David Mamet Is a Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity
The playwright won’t play along with woke signaling, talismanic masking or deference to petty tyrants.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, innumerable films, TV documentaries
and history textbooks instructed us that the 1950s were years of
conformity and conventionalism: “The Donna Reed Show,” McCarthyism, “The
Organization Man,” TV dinners. In fact, the ’50s were a time of
extraordinary artistic creativity, boundless technological innovation,
original thinking in politics, intellectual diversity in journalism and
higher education, new energy in religion, and enormous progress in race
relations. What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally
evolved cultural solidarity—something nearly everybody, on the left and
the right, longs for now.
An informed observer of present-day
America might reasonably conclude that our own decade—at least among the
educated and advantaged classes—is far more imbued with the spirit of
conformism than the ’50s were. Corporate managers and military leaders
parrot nostrums about diversity, inclusion and sustainability that few
of them believe. Museums and orchestras studiously avoid programming
that might offend ideologues. Reporters and producers in the mainstream
press seize on stories—or ignore them—solely because that’s what
everybody else in the press is doing. Large majorities in wealthy cities
dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be
largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the
ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the
same reason.
Maybe America’s deciders and describers (to use
Nicholas Eberstadt’s
phrase) aren’t the independent-minded lot they think themselves to be.
These and related ironies were on my mind in February when I
received a galley copy of the playwright
David Mamet’s
“Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of Free
Lunch,” published Tuesday. The book is a collection of essays written
over the past two years on an array of cultural and political topics:
pandemic zealotry,
Donald Trump,
terrorism, California’s punitive tax code, Christianity and
Judaism, Broadway and the movies. The essays are by turns witty,
insightful, affecting and cryptic. What struck me most about the book,
though, was how superbly out of place its author must be in the eminent
environs of his chosen industry.
In March I visited Mr. Mamet’s home in Santa Monica and asked
him about, for lack of a more original term, the Age of Conformity. What
is the source of this sudden impulse to go along with the crowd that we
see at high levels of American society?
“It’s that time-wasting machine,” he says, pointing to the
cellphone with which I’m recording the conversation. “We’re all
connected. But connected for what purpose? The idea that everybody has
to behave the same way is part of the breakdown of what was a cohesive
society.”
He brings up the 1950s without prompting. “When I was a kid,”
he says—Mr. Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947—“people went to different
churches, they were from different ethnic backgrounds, their parents
came from different countries, but somehow they managed to have a
collective life. All of their self-worth didn’t come from belonging and
staying connected to this one uber-group.”
Mr. Mamet’s works include the Pulitzer-winning play “Glengarry
Glen Ross” (1984) and the screenplays for “The Untouchables” (1987),
“Hoffa” (1992) and “Heist” (2001). He speaks the way he writes: in
short, forceful sentences and with constant recourse to wild anecdotes,
uproarious jokes and literary quotations bent to his purpose.
Do people in the entertainment industry censor themselves?
“They do not walk around saying things that are dangerous to express,
no. People whisper out here. They have to. To say, ‘Well maybe Trump did
some good things’—you can’t do that. You’d risk your home, your job,
your family, your friends.”
Mr. Mamet is convinced that the “woke agenda” (his term) is
basically an act, so in some ways it works well in Hollywood. “Nobody
really believes it,” he says. “Nobody really believes boys turn into
girls and girls turn into boys—no one does. But it’s put into a
different category, so that it becomes dangerous to question it. If you
question it, you’re out.”
Are the young buying it? My own observation suggests some
substantial minority do not. Academics and college students I’ve spoken
to since 2017 indicate that social pressure to signal assent to a
rotating series of orthodoxies, from public health to race and gender
theories, has sparked a quiet revolt. Post a black square on Instagram
to show that America is systemically racist, even if you don’t think
that’s true; wear a mask even though you know it doesn’t work and you’re
20 and vaccinated; share your pronouns whether you accept or reject
gender ideology—a reaction seems almost guaranteed.
“People of that generation,” Mr. Mamet agrees, “a lot of them just aren’t scared anymore.”
Not that he expects anybody among our institutional leaders to
admit they were wrong, on Covid or crime or anything else. He mentions
Stacy Schiff’s
“Witches,” a 2015 history of the Salem trials. “The delusion ran
for about 18 months,” Mr. Mamet says, summarizing the book, “and after
that, since they couldn’t explain it, they just forgot it. It never
happened.” The phenomenon by which authorities and experts make a hash
of things and then move on as if nothing happened is one attentive
readers will recognize. Mr. Mamet offers some encouragement. “The thing
about history,” he says, “is not that people change. People don’t
change. But people die. So a new generation comes up and says, ‘Yeah, I
get it, that’s stupid, I’m not gonna do that.’ ”
As if to demonstrate noncompliance, one of Mr. Mamet’s poodles,
Ruby, jumps on the couch and sniffs my face. “Manners!” he shouts.
