In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running
on Broadway, and ... perhaps to help with ticket sales ... decided to write
an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: "Why I Am
No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.' "
"They mistitled it," he insists. Mr. Mamet had given the piece the
far more staid title, "Political Civility." But the Voice's headline was
truth in advertising. "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I
believe I have changed my mind," Mr. Mamet wrote, referring to his prior
self as, yes, a "brain-dead liberal."
The article was the most popular ever published on the Voice's website.
But was the acclaimed Mr. Mamet really a conservative?
For a few years, he played it coy. In a 2008 interview with New York
Magazine, he sloughed off a question about who he was voting for: "I'm
not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer." In 2010, he told
PBS's Charlie Rose he'd only offer his opinion about President Obama off-camera.
But spend five minutes with Mr. Mamet and you realize that coy can
only last so long. "Being a rather pugnacious sort of fellow I thought,
as Albert Finney says in 'Two for the Road': 'As I said to the duchess,
'If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess. If you want to make love, it's
hats off.' "
Hats off, indeed. Now Mr. Mamet has written a book-length, raucous
coming-out party: "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American
Culture." (If only the Voice editors had been around to supply a snappier
title.)
Hear him take on the left's sacred cows. Diversity is a "commodity."
College is nothing more than "Socialist Camp." Liberalism is like roulette
addiction. Toyota's Prius, he tells me, is an "anti-chick magnet" and "ugly
as a dogcatcher's butt." Hollywood liberals ... his former crowd ... once
embraced Communism "because they hadn't invented Pilates yet." Oh, and
good radio isn't NPR ("National Palestinian Radio") but Dennis Prager,
Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.
The book is blunt, at times funny, and often over the top. When I
meet the apostate in a loft in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he's wrapping
up a production meeting. "Bye, bye, Bette!" he calls to the actress walking
toward the elevator. That'd be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug.
The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector's murder
trial.
Mr. Mamet is directing and he looks the part in a scarf, black beret
and round yellow-framed glasses. Looking out the window at NYU film school,
where he used to teach, I ask him to tell me his conversion story.
He starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern
American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, "Witness,"
documented his turn from Communism. "I read it. It was miraculous. Extraordinary
hero-journey of this fellow that had to examine everything he believed
in at the great, great cost ... which is a cost I'm not subject to ...
of abandoning his life, his sustenance, his friends, his associations,
and his past. And I said, 'Oh my God ... Perhaps it might be incumbent
upon me to see if I could get my thought and my actions into line too."
There were other books. Most were given to him by his rabbi in L.A.,
Mordecai Finley. Mr. Mamet rattles off the works that affected him most:
"White Guilt" by Shelby Steele, "Ethnic America" by Thomas Sowell, "The
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War" by Wilfred Trotter, "The Road to
Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek, "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman,
and "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill.
Before he moved to California, Mr. Mamet had never met a self-described
conservative or read one's writings. He'd never heard of Messrs. Sowell
or Steele. "No one on the left has," he tells me. "I realized I lived in
this bubble."
When it popped, it was rough. "I did what I thought was, if not a
legitimate, then at least a usual, thing ... I took it out on those around
me," Mr. Mamet says wryly. It took "a long, long, long time and a lot of
difficult thinking first to analyze, then change, some of my ideas."
Then comes one of Mr. Mamet's many Hollywood fables. "It's like Orson
Welles," he begins.
"It's his first day on the set of Citizen Kane, and he's never directed
a movie, he's the greatest stage director of his time. Gregg Toland is
his cinematographer, and Toland's the greatest cinematographer of his day.
And Orson says, 'Ok, this next shot we're gonna put the camera over here.
And Gregg says, 'You can't put the camera there, Orson.' So Orson says,
'Well why not? The director can put it wherever.' Gregg says, 'No. Because
you're crossing the line.' So Orson says, 'What does it mean crossing the
line? So Gregg explains to him that there's a line of action." (Mr. Mamet
attempts to demonstrate the principle to me by indicating the line of sight
between our noses.)
"Orson says, 'I don't understand.'" (Neither did I.) "So Gregg explains
it again. And Orson says, 'I still don't understand' ... 'cause sometimes
it can get very, very complicated. So Orson says, 'Stop! Stop filming!
I have to go home.' He went home and he stayed up all night with sheets
of paper and a ruler and he came back next day and said: 'Now I understand,
now we can go on.'"
And so it was with Mr. Mamet and politics. He couldn't move on, so
to speak, before he understood "what the nature of government is, just
sufficient so that I as a citizen can actually vote without being a member
of a herd." Same for taxes: "I pay them, so I think I should be responsible
for what actually happens to them." As for the history of the country itself,
he wanted to understand "the vision of the Founding Fathers. ... How does
holding to it keep people safe and prosperous?"
Reading and reflecting got him to some basics. Real diversity is
intellectual. Whatever its flaws, America is the greatest country in the
history of the world. The free market always solves problems better than
government. It's the job of the state to be just, not to render social
justice. And, most sobering, Mr. Mamet writes in "The Secret Knowledge,"
there are no perfect solutions to inequality, only trade-offs.
