Reprinted from Scope Magazine: http://www.scopemag.com/departments/thearts/knife.html.
"It is in our nature to dramatize," notes David Mamet in the opening of his latest collection of musings on the contemporary state of theater and the theatrical, 3 Uses of the Knife. Taking his cue (and his title) from blues legend Leadbelly, Mamet continues a project ostensibly begun with 1986's Writing in Restaurants: the dissection of American high and popular culture, coupled with the writer's conception of a theater that "exists to deal with problems of the soul, with the mysteries of human life, not with its quotidian calamities." Despite a conversational, sometimes rambling tone that characterizes the majority of his nonfiction, Mamet gives his reader little room for misunderstanding his characterization of late 20th-century America as a cultural milieu of repression that poses as information, of compulsion disguised as entertainment (not suprisingly, Las Vegas gets a nod at this point), and of drama composed of empty political rhetoric, lurid televised tales of sexual misconduct and Hollywood celebrity worship.
At first glance, readers unfamiliar with Mamet's nondramatic writing could easily dismiss all of this as the equivalent of the neoconservative political rants espoused by the politicians and pundits the author seems so ready to castigate; theater critics and scholars have judged his work at least this harshly on numerous occasions. Yet, as they delve deeper into the three essays collected in this book, readers will recognizes that Mamet's "knife" slashes at all sides of the political spectrum: the author lumps performance artists and supply-side economists into the same category of actors too willing to offer easy answers to complex questions of human existence. Such theater, along with the problem play (theater aimed at a specific political agenda) dons the mask of good will while engaging in a process of infantalizing, of manipulating the audience. But, of course, the audience of all these brands of drama, by patronizing both the political rally and the Happening, participates in this societal compulsion toward the unrealizable ideal: "When strife is gone. When things have been resolved. When there is no more uncertainty in my life."
While excoriating those who pander to the insecurity inherent in such desires for certainty, and to those who clamor for more of the same, Mamet also carefully defines his conception of art and its purposes in the culture from which it arises. Relying on authorities as diverse as Aristotle, St. Paul and Sergei Eisenstein, Mamet characterizes the drama as that which: 1) calls for the hero to exercise will; and 2) to create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character.
Romance, that brand of the faux drama which "gave us Hitler, the novels of Trollope and the American musical," can only preach and manipulate; true drama compels an audience to communal self-reflection. One need only compare the author's own American Buffalo or Speed-the-Plow to, say, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, James Cameron's Titanic or any given episode of the Jerry Springer Show, and Mamet's definitions become perfectly lucid.
It's highly likely, of course, that the clarity of such distinctions may well draw more fire to a writer who's already been accused of hypocrisy, misogyny and opacity. After all, isn't Mamet biting the hand that feeds him? Hasn't he been showered with awards from the Establishment he criticizes, most notably a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross? Haven't films such as The Untouchables, The Edge and Wag the Dog (all of which he wrote or co-wrote) fared well both in the critics' columns and at the box office? And, even if he hadn't received all this financial and critical success in a career not thirty years old, doesn't his critique amount to tilting at neon-clad windmills? Does Mr. Mamet really think that the Stardust might now consider replacing Enter the Night with a double bill of Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz andGuildenstern are Dead?
Of course not. Like the heroes of the classical tragedies he mentions throughout this book, Mamet's criticism of both our bloated culture of consumption and the art that both feeds and reflects it represents a confession of "powerlessness in the face of the gods/the ways of the stage/existence." And while one could interpret this confession as a public act of self-pity, Mamet clearly believes that an artist in a decadent age must risk this charge.
Artists don't wonder, "What is it good for?" They aren't driven to create art, or to help people or to make money. They are driven to lessen the burden of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds - and so to achieve peace.
Has David Mamet achieved peace? Let's hope not.
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg is a PhD candidate in English at UNLV. He is currently writing a dissertation on David Mamet.
All Contents Copyright © 1998 Las Vegas SUN, Inc.
