No Steak Knives for Me
For twenty years, I ran a Chicago Off Loop theater. For those non-Chicago civilians, that's the Chicago equivalent to Off Off Broadway. Small. Gritty. Low budget.
In order to get audiences, the plays had to grapple with the hard stuff and, when it's at its best, force the audience to likewise wrestle with ideas and perspective.
David Mamet came from that world a decade before on the same streets. The plays he wrote were ideologically tough. The language was tough. Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Speed-the-Plow. American Buffalo. Glengarry Glen Ross. Oleanna. Hard plays about hard people dealing with hard subject matter.
He went on to write and direct movies. House of Games. The Spanish Prisoner. Heist. He wrote amazing screenplays. The Untouchables. Wag the Dog. Hoffa. The guy has been a wrecking ball of a very specific type of storytelling.
In my twenty years in the theater, I produced American Buffalo, The Revenge of the Space Pandas, or Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock, and Oleanna. I directed The Water Engine and The Cryptogram. I performed in productions of Glengarry Glen Ross and Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues. Mamet is in my blood.
In a twist on the adage of never meeting your heroes, I met Mamet once at a workshop. He was exactly who I hoped he'd be—kind, straight-shooting, gracious. He had great pearls of theatrical wisdom he dropped on us. He was funny and self deprecating despite being, you know, David Mamet.
For myself, I've answered the question about separating the artist from the art.
That one-time encounter was all I needed from him. I had his plays, his movies, and his books. Sometime after 9/11/2001, he started spouting off his personal political views and how they had shifted from liberal to conservative. Maybe it was the act of terror and our national response. Maybe it was the fact that by then he was a very wealthy man. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis. Who knows? Whatever the reasons, he went from one side of the ideological fence to the other and many in the highly progressive theater scene nationally could neither fathom nor forgive.
In his book Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture he writes:
"America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible…. The result of a 230-year-long experiment is the triumph of Judeo-Christian values. We have created peace and plenty for more citizens over a greater period of time than that enjoyed by any other group in history.
This triumph is not due to altruism, nor to empathy, nor to compassion, but to adherence to those practicable, rational rules for successful human interaction set out in the Bible."
When I read that I was reminded of another hero of the rightwing, Ayn Rand, and not in a favorable way.
In his promotional tour for his latest book, I caught him on Real Time with Bill Maherand found him to be just as open, self deprecating, and funny as I did some thirty years ago. Maher questioned him about his statement in the book about 'the stolen election' and Mamet walked it back but it's in print nonetheless.
Just the other day, he was on "Life, Liberty, and Levin" with host Mark Levin on Fox.
"People have gone nuts and people are frightened because there’s huge changes in society, that are brought about by the people in power. The people in power, as always, are to a large extent, parasites who are feeding off of the decaying flesh.
But the decaying flesh of a society doesn’t mean it’s dying. It means it needs to get pruned, and we need to cut off the diseased parts and go back to individual control of our own destiny. That’s called freedom."
Also:
"If there is no community control over the schools, what we have is kids being — not only indoctrinated — but groomed in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators. Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they are abusing them mentally and using sex to do so. This has always been the problem with education."
I can agree with him that people have gone nuts and are frightened by cultural changes, don't understand the whole 'pruning of decaying flesh' thing, and the grooming nonsense is just silly. Public education has always been about indoctrination on some level (written by someone employed as a public school teacher in the 90s). The question isn't whether students are being indoctrinated—a heightened need for conformity and the slow building of a population of worker bees for the American capitalist machine has been the default for generations—but what specifically are they been indoctrinated for?
Are kids being indoctrinated? Of course. In the movies they watch, the hours of TikTok they pour over, the lessons of the WWE that has become our governing class. They are indoctrinated by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. They are indoctrinated by their teachers who are human and have ideas about the world.
Are they being groomed to eschew the gender binary or merely being guided toward a more compassionate version of society? I'd argue it depends on the teacher.
But all of that is nothing short of wasted digital flotsam. I'm not in a room with David Mamet discussing his views and how I might disagree with him. If I were, I would not ask him anything involving his current political ideas. I'd ask him about his work because that is what makes him unique.
For myself, I've answered the question about separating the artist from the art. I'm not looking to hang out with Kevin Spacey but I love his performances in American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, and Se7en (not so much with K-Pax). I'm uninterested in doing a double date with Roman Polanski but still think Rosemary's Baby is a masterpiece (if only because there is never enough Ruth Gordon in the world). No dinners with Harvey Weinstein but try and make me disavow most of the films he produced and you'll get nothing but side-eye from me.
I don't need David Mamet to agree with me politically. I need the words, the plays, the characters he created. His bizarre screed about grooming doesn't change a single word of American Buffalo. I'm thankful for that.