It's a wonder he didn't explicitly adopt this tragic view of reality
earlier on. The play "Glengarry Glen Ross," for example, for which Mr.
Mamet won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, is about a group of desperate men competing
with each other in a Chicago real estate office. At stake: a Cadillac for
the top seller. Second place: a set of steak knives. Third prize: you're
fired.
Needless to say, no one ends up getting the Caddie. "That's the essence
of drama," Mr. Mamet says. "Anyone can write: And then we realized that
Lithuanians are people too and we're all happier now. Who cares?" Tragedy
is devastating, he says, precisely because it's about "people trying to
do the best they can and ending up destroying each other.
"So it wasn't a great shift to adopt the tragic view, and it's much
healthier," he says. "Rather than saying, as the liberals do, 'Everything's
always wrong, there's nothing that's not wrong, there's something bad bad
bad ... there's a bad thing in the world and it's probably called the Jews,'"
he says sardonically. "And if it's not called the Jews for the moment,
it's their fiendish slave second-hand smoke. Or transfats. Or global warming.
Or the Y2K. Or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. And something must
be done!'"
It's the last part ... the temptation to believe that everything
can be fixed ... that Mr. Mamet thinks is the fatal error. "That's such
a f ... bore," he says. "I mean, have you ever tried to get a pipe fixed
in your bathroom on a Saturday? It's not going to happen. It's gonna happen
wrong, and the guy's gonna be late because his dog got run over, and he's
going to fix the wrong pipe, and when he takes it apart he's gonna say,
'Oops, the whole plumbing system's gonna have to go and dah dah dah and
etc. etc. etc. And your daughter's Bat Mitzvah's gonna be ruined. It's
interesting ... it's the tragic view of life."
As Mr. Mamet quotes his son, Noah, in "The Secret Knowledge," "it's
the difference between the Heavenly Dream and the God-Awful Reality."
On the left, Mr. Mamet is accused of having ulterior motives for
his political shift. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait writes that the
story is a familiar, Zionist one: "An increasingly religious Jew with strong
loyalty to Israel, he became aware of a tension between the illiberal nationalism
of his right-wing views on the Middle East and the liberalism of his views
on everything else, and resolved the tension by abandoning the latter."
Mr. Mamet calls this a "crock of s ... ."
The Slate website has run with the "Rich Person Discovers He Is a
Republican" narrative. And then there's the jiu-jitsu theory offered by
a film blogger: "Mamet's escalating interest in martial arts ... traditionally
the domain of right-wing nutjobs like Chuck Norris ... has pointed toward
this new stance for some time." Obviously.
None of these responses comes as a surprise. And, being a contrarian
and a dramatist, Mr. Mamet doubtless relishes the attention for his heresy.
What will be more interesting is to see how critics respond to his two
new plays.
The first, playing now in Manhattan, is called "The Linguistics Class."
Only 10 minutes long, it's part of a festival of 25 short plays at the
Atlantic Theater Company, running alongside works by Ethan Coen and Sam
Shepard. It's a coming home for Mr. Mamet: He founded the company with
his friend, the actor William H. Macey, 25 years ago.
The play is about a teacher and a student who don't see eye to eye,
and Mr. Mamet assures me "it has nothing to do with Noam Chomsky."
"The Anarchist," on the other hand, sounds like it will be red meat
for conservatives. The two-woman show, which opens this fall in London,
is about a prisoner, a former member of a Weather Underground-type group,
and her parole officer. The play's themes have been developing since Sept.
11, 2001.
Mr. Mamet was in Toronto that day for a film festival. "I read an
article, I think it was in that day's Toronto Star, that had been a reprint
from the Chicago Tribune," he says. It was an interview with Bill Ayers
and his wife Bernardine Dorne, two former leaders of the Weather Underground.
"They were talking about the bombings in the '60s. And the guy says to
Bill Ayers: 'Are you regretful?' And he said: 'No, no, no.' ... And I read
it, and I thought, this is appalling and immoral," recalls Mr. Mamet.
"Then I got on a plane. And while I was on the plane they blew up
New York City. The combination of the two things just started me thinking
what have we ... meaning my generation ... done?" Mr. Mamet knows these
characters intimately. They went to school with him at Goddard College
in Vermont, or they passed through. "Some of the people I knew actually
were involved in blowing up the building on 11th Street [in Manhattan by
members of the Weather Underground in 1970]. ... And I thought: how does
this happen?"
Is it a coincidence that this play is arriving at the same time as
Mr. Mamet's public conservatism? Does he worry that critics will see it
as polemical? "I don't know," he contends, insistent that his job as a
writer is not to worry about politics but to entertain and surprise his
audience. "The question is can you put the asses in the seats and can you
keep the asses in the seats. That's not me, that's Aristotle. I've forgotten
the Greek for it."
Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal. |