you go to be surprised by the twists and turns of his plots, you can only do it by not just a willing suspension of disbelief but a willful suspension of memory and thought.

Once upon a time you went to be thrilled at the way he played with language, which was like the way a blindfolded juggler played with knives.  But after a while, you get it.  He can juggle knives without cutting himself.  Now how about mixing it up a little, David?  How about juggling an orange or two along with the knives?  How about juggling more than three knives?  And he’s been out-juggled over the last decade or so…by television writers!  The Sopranos’ David Chase.  Deadwood’s David Milch.  And, far and away, by David Simon.  (What’s with all the Davids?)  One episode of The Wire is worth any two or three of Mamet’s plays, and not just for the thrill of the knife-juggling.

But if you cast your mind back, you realize that much of what Mamet was putting on stage at the start of his career was already being done on television, by the writers of MASH and All in the Family, then by the writers of Hill Street Blues.  It was also happening in the movies.  It’s fun to recall how many of the great films of the late 60s and early 70s were talky films. The Graduate.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  The Last Detail.  Dog Day Afternoon.  That one has a special resonance in Mamet’s career because of its star.  Al Pacino has had a lot to do with the fact that we know David Mamet’s name.  Chinatown. Network…

American Buffalo got to the stage at around the same time as Network made it to the movie theaters, but The Hospital beat it by five years, and, anyway, watch Network and Glengarry Glen Ross side by side and it’s almost impossible not to see the homage to Ned Beatty’s “You have meddled” speech in Alec Baldwin’s big scene (which was added for the movie, I believe). Mamet knows where he came from.

It’s not a dismissal to say that Mamet was the product of a trend.  Shakespeare was the product of a trend.  But Mamet wasn’t as much of an innovator as he first appeared to be---critics and audiences who thought so must not have gone to the movies or watched TV or maybe they werejust  so surprised at hearing this kind of a wordplay on stage that they forgot where else they’d heard it---and as a “poet,” he hasn’t grown.

Like I said, he’s still juggling the same three knives.

Nope. You go to his plays to be made uncomfortable.  You go to have your liberal prejudices and pieties challenged.  You go to find yourself squirming in your seat as you sympathize with characters you know you’d hate in real life and hating characters you suspect are meant to be a lot like you.

You go in order to get pissed off at Mamet.

And one of the ways Mamet pisses his audiences off is by implying that liberalism is bullshit and liberals are chumps for believing the bullshit.  Which is fine. What the American theater doesn’t need more of is earnest, self-congratulatory liberal sermonizing.

You’re a feminist?  Have you seen my play Oleanna?

I love your precious ideals about art.  Wanna come to a revival of Speed-the-Plow?

You think there’s more to life than money?  Here’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

Yeah, I don’t get how any decent person could be a racist, either.  By the way, how’d you like my latest?

At any rate, every couple of years, it’s seemed, we get the news that David Mamet is becoming a conservative.  The only way this is news, though, is if you assume that anyone working in the arts in New York City must be a liberal if not an out and out communist.  I imagine Mamet gets a kick out of people assuming this because he assumes the people assuming it are liberals and their assumption shows up their prejudices.  He gets a good laugh at the thought of them sputtering in outrage, “How can anyone as smart and talented as David Mamet think like that?”

In the past, though, he seemed content to be more of a contrarian about it, to make it sound like more of temperamental tick than a political stance, as if he was saying, I’m not a Right Wing Republican but I sure do understand how somebody could be.

This time out, however, he’s changed his tune.  He’s more crassly, more explicitly, and more self-servingly political.

In the New York Times piece, he sounds like another cheap---as in stingy---Republican Randian, full of spite and bile at the “parasites” clamoring for his money and reserving the threat of going Galt.  Randians talk about wealth creators as if they are really that, creators, producing money out of nothing or out of themselves the way artists produce their creations.  Of course, the only artists who come close to creating all by themselves are painters and sculptors and so the comparison only works if other people are to the Galts of the world what brushes and hammers and chisels are to painters and sculptors, that is, tools, an idea the Randians have no problem with.  But wealth creation is like every human endeavor, a social endeavor and therefore a collaborative one.  None of us gets anything done without help.  It’s ridiculous to talk otherwise and Mamet is even more ridiculous because he works in one of the most collaborative of human endeavors, the performing arts.

We don’t need more than one word to take care of this.

