Scott Galupo

David Mamet Should Get out of Politics and Stick to Playwriting

September 22, 2011 RSS Feed Print

At my first job in Washington, in the late '90s, my coworkers introduced me to the filmmaker-playwright David Mamet.

Via .wav audio files that seemed like a technological breakthrough at the time, we listened to Alec Baldwin's mesmerizing Glengarry Glen Ross tirade on a perpetual loop, and quoted from it with a regularity that I'm sure those around us found highly annoying.

"Put that coffee down!"

"A-B-C: Always be closing!"

"First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you're fired."

[See the month's best political cartoons.]

The Hollywood-invades-Main-Street send-up State and Main was more fully satisfying (Glengarry, I thought, didn't sustain the pitch of the opening sequence).

It contained at least one immortal one-liner, delivered by a Hollywood playboy (Baldwin, again) who'd just wrecked his car while cavorting with an underage girl: "So that happened."

So that happened: That just about sums up my reaction to Mamet's mystifyingly bad political treatise, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.

My review of the book appeared online today at The American Conservative.

Best I can tell, Mamet didn't think terribly deeply about politics until fairly recently, and he couldn't have picked a worse possible time to convert to conservatism. I like to imagine Mamet, a quintessential urban Jewish literary type, in the 1950s. He'd have fit in beautifully with the original neoconservative set: smart, skeptical, ironic, iconoclastic.

But in today's reality, Mamet fell in with Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Beck, with their unhinged and ahistorical fear of impending serfdom.

Mamet has gone all-in with the crazies, and it ain't pretty. As I write:

There's something unsettling about the intensity, the totality, of [Mamet's] post-Damascene convictions.

The literary critic James Wood once described a certain kind of freshly adopted religious commitment this way: "It is like entering prison: you must turn out your spiritual pockets and hand over all your inner belongings, even your shoelaces." Well, Mamet has handed over his shoelaces, voluntarily stripped, and appears eager for a cavity search.