Subscription required so excerpt only....
Posted on 04/13/2022 6:45:32 PM PDT by Rummyfan
The playwright has undergone a conversion. He’s an apostate now
How did David Mamet spend the pandemic? The answer, as anyone familiar with the prolific, brilliant playwright and screenwriter would probably have guessed, is that he wrote.
“I’ve been writing a lot of essays lately,” Mamet, seventy-four, says when we meet at his Santa Monica home on a cool January evening. “Because, you know, I don’t want to go and sit on a park bench. I’m a writer.” A collection of essays written during the tumultuous plague years is published this month by Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is combative, challenging, witty, and, as the title suggests, its prevailing mood is as dark as the “terrible” period in which it was written.
“Now we are engaged in a prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contest’s prize,” writes Mamet. “The universities and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theory — that is racism — and elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin.”
Watching his “beloved American democracy and culture dissolve,” he asked: “What can I do?” He took up his pen. “The question as one ages,” says Mamet in an energetic bass tone, “is ‘What in the world is going on here?’ Especially if you’re a writer and especially if you’re a playwright, because being a playwright is about looking at human folly. It’s not about flogging a horse of your own good opinions or writing marginally good dramas about marginally difficult situations. It’s about saying ‘I just don’t get it.’”
(Excerpt) Read more at spectatorworld.com ...
Subscription required so excerpt only....
Subscriptions are for closers!
Well played sir.
Bookmark
Good article. I read it without subscription.
I see what you did there.
My unconstrained thought is that David Mamet's Jewishness is showing -and to his advantage. It is fair to attribute in some part his epiphany of conservatism to his ethnic upbringing because he has acknowledged its influence so so often himself.
I think it's fair to say that intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals, are now increasingly turning away from the mindless fascism of the woke culture. This is entirely in keeping with a Jewish intellectual and academic tradition that goes back to Maimonides and beyond into the Old Testament.
When opposition to woke-ism is taken up by Jewish intellectuals, much as they led the crusade for civil rights, then free speech and intellectual rigor will become fashionable once again.
As a David Mamet fan, it is kind of surprising to me that he was ever a leftist. In many ways, his plays, like Glengarry Glenn Ross and Oleanna, are very conservative.
I saw an interview a few years back in which he said that he listened to a lot of talk radio and “snake oil” salesman. The purpose was to keep in touch with flyover country, unlike his peers.
I like to think that Rush got to him, through osmosis.
a good listen if you're into those things,
he provides a pretty darn interesting take on the current state of America and how we ended up here
“Spartan” is one of my favorite films.
Mamet is an amazing director. He’s also incredible at writing plays, screenplays, and especially dialogue.
Stylistically, I’d compare him with Michael Mann, but he tells his stories leaner and more efficiently than Mann. Mann likes to throw in a lot of vanity shots.
Glengarry is one of two movies that made Alec Baldwin not just watchable, but insanely good. The other is Hunt for Red October. Both those movies are some of my favs and they managed to make baldwin interesting in totally opposite ways.
Mamet publicly announced that he was no longer a "brain-dead liberal" decades ago.
Regards,
Ja, genau...
Another of his books, The Secret Knowledge, goes into his 'conversion'.
Was never a big fan of Hunt for Red October (either the book or the movie), but GGR is a masterpiece — and Baldwin deserves his share of credit for that. I don’t think Baldwin is even on screen for 8 minutes in GGR, but his monologue is a classic. I probably rewatch it 3-4X a year. Nothing he has done since has come close. He made that film at 34, so he peaked fairly early in his career.
You should check out Oleanna with William Macy. A very complex psychological thriller. Also a masterpiece in its way.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.