Actors.

But we can add a few more.  Stagehands.  Make-up artists.  Costume and set designers.  Directors.  Producers.  Old guys named Joe sitting by the stage door.

How rich would David Mamet be if he’d had to make his money off reciting his own plays on street corners?

I haven’t read anywhere if he does, but if Mamet wants to vote Republican, that’s his business, and anyway as a New Yorker he can’t do much damage with that vote.  The last time this state went for a Republican for President was 1984 and that might really be the last time, at least in Mamet’s lifetime.  As for the state and local levels, if Carl Paladino had been elected governor at least he’d have been incompetent when it came to raising taxes on the middle and working classes while not raising them on millionaires, and I’ll leave it to people who know City politics how much better any Democrat with a shot would have been than Michael Bloomberg and if there was a Democrat with a shot after Bloomberg decided to make himself mayor for life.

The thing is that the Republican Party’s move to the right over the last thirty-five or so years---which happens to coincide with the entire course of Mamet’s career---and to the far right over the last fifteen hasn’t only been economic.  It’s been hate-filled, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic.  And while Mamet might be able to say “Screw the fucking poor” without a twinge of guilt because the poor are abstractions to him, he would have no career, no job, no money, and a lot fewer friends without women, people of color, and gays and lesbians working with him and for him and around him every single fucking day!

Now, the Right Wingers deny their misogyny (Look! Sarah Palin! Michelle Bachman!) and they’re mostly adept at denying and coding their racism.  But they are out and proud in their hatred of gay people.

As a rich asshole, being a Republican is in Mamet’s self-interest.  But as an artist working in the theater, being a loudmouth about being a Republican is definitely against his professional interests.

The comedian Tracy Morgan may have just self-destructed but if his career survives it will be because the gay people he works with and for are tolerant and forgiving.  Morgan’s boss on 30 Rock, his real life boss as well as his onscreen boss, Tina Fey laid it out for him:

I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket.

It’s one thing to adopt a politics that defends your economic self-interest.  Liberals do that too.  It’s another thing, though, to adopt a politics that threatens the economic well-being and survival of millions.  But it’s something else entirely to advocate a politics that basically says that the people you work with and whose work you depend on and whom if only out of self-interest you ought to look out for and care for have no right to be themselves.

I observed this once in the case of another Republican working and thriving in the theater and Hollywood, Kelsey Grammar, that his life and career are only possible thanks to the liberalism he affects to despise.  Mamet’s another one who couldn’t get by, and who couldn’t mouth off as a Right Wing jackass without suffering for it professionally, if it weren’t for the fact that liberals are, well, liberal.

You’d think since he’s such a street-smart and savvy guy and knows the score and has figured out all the angles, that would be fucking obvious to the fucking jerk.

____________________

The last time I noticed Mamet’s perpetually creeping conservativism had made the news was three years ago when The Village Voice published his infamous essay, Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.

Mamet has a new book of essays out The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.  And of course if anyone’s going to have that secret knowledge figured out, it’s going to be David Mamet.

Introducing a less than positive review by John Lloyd in the Financial Times, James Wolcott gets the ball rolling with a quick summing up of Mamet the posturing tough guy turned essayist:

It's an effective guise and mode of attack when Mamet is operating within his own hermetic game room and controlling the data stream, but once he moves out of his scripts and screenplays and into nonfiction, he's out there playing with the rest of us, and his shtick crumbles like so many breadsticks because when it comes to history and politics he doesn't know nearly as much as he thinks he does and his rhetoric ratchets down from "Mamet speak" to the exhaust-pipe sputter of your average cranky old fart who needs a Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh harangue to get his pacemaker started.

By the way, congratulations to Mr Wolcott on winning a Newhouse School Mirror Award for Best Commentary, Traditional Media. 

Update: Film critic Bob Westal is someone else for whom Mamet’s grumpy drift to the right is not news.

Photo of Mamet via the New York Times.

Comments

[John Emerson]

Everything he says is right-libertarian boilerplate of the common hardass variety. It's the kind of thing I leave the house hoping to avoid, all too aware that I might run into it anyway. Whatever interest it has comes from who it is that says it. It's like a veteran musician dropping down to death metal at the end of his career.

A lot of hardass rebels are completely self-centered, as he confesses to being here -- radical when poor and reactionary when rich. Getting in people's faces is their whole story.