“Come on, you’re embarrassing me in front of my guest. Sit!” The dog
pays little attention. Made at last to submit, Ruby reluctantly goes
elsewhere.
On the coffee table between us are several books by and about
James Joyce,
and an oversized edition of the Torah. “It’s all there,” Mr. Mamet
says, pointing to the holy book. “Everything we’ve been living
through.” The habit among America’s wealthy, privileged influencers of
reviling the country that gave them privilege and influence, Mr. Mamet
says, is in various way a re-enactment of biblical events. He refers to
the narrative in which God provides manna for the Israelites in the
wilderness: “The people are hungry, there’s nothing to eat in the
desert, so God says, I’ll give ’em manna. They say, What does manna
taste like? Answer: It tastes like whatever your favorite food is. They
say, I don’t want whatever my favorite food is. And so they stage another rebellion.”
That is a heavily abridged version of the accounts in Exodus
and Numbers, but he is right about the biblical pattern: Prosperity,
particularly unearned prosperity, tends to generate folly and vice.
“When do violent revolutions happen?” he asks. “They happen when things
get too good.” We live in the “most prosperous country in the history of
the world, and so what’s our response?” Mr. Mamet waits for me to
answer, but I keep silent. “The response is: We don’t need God. We don’t
need the Constitution. We don’t need anything. Go study semiotics. Go
become an energy therapist, whatever. Someone will take care of you and
tell you what to do.”
Mr. Mamet announced a turn to the political right in a 2008 essay
for the Village Voice, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’ ”
but he was a black sheep long before then. His 1992 play “Oleanna,” for
instance, features a male academic whose life and career are ruined by a
calculating female student’s spurious accusation of sexual harassment.
Was there a moment when he decided to break ranks altogether?
“I met a guy at my synagogue here maybe 20 years ago,” he says. “He was
talking about
Milton Friedman
and [Friedrich] Hayek and
Thomas Sowell.
It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was impressed by his
attitude. He wasn’t strident or arrogant. It was that guy’s attitude
that impressed me.”
The man lent Mr. Mamet some books by these authors. “I said to
him, ‘Good, I’ll read them. But,’ I said, ‘when my friends come over,
I’ll have to hide them.’ He said: ‘I don’t.’ And that changed my life.
What was I saying? Did I really think I had to hide books from my
friends? How sick was I? It was a Road to Damascus moment.”
(Mr. Mamet, an observant Jew, freely uses Christian imagery, as
in this reference to the Apostle Paul’s conversion. In “Recessional” he
remarks, apropos of
Billy Graham’s
oratory, that he “would be thrilled to accept the Christian
tradition and Christ as my Savior” but that “I am prohibited from doing
so by my own religion.” Here, at least, he conforms.)
He recalls another incident around the same time, not long
after he bought his house in Santa Monica. The house was, and still is,
surrounded by enormous hedges—you can hardly see the building from the
nearby street. He received a letter from the City Council demanding that
he cut the hedges down to a certain height or be fined $25,000 for
every day the hedges remained too high. He eventually won that wrangle,
he recalls, but the episode led him to believe that many government
officials simply enjoy forcing law-abiding people into compliance with
arbitrary dictates.
“I thought at the time: I’ve seen these people before.” The
“hedge commissioners,” as he calls them, were the theater critics he’d
known earlier in his career. “They would come in on opening night and
strut around and stand with their backs to the stage, looking at the
people coming in. People used to say, and maybe they still do, that the
critics just liked having the power to shut the play down. And the
critics would say, ‘No, ha ha, we don’t have that power.’ But they did
have it, and they loved it.”
Like many people who find themselves dissenting from the
dominant outlook of their cultivated and post-religious peers, Mr. Mamet
felt that modern conceptions of human nature had become hopelessly
naive. A rosy view of human proclivities leads easily to groupthink and
its invariable accompaniment, scapegoating. Since the existence of evil
is undeniable, if it isn’t intrinsic to all of us, it must come from
some disfavored person or group.
Which led him back to biblical religion. “The Bible starts with
perfidy, and perfidy is everywhere in it. There are very few people in
the Bible you want your kids to be like,” he says. We exchange our
favorite bits of biblical realism. Mr. Mamet notes that the genealogies
of David and other heroes don’t bother skipping over—indeed they seem to
go out of their way to mention—adulterers. “What the Bible is telling
us is that the human race is unalterably flawed. It’s not a matter of
doing away with the ‘haters’ or with this group or that group. We have
to deal with our own mind.”
A robust understanding of your own and others’ propensity to
bad behavior, he seems to suggest, has a way of inoculating you against
groupthink.
Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health
authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city
officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along. I’m reminded of the line spoken
by Richard Roma, the aggressive and highly successful real-estate
salesman in “Glengarry Glen Ross” played by
Al Pacino
in the 1992 film adaptation. “I subscribe to the law of contrary
public opinion,” Roma says. “If everyone thinks one thing, then I say
bet the other way.”
