However ambivalent they may be about American culture in general, the British often pay more attention — and homage — to American art than Americans do. BBC Radio 3 has just finished airing a year of American music, while the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company hosted a festival in which jazz, gospel, Arthur Miller, and Neil Simon were presented as the cultural touchstones of the twentieth century. Even the Royal Air Force component of the yearly “Royal Tournament” now marches to the American John Williams’s music from Star Wars.
Of course, as the British often complain, a second form of American culture has conquered the United Kingdom as well. Sainsbury’s supermarkets offer Classic Cola with “original American taste”; local fast food offers New Jersey chicken cafes, Seattle coffee houses, and Texas barbecue restaurants (advertised as “mighty fine eats”).
Such invasions engender what is anyway natural to the English: a rich xenophobia, surely bespeaking a mad envy. The newspapers seized gleefully on recent reports that Americans are fat. The Duke of York is mocked for having “big white American teeth.” The inveterate scribbler A. N. Wilson, a sometime young fogey, has lately gone on record in the Evening Standard that “mustachioed American professors of both sexes” don’t deserve admission to the country, let alone to the new British Library.
Nonetheless, the English have always appreciated dramatic culture and good writing in a way that Americans do not. In particular, the fascination and repulsion they have for American culture enable them to identify David Mamet as the great American playwright of his age. Americans themselves are still making up their minds about Mamet. But, for the British, he seems the successor of Arthur Miller, and in London a new (rather slight) play by Mamet, The Old Neighborhood, has been sold out all summer. The English see in Mamet a quintessentially American voice, defining what it is to be human in a fascinating and uniquely American idiom.
In a talk he gave in London this summer before a performance of The Old Neighborhood, it became clear that Mamet is comfortable with British adulation. Though he spoke with some humility about his mentors, he confirmed his “bad boy” reputation by genially showing his disdain for many of the questions his listeners put to him. Asked “Is The Old Neighborhood autobiographical?” he replied, “Autobiographical of whom?” Questioned whether he has followers, he quipped, “I certainly hope not.” His plays and movie scripts are markedly foul-mouthed, and when I asked about his use of “broad language,” he replied merely that it “depended on the play” — and cited the film Slap Shot, which “has locker-room language in it because it takes place in the locker room.”
And yet, in the midst of his quips and dismissals, Mamet said some things enormously revealing and helpful about his work. On the one hand, meeting resistance to his remark that there are no characters in drama, “only lines on a page,” he quoted Aristotle to the effect that character is merely “habitual action.” On the other hand, he declared, “I don’t set out to make the audience feel anything; I am just solving a problem in stagecraft.”
In the famous Aristotelian definition, a tragic play succeeds when it “achieves, through the representation of pitiable and fearful incidents, the catharsis of such pitiable and fearful incidents.” Tragedy presents incidents that are pitiable because they seem undeserved and fearful because we fear similar incidents may befall us. And we experience catharsis — literally, a term for purging that Aristotle borrowed from Greek medicine — because we learn through the play “how such things came about”: Pity for others and fear for ourselves are purged in our learning the coherent and grimly inevitable relation between the hero’s “habitual action” and his end.
Sounding very Aristotelian, Mamet said during his talk that he wants his audience to “fear for their souls.” But this does not precisely contradict his claim that he doesn’t “set out to make the audience feel anything,” for Mamet is only half an Aristotelian. His dramas are classical insofar as the fate of a Mamet hero is a consequence of that hero’s character. But Mamet’s dramas are profoundly unclassical insofar as the hero’s fate lacks relation to a coherent universe. In Mamet’s plays, there is not — because there cannot be — any cathartic relief for the audience.
What the British seem to have recognized in Mamet, what makes them celebrate him as the great American dramatist of his generation, is the playwright’s clear and conscious presentation of what confusedly and unconsciously drives most contemporary American writers: an attempt to create in audiences the horror of recognizing themselves as solipsistic creatures in a world whose coherence is unknown. Any catharsis we might seem to feel — and what Mamet’s audiences usually feel is unease — is only the satisfaction of seeing such a powerful snapshot of ourselves, tempered by delight in Mamet’s savage humor.
Born in 1947, David Mamet has written twenty-two plays, six collections of essays, two novels, and scripts for twenty-three films (seven of which he has directed). He seems our first major playwright to have become a major screenwriter as well, and the pace of his film work has increased in recent years. Three of his films were released in 1997: The Edge, with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, Wag the Dog, with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, and The Spanish Prisoner, with Steve Martin. And 1998 saw the production of three more: a new version of The Winslow Boy, State and Maine, and (under the pseudonym “Richard Weisz,” co-authored with J. D. Zeik) the newly released Robert De Niro film Ronin.
As stage productions, his plays have rarely found great commercial success. But, thanks to his work in films, his writing is well known to audiences (at least in the United States) that probably would not recognize its author. About Last Night (1986), for example, is a movie made from his play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which charted the difficult relation of two heterosexual young people seeking to move away from latently homosexual roommates and the singles scene but unable to express love. Although Mamet repudiates the movie, About Last Night employed Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Jim Belushi expertly playing to type (Belushi is surprisingly good as Lowe’s foul-mouthed roommate), and the film is well worth watching in spite of its tacked-on happy ending.
The Verdict (1982), directed by Sidney Lumet, presents Paul Newman as a bottom-feeding Boston lawyer who is given a chance to restore his self-esteem by fighting corrupt corporate lawyering, headed by James Mason, in a medical-negligence case. Last year’s Wag the Dog, fortuitously about a president trying to cover up a sexual indiscretion by pretending to fight a war, is a small but choice movie with an especially enjoyable performance by Dustin Hoffman.