[Nancy]

Wow this is such a great piece!

[Bob Westal]

Very nicely done, sir. Not quite as complete, or as heated, but if I may self-plub on the occasion of his last self-outing as a conservative, I had this to say.

[El Jefe]

John,

"It's like a veteran musician dropping down to daeth metal at the end of his career."
and
"A lot of hardass rebels are completely self-centered."

These. Especially the second (a halfway competent crowd of death-metal fans would devour Mamet like a "fish" in the drunk tank.) It's rather like commentators -- and they exist in all colors of the political rainbow, sadly, one of the joys of this place is that our gracious host is *not* one -- who enjoy, at that deep monkey-brain human level, the sanctimony much more than they do the principles. And when it comes to professional rebels they tend to share that quality Lance described here as only juggling the same three or four knives with their eyes closed. That has a shelf life out to about the end of their twenties, but beyond that lies only aggressive bitterness visited on the undeserving and a deeply felt assholery.

Nancy,

Yes it is.

Lance,

It's interesting you mention "You Have Meddled" in relation to Baldwin's speech, which is indeed a quick and vituperative Mamet knockoff. I probably like Chayefsky less than a lot of folks because he had a hard time getting through any long piece without a staged monologue rant (the "staged" part is important, there are plenty of rants in the Sopranos and Deadwood and a few in the Wire, but they emerge from the moment of the story and what that character's going through, rather than being ported in by a gifted but cranky editorial voice.) But "You Have Meddled" has to be one of the two or three greatest monologues in a play from the last hundred years (and Chayefsky was a playwright at heart even if he cheated by relying on the first version of a medium -- movies -- that he used "Newtork" to condemn in its second version.) Beatty could just have showed up for that scene and never worked again and it would be enough.

[KLG]

Thanks Lance. This reminds me of a scientist I have known since I was an undergraduate. Even before the most recent excrescence of "Tea Party" horsesh*t he liked to go on and on about how the only jobs for the government were to deliver the mail (he never seemed to figure out that the USPS had supplanted the Post Office Department) and guard the coasts. This from a man who went to college and graduate schools at public universities, spent 2 years on active duty in the early 1950s and thirty years in the reserves, played out his entire academic career in a public university when the split was 75:25 state funding:tuition, funded his research for most of that time (until terminal deadwoodism set in) with money from the National Science Foundation and the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Institutes of Health. He is now living on a fixed pension that pays him an inflation-adjusted 80% of the average salary of his top three years, Social Security, a DoD pension, and Medicare. All he could talk about back in the day was "parasites." Probably still the same. Oh, and his scientific work? Pedestrian in the extreme.

[M.A. Peel]

The only thing I have ever liked about Mamet is that he once referenced Yertle the Turtle in an interview.

[El Jefe]

M.A. Peel,

That's a beautiful sentence, and a better sentiment.

Lance,

Ref: Kelsey Grammer, since you brought him up, I'd think you could shut him up about being all square with hanging out with homophobes with six words. "John Mahoney and David Hyde Pierce." Wonder how he gets that extra decade in the public consciousness without them ....

[Jim Treacher]

"Not only does he know the score and have all the angles figured out, it’s made him piles of cash he has no intention of sharing with anybody"

So he's a miser? He never buys anything?

[Lance Mannion]

Jim, read the opening graph? I meant it. For all I know he is the soul of generosity. I'm just describing how Mamet himself is making himself sound these days. And, technically, buying is not sharing.

[DaveH]

I am in awe whenever Wolcott picks up his scalpel and proceeds to filet a particularly nasty character.

[Dan Coyle]

Lance, re: that opening graf:

I hate P.J. O'Rourke with everything in me. I find his ideas loathsome, his jokes pallid, his all-encompassing cynicism wearying to the point of making me want to commit suicide, his insufferable smirk punchable. I read some of Don't Vote, It Just Encourages the Bastards an felt like screaming. To paraphrase one of David Mament's new heroes, Dennis Prager: He's one of the few things in the world that I truly feel does no good.

And yet, I have heard, from reliable sources, that he's taken care of friends, paid for their health care when they're sick, even when he himself was sick. He has some sliver of humanity in him. At one point during the day, the mask can slip, if only for a moment.

And if O'Rourke can, maybe Mamet can too.

[actor212]

Interesting.

