[In the following review, Van Leer discusses many of Mamet's works that were produced from the mid-1970s to 1988.]

In the past fifteen years David Mamet has established himself as one of our most powerful playwrights best known for Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow, he is praised for the contemporaneity of his deadbeat settings and characters, for the honesty of his gritty dialogue, for the intensity of his moral vision. Not simply a chronicler of modern life, Mamet is a prophet decrying the dark underside of the American dream. Yet Some Freaks, his second book of essays, possesses so little of the style, wit, intelligence, or intensity usually claimed for him that one finishes the embarrassing collection wondering what Mamet's reputation for high seriousness could possibly be based on. Even more disappointing, Mamet himself seems totally unaware of his failure.

The volume is a hodgepodge of speeches and journalism, reprinted from such unlikely places as Sports Illustrated, Penthouse, and Lincoln Center Theatre Company Magazine. Every page exudes a self-importance far exceeding the originality of the thinking and the elegance of the writing. The only interesting essays are the few in which Mamet considers his Jewish heritage. Next best are the bland personal accounts of youth in Chicago or summers in Vermont, inoffensive pieces reminiscent of Jean Kerr or Erma Bombeck without the bite. But whenever Mamet aims for bigger game—art or politics or sex or kryptonite—he falls consistently short, in a sententious prose Solemnly Capitalized and religiously committed to the split infinitive.

Mamet's ideas are as haphazard as his sentences. The essays are full of specious generalizations—that some of Jesus' teachings are “weak” and “anti-labor,” or that “women do not, on the whole, get along with women.” Trite observations masquerade as insights. Shane and Bad Day at Black Rock are deemed “the true stuff of the American Dream” and, Mamet cautions, the Mouseketeers did not really like us. Most distressing, the arguments often reaffirm the very clichés that they mean to overturn. In the title essay, for example, Mamet examines the elitism and the self-congratulation built into the Romantic notion of the artist as an isolated “freak,” yet what begins as an attack on the belief that artists are better than businessmen ends by celebrating that “freakish” superiority.

Part of the problem is Mamet's difficulty reconciling his intellect with his notion of masculinity. Obviously well read, Mamet peppers his analysis with references to Veblen, Jung, Stanislavsky, and Eisenstein. Yet he favors a kind of intellectual anti-intellectualism—the desire to be profound and to deny that profound is the sort of thing a real man would want to be. Following the macho lead of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, Mamet flaunts his knowledge of poker tables, pool halls, guerrilla warfare, and prides himself on being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU and the NRA.” He applauds his sexual open-mindedness in characterizing straight male bonding as very latent homosexuality: “That Fun Which Dare Not Speak Its Name.” And in a predictably elitist inversion, he dismisses as insufferably highbrow the achievements of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, James, and Mozart, while proclaiming television's Tyne Daly as “surely one of our finest actresses, a model artist.”

Such neo-philistinism is a time-honored trick of the anxious intellectual, at least as old as Walt Whitman's unconvincing insistence that he was one of the toughs. And in general the inadequacies of Some Freaks would be unremarkable had the collection not been followed so quickly by two equally insipid volumes—The Hero Pony, Mamet's first book of poems, and We're No Angels, his most recent screenplay. Operating on the principle that Mamet's every syllable must see print, his publishers have in addition announced for winter a book on film directing (Mamet has directed two movies). In his verse, Mamet has mastered alliteration and some rhymes. Yet, as its cloying title suggests, The Hero Pony combines an inflated sense of self-importance with a disingenuously cute poetic voice. Mamet treats such familiar themes as marital love, artistic creativity, and cosmic absurdity in a wide range of styles from Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery to Mother Goose and Hallmark. Confusing inexperience with innocence, the poems alternate tired metaphors (“Our love is butter / And the world is bread”) with shallow profundities (“Below a world of transportation / There is a school of thought”).

The banality of The Hero Pony is not surprising. Many macho prose styles go limp when they turn to poetry. More distressing is Mamet's screenplay for last winter's critical and commercial failure We're No Angels, Mamet's reputation as a screenwriter is less secure than as a playwright. He began in 1980 with a rewrite of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (which was first filmed in 1946) and went on to convert Barry Reed's novel into the Paul Newman vehicle The Verdict (1982), for which he received an Oscar nomination. These adaptations were followed by original screenplays for The Untouchables (1987), House of Games (1987), and Things Change (1988), the last two of which Mamet directed as well.