Mamet first became known in 1975 with his play American Buffalo, which, as he has said, deals with “the predatory aspect of American life.” The play concerns the plans of the owner of a junkshop who wants to revenge himself on a customer who has outsmarted him in the sale of an American buffalo nickel. He plots the theft of the customer’s coin collection and manipulates others into agreeing to commit the actual theft. But the scheme collapses as Mamet explores the comic and disturbing irony of the gap between the owner’s self-justification and the acts he plans to commit: the owner buffaloed by his inability to buffalo others. In a diminished country, the great beast of the American West is reduced to a coin coveted by thieves and collectors.
In 1984 Mamet won both the Pulitzer prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Glengarry Glen Ross, made into a riveting movie in 1992 with Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, and Al Pacino. Its plot again centers upon a robbery, this time of a list of leads for buyers of undeveloped plots in Florida (improbably named after places in the Scottish Highlands: “Glen Ross Farms,” etc.). In contrast to the theft in American Buffalo, this robbery, in an office of desperate real-estate men, does actually occur, and the audience is as suspicious and as mystified as the real-estate men, all waiting to find out who committed it. Throughout the film — and particularly in Al Pacino’s meditation on the “great moments” in life, which consist solely of physical and emotional self-gratification — the characters con themselves as much as the customers they are in business to swindle.
Glengarry Glen Ross ran on Broadway at about the same time as a much-praised revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman. It was immediately noted that Mamet’s coolly objective presentation made Miller’s play seem moralistic and sentimental. No version of poetic justice — the punishment of the bad and the redemption of the good — exists in Mamet’s plays. In Mamet, the loser loses and the aggressor succeeds. There is no great scheme of the universe in which his characters’ “habitual action” leads to a cosmically fitting end.
Of Mamet’s 1997 movie The Spanish Prisoner, the critic Anthony Lane remarks that Mamet is “a connoisseur of the great American con.” And how we con one another and ourselves proves the major theme of all his work.
In his 1987 movie House of Games, a psychiatrist who counsels gamblers and writes bestsellers about their addiction herself becomes addicted to learning the tricks of a con artist (brilliantly played by Joe Mantegna), believing she cannot be conned since she is so experienced in the deceptions of her patients. The audience believes that, like her, it cannot be conned and certainly not conned twice. But the psychiatrist and audience alike are conned, to the very end. No less victimized than the heroine, the audience ends up empathizing with — and even approving — her killing of the con man at the end of the film.
The fascination with conning is equally apparent in the 1994 Oleanna, a filmed play much condemned for its apparent misogyny and sexism. A female student comes to a sociology professor complaining that she does not understand what he means when he tells his classes that their schooling is a scam — a con game concealing the fact university education is mere warehousing of students till they get old enough to earn a living. And indeed, in the end, the professor proves a typical Mamet con artist, finally conned by the woman and her “committee” into losing his job through her enticing him into making patronizing, sexist remarks.
In a profile in the New Yorker, John Lahr claimed that Mamet “had done for American theater at the end of the century what his hero, the iconoclastic sociologist Thorstein Veblen, did for American sociology at the beginning: provide a devastating, often hilarious new idiom to dissect the follies of American life.” This idiom is often blunt, demotic, and scatological. But this, too, is quintessentially American, and Mamet’s broad language is not the thoughtless filler common to most social obscenity.
Rather it represents a distillation of our baffled inability to explain ourselves to ourselves or to communicate with others. It is the ironically and comically inappropriate language of the con man outmaneuvered and of his conned victim — of the baby boomers who speak casually of sexual conquest and physical intimacy while being terrified of one another.
Given Mamet’s jaundiced view of American morals and mores, one would expect him to pose himself as the bad boy of American theater, a sort of dirty-talking George Bernard Shaw who hopes to overthrow the classical past. But his recent book on drama, Three Uses of the Knife, proves that expectation wrong. Instead, he puts himself directly in the great Western tradition, invoking Saint Paul, Shakespeare (often), Henrik Ibsen, Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller.
The title of the new essays on the theater that Mamet has collected in Three Uses of the Knife comes from a passage by the folksinger “Leadbelly” Ledbetter that Mamet uses to illustrate his thesis that “dramatic structure” is “an exercise of a naturally occurring need or disposition to structure the world”:
You take a knife, you use it to cut the bread, so you have strength to work; you use it to shave, so you look nice for your lover; on discovering her with another, you use it to cut out her lying heart.
A beautifully designed and printed volume, Three Uses of the Knife is not a scholarly treatise on the drama. Rather it is a loosely organized set of remarks not strictly following from one another, but containing a wealth of sharp insight into the elements of plot, enticement of the audience, and engagement of the heart and soul rather than the intellect.
Writing about art and propaganda, for instance, Mamet distinguishes Samuel Beckett from the brilliant filmer of Nazi propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl: “They’re both dealing with exactly the same human capacity to order the intolerable into meaning — one creates cleansing art, the other advertisements for murder.” He jokes, about artistic creation,
I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.
What makes the British so admire his work is the easy sense Mamet gives of belonging to the European dramatic tradition. He is believably traditional when, at the conclusion of Three Uses of the Knife, he writes, “The purpose of theater, like magic, like religion — those three harness mates — is to inspire a cleansing awe.”
But the British may admire Mamet as well for what strikes them as his very American denial of drama’s tradition of showing a moral structure to the universe. The great tradition in Mamet is shattered — and the catharsis, the “cleansing awe” of which he speaks, is tainted — by his denial of the moral order necessary to purge fear and pity. “We live,” he writes “in an extraordinarily debauched, interesting, savage world, where things really don’t come out even. The purpose of true drama is to help remind us of that.”
Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