I've done a fair amount of Mamet in my day, which to a NY based actor is like saying I've breathed a little.

First: “I fucking got mine, they fucking got theirs, you fucking get yours, if you fucking can, you weak and stupid fucks.”

Which is the plot of American Buffalo, except Mamet manages to leave the interpretation of the impact of that up to the actors, which may be his gift as a playwright (can't really speak to his "gift" as a director, because I think he's singularly ungifted in that respect).

When I sat down with my director for "Buffalo," we tossed ideas back and forth about how the play ought to go down, and the one thing we kept coming back to was the word "Buffalo." Ungainly, shambling beast, almost extinct. Donnie and Teach are the buffalo, Bob and (offstage) Fletch have got it together.

Donnie and Teach believe life has treated them badly. They decide to make it better. They fail, miserably, but it's the journey that gets them there, particularly how they treat Bob, that has an awful lot of "bleeding heart thinking" involved.

Or not. Again, it depends how you stage it. We staged it as a "don't do this" warning piece, that karma comes to those who waste.

Likewise, Oleanna. The way we staged it, you could not possibly know if Carol or John was to blame for the situation. Most likely, as in life, both people screwed up and overreacted. The reaction Mamet was going for, I felt, was to piss *everyone* off, no matter which side you would take. I thought it was one of the best plays I've ever read, certainly the best I've ever performed, and was one for which I got my best reactions.

I suspect Mamet tried to play things down the middle, and finally jsut got frustrated that he was being misinterpreted, which is ironic because that seems to be precisely how he writes, with ambiguity and uncertainty. Even going back to "Sexual Perversities," with it's ambiguous sexuality and relationships, Mamet is distinctly showing us a side of ourselves we probably don't want to look at too often because it rips our mask off.

He may have self-identified as a liberal at one time, but I suspect that was the mask Mamet did not want taken off.

[Nancy Nall]

Very nice work, Lance. As always.

[loretta]

Don't know why the Twitter sign-in is down...anyway, Mamet's interview (or at least the excerpt of it) doesn't even really make much sense. There are some explanations for his conversion to the dark side, if you don't mind armchair psychoanalysis:

1. He is losing his mind. This is quite possible, considering he could be experiencing early-onset dementia, or he has a brain tumor. His madness could be organic.

2. The part of him that has always been parodied in the past (sociopathic greed) is emerging because he resents having to pay taxes and he now relates and commiserates with overpaid CEOs and Wall Street Execs. In other words, greed has consumed him.

3. He suffers from a sad malady called "scarcity mentality" in which he believes that there is only so much pie to go around and he has to hoard his. Scarcity mentality naturally manifests itself in envy and covetousness, which explains his scorn for "English majors" and others who have a broader range of expression, are better writers, are better thinkers, are not as lazy as he.

4. He's just a dick and always has been.

[Robkroese]

If all the stuff you're accusing him of was evident in that interview, he WOULD be an asshole. But I don't see any resemblance between what he's saying and the strawman you're portraying. Like many liberals, you assume that conservatives are generally opportunists who say whatever the hell they need to in order to get make money or get elected (or, in Mamet's case, to entertain himself). You think (for example) that he couldn't possibly believe that black people would be better off without so much government intervention, and then you wrack your brain trying to imagine why he would say something so ridiculous and obviously untrue. Maybe, you think, deep down he's really a good guy (i.e. a liberal), but he's acting like such a conservative! It doesn't compute!

Here's a possibility: Maybe he IS a conservative. Maybe he's not doing this to piss people off. Maybe he's just talking about his actual beliefs about government, regardless of how people will take it. I didn't see the part of the interview where he talked about not wanting to give any money to his own kid, or the part where he thinks he owes none of his success to actors, directors, technicians, etc. Either that stuff was edited out of what I read or you're just making it up. It seems like you heard a few conservative catchwords and then constructed this artificial Scrooge persona for him. Then you spend 2 pages tearing down your made-up persona, all the while protesting that maybe you're wrong, but he sure seems like an asshole to me from the 12 sentences he spoke in an interview I read.

Anyway, as I said on Twitter, your post is well-written and argued, but in the end it seems like mostly bunk to me.

[moe99]

I'll echo the superlatives of all the other commenters. However, just one quibble (it's the compulsive editor in me as Nancy well knows) In your Al Pacino link, I think the word is "do" not "due."