The films lacked the strengths of Mamet's theater. The rapid-fire dialogue of the plays was replaced on screen by cryptic understatement and soulful art-film silences. The plots were sloppy and the characters were undermotivated. In the climactic trial sequence of The Verdict, the testimony by an eleventh-hour witness was dramatically irrelevant: it was declared inadmissible as courtroom evidence without revealing anything new about the situation or the characters. And in the surprise murder that ended House of Games, the victim spewed blood and theme lines as an easy way of wrapping up the film.

Despite the movies' moralistic tones, their morals were not even all that clear. Virtue rarely depended on anything as concrete as a good deed. The hero of The Verdict was a disillusioned lawyer so concerned with salvaging an ideal image of justice (and of his own self-worth) that he almost lost the case for his deserving clients; audiences tolerated such a sanctimonious prig only because he was played by Paul Newman. Corruption seemed more interesting. In The Untouchables neither Mamet, nor director Brian De Palma, nor actor Kevin Costner ever figured out how to breathe life into straight-arrow Eliot Ness, and Al Capone walked off with the movie and audience sympathies.

Given this uneven record, the publication of We're No Angels seems at best a miscalculation, at worst a mystery. In its 1955 movie version, this much recycled plot presented Humphrey Bogart as one of three nineteenth-century convicts escaped from Devil's Island to work miracles at Christmastide (with the aid of an obliging viper). Mamet updated the story half a century into the 1930s, relocated it near the Canadian border on the feast of the town saint, substituted Robert De Niro for Bogart, and eliminated the snake, yet the rewrite suffered from its own irrelevance. Except for the commercial pairing of De Niro with teen heart-throb Sean Penn, there was no reason for refilming so forgettable a movie.

It is hard to imagine a less likely author for such cornball material than Mamet, and all his attention to atmosphere and detail could not disguise the inappropriateness of the assignment. His secular cynicism worked against the story's Christian moralism, with its sentimental theme that strangers may be “angels unawares.” In Mamet's delineation of the character, Penn's spirituality was indistinguishable from imbecility, and the watery miracle that ended the film—half The Miracle Worker and half Butch Cassidy—seemed virtually sacrilegious. Mamet was not even able to construct from these raw materials a serviceable plot; he reduced the third convict to a sociopathic cameo, who reappeared with pistols blazing whenever the movie bogged down in its own piety, and the characters' goal—the escape across a bridge into Canada—was so uninteresting, and so lacking in visual suspense, that the camera all but forgot to remark its occurrence in the film's final frames.

The question is not why Mamet was reduced to writing Christmas movies (that answer is easy to guess), but why he permitted the screenplay's publication. To understand what is going wrong in Mamet's recent writing, however, we must recall his more auspicious beginnings. Mamet first received national attention with the New York productions of Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo in the mid-1970s. Perversity dealt candidly with modern relationships, depicting in a series of brief skits the coupling and subsequent estrangement of two insecure young people, as abetted by their cynical best friends. The dialogue was consistently vulgar, but it was clever:

DANNY:
Do you like the taste of come?
DEBORAH:
Dan, I love the taste of come. It tastes like everything … good … just … coming out of your cock … the Junior Prom … an autumn afternoon. …
DANNY:
It doesn't taste a little bit like Chlorox?
DEBORAH:
It smells like Chlorox. It tastes like the Junior Prom.

American Buffalo was more complex, examining our definitions of success and loyalty in terms of a symbiotic relationship between three would-be thieves. A low-rent version of Chekhov's The Three Sisters, the play took place in the shop of a junk dealer, who with an addict and a small-time hood dreamed futilely of stealing a coin collection. Superimposing the extreme vulgarity of street slang onto the deadpan rhythms of Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter, Mamet created for his aspiring criminals a dramatic language both idiomatic and poetic, rivaling that of Marlon Brando's longshoreman in On the Waterfront.

