Con Man - David Fucking Mamet

To hype his new book of essays, David Mamet is doing the rounds. He's the subject of a piece in the Weekly Standard and one of those snotty Q and A's in the Sunday Times. These Q-and-A's are generally geared around the outrageous or inflammatory quote or a gotcha moment, and I usually regret wasting time on them.

But this was David Mamet.

Now David Mamet's written some fine plays, screenplays and directed a pretty good movie or two. His essays mattered to me, and he introduced me to Seneca, for which I'm grateful. His career as a film director is a hash. I admire his first film, House of Games. The script was strong, as you'd expect, and dealt with his favorite themes: con men, the morality of poker, the trickery of psychologists. But what interested me most was how he managed a dream-like effect within the neo-noir structure of the story. All those middle shots. The steady, unblinking camera that seem to hold the scene just a few beats too long. The flat affect of the acting. It added up to a film that was slightly surreal and nightmarish, weirdly effective.

As he grew more experienced, or perhaps, just competent, his films lost that quality and became merely workmanlike. The only real distinctive aspect of his films is the uninflected acting style he inflicts on his cast. Some of them, like his poor wife Rebecca Pigeon, seem to flatten out to a zombie like trance, which is sort of interesting. The bigger guns, such as Alec Baldwin or Gene Hackman, just bring their own game and look like regular Hollywood types. He's on the record as saying he only wants to direct genre movies, and in that, I don't think he's quite succeeded. Maybe on the level of a no-name hack from the 1930s or 40s who never enjoyed a revival, but you put up any of his work against, say, Sexy Beast or Croupier, and his limitations show through.

Other than that odd acting, born, no doubt, of Mamet's applying his own acting theories on his more pliable cast members, they're boring. Heist was one plot reversal after another until it became a dried up crossword game of a picture. Spartan ended with a deus ex machina so clumsy, a screenwriting 101 prof would've given it an F. And she would've been right.

After his first movie or two, he wrote a book, On Directing, which is stimulating nonsense. Mamet himself went on to violate most of the precepts he laid down in it.

Still, his script for The Verdict is a fine piece of work. Glengarry Glen Ross is a helluva a play, and the Lakeboat is a tender, elliptical love story.

But what's he done lately? I can't say. The Unit was okay popcorn TV, all brawn and big guns and nefarious politicians screwing over heroic front line soldiers. If you didn't think about how much that story resembled a certain narrative peddled after World War I, and later by Ollie North, it was okay. Bambi Meets Godzilla was a rehash of ideas he stated more succinctly in Three Uses of the Knife.

Now he's come out as a conservative, chip on his shoulder and ready to take on . . . who? Rachel Maddow, I guess, or the semi-mythical Volvo driving readers of the New York Times where he throws some jabs in that Q and A.

For example, in discussing the obscene amounts paid to CEOs who fail companies and tank their profits, Mamet quotes Friedman to the effect that the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. If you consider that, it's nonsense. Of course it makes sense what the decision is. If a death sentence is handed down, and you are the condemned man, you're dead. Less dramatically, use the example of health care. It very much matters what the decision is -- to treat, to cover the cost, or not -- whomever makes that decision.

He goes on to say that it's his job to alienate his audience, which is just laughable chest pounding. He has not alienated the public. This is a useful pose. If he had truly alienated the public, his plays would not be performed, he would not be hired to direct or write films and television, and he would not earn $2 million per screenplay. For an example of a true iconoclast and what happens to writers who do, in face, violate the status quo, examine the career of Peter Handke. Handke was once a respected playwright and novelist who co-wrote Wings of Desire. Because of his views on Serbia, respectable theatre companies, such as the Comedie Francaise and so on, refuse to stage his work. He is a pariah without access to mainstream media. Hollywood conservatives don't suffer very much. Reagan went on to become president. Schwarzenegger became governor, Jon Voigt still gets parts, Vincent Gallo goes his own way, and Bruce Willis's career seems to be as solid as any aging actor's. They even get the spurious satisfaction of going rogue -- how sweet!

He goes on. He takes a few potshots at intellectuals and academicians.

What's most risible about these macho, supposedly anti-academic conservatives is how few of them actually made a living in the rough and tumble world of their mythical and exalted free market. Milton Friedman was an economist, a species of thinker related to voodoo priests. Thomas Sowell taught at Howard, Cornell and Rutgers, among other universities. He now has a fellowship, that is, the modern form of patronage, at the Hoover Institution. Mamet himself has taught at Columbia and Goddard.

This makes Mamet a fraud and a hypocrite, unless he is willing to refund his salary and the tuition his students paid him.

As a lumpen intellectual and left-libertarian, I'm surprised to realize I have more real world business expertise than any of those guys. I worked for small firms. I started a company. I freelanced. I worked for a behemoth business. And with all that rough and tumble amid the bloody teeth and nails of global capitalism, I haven't seen much to change my opinion that government can deliver some things the market cannot. I share conservatives suspicion of government and unions. But I also suspect, with some well documented reasons, corporations and the upper echelons of the military establishment, which somehow get a pass in your standard conservative's worldview.

But, back to Mamet. It's hard to be a macho writer in the United States, and has been nearly impossible for the last 30 years. Mailer was the last man who could pull it off. He served in a war, as did James Jones. Guys in Mamet's generation -- the equivocal boomers -- can't manage the machismo. It stinks of playacting, this nice lawyer's kid taking up pistol shooting and knife tossing in his middle age. Even the involvement in obscure martial arts really can't balance the fact that this is a guy who writes and reads for a living and so should just deal with the condition of being an intellectual instead of fleeing it with shame. This is Mamet, after all, the theatre major and playwright strutting around in battle fatigues in the Village while boys in real fatigues were getting killed in the army -- the army, he now says at the safe age of 62, he wished he had served in. Lord knows, it can tough being hetero in the theatre, although you are surrounded by lots of willing women, so  . . . maybe not so tough.

He winds up his little tete-a-tete with, "I went to a consultant a few years back, and he said, “You want to make your life better?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” He said, “Stop drinking and don’t read the newspapers.” So I did both."

In another telling of this story, he attributes this same advice to his rabbi. Not sure why this increasingly religious Jew would substitute the anodyne "consultant" for the rich and rendolent "rabbi." But.
This anecdote explains a great deal. Quitting drinking has obviously soured his disposition. Genial men who have made it up the ladder of success often look down and think that maybe the people left behind could use some help. Conservatives, who like to ignore the benefits that fell in their laps along the way, usually say: Fuck you. I got mine. Go fuck yourself. You and your schools and your roads and your medicare -- get your grubby paws off my money.

Giving up on newspapers means Mamet's also missed out on some events lately that might call his conservative views into question. Little things like those robust and unregulated financiers nearly bringing the global financial system down -- only to have their venal asses bailed out with tax money.

My tax money.

Oh, and last year, that little thing in the Gulf of Mexico? More hi-jinks from benevolent capatilists who managed to poison the ocean and waste millions of gallons of oil.

What's disappointing is that Mamet used to think for himself. You might not always agree with him -- I often found myself shaking my head over his positions, but he had the rare virtue of working things out for himself and then putting those positions out there. Now he seems like just another mouthpiece in the chorus, listening to, and taking seriously, thinkers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

Con men always fascinated Mamet. They populate his plays, essay and screenplays. It's not a big surprise, then, that he's become one, politically. Conservative principles always seem to serve as cover for transferring wealth from the pockets of the middle class and the government to their own coffers.

So David, keep you eye on your wallet as you swill your Perrier out there with your new pals.