When politics and religion infect fictional art in a pointed way, the results are often quite limited in their appeal. The bull-in-a-china-shop methods of allegory or didacticism occasion more eye-rolling than real fervor. Just witness recent efforts like Atlas Shrugged, which barely twitched critics’ meters. The same could be said for plenty more.
Not so the plays and films of David Mamet. He’s inconsistent, but when he’s good—House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, American Buffalo—he’s all but peerless. Mamet’s strength has always been the maddening complexities of what he portrays. Oleanna, for instance, in which an undergraduate brings a professor to ruin through a maze of psychosexual situations, wouldn’t be half the play it is were it not for the slipperiness of its main conceit. It could have strayed into clearly political territory, but instead induces incredible discomfort with its elusiveness.
The best artists have always tended to be those who reflect the bewildering complexity of real human interaction, who go beyond caricature and easy assumption. Shakespeare’s reputation is all but unassailable; nobody remembers who wrote the simplistic religious allegory Everyman.
Recently, the Weekly Standard, the bully pulpit of the neoconservative movement, examined at some length David Mamet’s very public conversion from an extreme brand of liberalism to an extreme brand of conservatism. He’s about to publish The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. This conversion is supposed, apparently, to make those of us on the leftward end of the spectrum apoplectic, make us suddenly cease liking what before we adored. I’m sure some critics may go a little green in the gills at Mamet’s newfound conservatism, but it seems like a petty point that few critics will really care about.
Mamet’s politics won’t change the beauty of his best work—most of us will still be saying “Coffee is for closers” when the moment calls for it. Judging an artist’s work shouldn’t be dependent on said artist’s politics. Artists, after all, are mortal; their lives may be interesting, but the work that outlives them is what gets studied. I, for one, won’t stop adoring Soylent Green just because Charlton Heston turned out to be a gun-toting conservative icon.
Artists, by the very nature of their relationship to mainstream culture, tend toward social liberalism. It’s so common as to be the subject of stereotype: “Hollywood liberal.” The very commonness of it seems to mean the political left seldom finds itself celebrating fictional works meant as thinly disguised liberal propaganda.
Mamet’s conversion, however, seems to have the Weekly Standard wondering (with a whiff of fond hope) if the presumably leftward tribe comprising the entire arts establishment will immolate itself over his fall from grace and the arrival of new works from Mamet in danger of being too conservative. In that wondering, author Andrew Ferguson, describing a college audience witnessing a Mamet speech, wallows in stereotypes of the left that feel as outdated as any of the cast of Everyman: “You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-‘n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’.”
He proves, if nothing else, that the Weekly Standard‘s comedy isn’t for everyone. Granted, the publication is a political beast entire, but the imposing of politics onto the arts is a deeply limited and limiting view of something that, at its best, trumps such concerns. In bestowing conservative sainthood onto an artist of Mamet’s caliber, Ferguson seems to miss that he is bringing something grand to a paltry, evanescent summation.
His unintentional comedy, however, verges on creating beautiful satire: “The two personal attributes that come through most notably in conversation, and in The Secret Knowledge, are gratitude and modesty, both regarded as conservative virtues. His modesty is of the epistemological kind, reinforced in politics and economics by his reading of Friedman and Hayek, the great critics of central planning.”
And indeed, we all know it’s not the shoes that make the man, but his criticism of “central planning.”
Mamet himself gets in on the cartoon act to a surprising degree: “…I saw the liberals hated George Bush. It was vicious. And I thought about it, and I didn’t get it. He was no worse than the others, was he? And I’d ask my liberal friends, ‘Well, why do you hate him?’ They’d all say: ‘He lied about WMD.’ Okay. You love Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t write Profiles in Courage—he lied about that.”
So yes, one of the most brilliant of contemporary playwrights just put an equal sign between lying to start a war and lying about authorship. And Glengarry Glen Ross is still a work of genius.
In the end, it comes down to something Mamet is quoted as saying: “As an American, I don’t think that my politics are any better than anybody else’s politics. I’m a gag writer.”
Exactly. And a great one at that.