TEACH:
I should have a nickel every time we're over at the game, I pop for coffee … cigarettes … a sweet roll, never say a word. … Someone is against me, that's their problem … I can look out for myself, and I don't got to fuck around behind somebody's back, I don't like the way they're treating me. Or pray some brick safe falls and hits them on the head, they're walking down the street. But to have that shithead turn, in one breath, every fucking sweet roll that I ever ate with them into ground glass. I'm wondering were they eating it and thinking “This guy's an idiot to blow a fucking quarter on his friends” … this hurts me, Don. This hurts me in a way I don't know what the fuck to do.
(Pause)
DON:
You're probably just upset.

To an audience still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, Mamet's brutality and nihilism seemed healthy correctives to the platitudinous optimism of the 1960s. Yet there were limits to this technique. The vulgarity quickly became wearisome. As Mamet himself has admitted, people “say ‘Fuck’ in direct proportion to how bored they are.” The repetition through which he created his poetic inarticulateness left little time for characterization or plot development. His characters were simple types—young lovers, addicts, petty thieves. And his plots—boy meets girl, boy loses girl; thieves plan a robbery, thieves do not execute a robbery—were merely skeletons on which to hang his fleshy dialogue.

More important, the moral ambiguities that plagued the films subtly informed the plays as well. The verbal facility of the more reprehensible characters often obscured the plays' indignation at their behavior. In Perversity, the boy's overbearing male friend regularly stole the show with his misogynist accounts of sexual conquests. (The part made the career of James Belushi, both when he performed it onstage and when he revived it in the sanitized film version, About Last Night. …) Similarly, the moral center of American Buffalo lay in the relation between Don the junk dealer and Bobby the addict. Yet productions of the play invariably became star turns for the actor playing the flashier role of the violent hood Teach (Robert Duvall in the original Broadway staging, Al Pacino in the 1984 revival).

Comparable inconsistencies marred Mamet's finest play, Glengarry Glen Ross, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Focusing on the competition within a real estate agency, Mamet explored one of his favorite topics—“the language of American Business”—in a series of rapid-fire exchanges (and scams) between the brokers. The script allowed for the kind of ensemble acting that guaranteed an electrifying evening in the theater. Yet the plot, which involved a theft within the agency, got lost in the dramatic fireworks. And the dialogue, in its fury, at times degenerated into mere invective:

ROMA:
Oh, fuck. Fuck. (He starts kicking the desk.) Fuck Fuck Fuck! Williamson!!! Williamson!!! (Goes to the door Williamson went into, tries the door; it's locked.) Open The Fucking … Williamson …

For all the power of the performances, it was difficult to know how to respond to such material. Mamet's distaste for the situation was clear enough. Still, nothing but a fashionable despair followed upon that distaste. And the amorality of huckster businessmen was not exactly news; it has been deplored everywhere on the American stage, from The Iceman Cometh to The Music Man. If anything, Mamet's outrage was less than that of his predecessors. While abhorring the vile means by which the salesmen succeeded, the play gloried in the ingenuity of their vileness. And Mamet's penchant for down-beat endings seemed in this case arbitrary and mean; in Glengarry's final minutes, its most sympathetic character, an aging spokesman for professionalism and team spirit, was without justification revealed as both thief and fool, leaving his heartless protégé to walk off with audience admiration (and acting honors). It was as if the opportunistic nephew Bernard had replaced Willy Loman as the protagonist of Death of a Salesman.

These tensions between moral outrage and cynical admiration became even less palatable in Speed-the-Plow. To date Mamet's most recent Broadway production, this three-character play of 1988 followed a producer's momentary dilemma about whether to film a star vehicle as his crass friend wishes or a prestigious novel about radiation as his secretary suggests. Full of witty (and knowing) jibes at Hollywood values, the play worked all of Mamet's customary moral inversions, finally exposing the secretary's high tone as opportunistic. And while the boss and his secretary wrestled with the niceties of the situation, the friend deflated all pretenses with his unapologetic greed (and, as always, copped the Tony).

In Mamet's previous work, the ethical uncertainty of the situation could seem tantalizing, perhaps even the point of the play. In Speed-the-Plow, however, the ambiguities were cheap and the ironies were self-congratulatory. Not only was the “classy” novel itself obviously a piece of pretentious dreck, but Hollywood superficiality was too easy a target. Instead of undermining his audience's sense of moral superiority, Mamet pandered to it. No one ever lost money preaching in New York the shallowness of Los Angeles. Moreover, the casting of the rock star Madonna as the secretary embodied precisely the commercialism that the script claimed to attack. The play itself became a star vehicle, a canny career move. Yet Mamet encouraged his audience to remain smugly aloof. We were not groupies, finally, for a box at the Royale Theatre was different from general admission to “Blond Ambition” at the Meadowlands.

Given the confusion, even the dishonesty, of Speed-the-Plow, one wonders whether Mamet, for all his anger, has ever been a reliable moral guide. His diatribes do not really take risks. In exploring the lower depths, he rarely attacks anything cherished by his middle-class audience. At the same time, the racism, the sexism, and the homophobia of his characters are not effectively defused by their author, and Mamet may seriously misjudge the psychological effect of so regularly venting those emotions in his work. As he himself implies in a disturbing scene in Edmond (1983), such hatreds always lurk beneath the surface of middle-class gentility, eager for expression. The venom in Mamet's plays permits audiences to credit their own worst biases under the cover of moral distance. And when we applaud (and award) Mamet's most villainous characters, we may secretly be celebrating the prejudices as fully as the performances.

Mamet would probably claim, like most postmodern artists from Wallace Shawn and Eric Bogosian to Andrew Dice Clay, that his satiric method (and his liberal upbringing) distinguishes his voice from that of his prejudiced characters. That is why the complacency of his non-fiction, where Mamet writes in his own voice, is so discouraging. His preoccupations—the language of business, the “American Loves” of the game of skill and the short con, sex as “the true nature of the world”—are of course all unapologetically (and perhaps exclusively) male. More important, they are relentlessly universalizing, assuming the existence of some underlying mythic abstraction, usually called Truth or America. His belief in homogeneous universals permits moral judgments, but it does so only by applying the same absolute standard to all people in all situations. Whatever the apparent modernity of Mamet's plays, his judgmental tone most recalls the work of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the other Jazz Age Jeremiahs. He reproduces not only their moral seriousness, but also their WASPish self-satisfaction with the spurious “truths” of manliness and inside knowledge.

Mamet's moralism is probably neither insincere nor intentionally old-fashioned. The problem resides not in his politics, but in his dramaturgy. Mamet's lack of interest in plot results from his development as a playwright. Beginning as an acting teacher, he turned to writing to provide his students with scenes to perform. It is not surprising, then, that sequences in Mamet's works play like acting exercises. Yet the sketchy plots and characterizations also reflect his fondness for abstraction. Despite the specificity and variety of Mamet's settings—a junk shop, a real estate agency, a producer's office, the Canadian border—all the plays take place in a single generalized landscape, vaguely urban and modern. Just as there is no difference between locations, so all people are essentially identical. Not only are all Mamet's characters stereotypes, but his lovers, brokers, producers, and convicts-turned-monks all speak the same Mametese. For him, “the model of the perfect play is the dirty joke,” drama stripped to the bare essentials of barn, salesman, and farmer's daughter.

Mamet's reliance on generalization and stereotype is the indirect legacy of Stanislavsky's influence on acting as practiced in America. There is no denying the contributions of Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and other reinterpreters of Stanislavsky in training a sophisticated roster of American actors. Nor can one fault Mamet for providing showcases for some of our most talented performers, especially Robert De Niro and Joe Mantegna. Yet one must at the same time recognize that the cultural assumptions of this approach were specific to the time that produced it, and especially to the decade after World War II, when it exercised its greatest influence on American theater.

Stanislavskian performances in America emphasized the universality of the dramatic situation, in which actor and character (and presumably audience) were all roughly on the same level and in agreement. The method succeeded best with contemporary works sharing its faith in abstract truths. The plays' plots were commonly symbolic, as in The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, or mythic, as in Death of a Salesman or A View from the Bridge. Their politics tended toward extremes—either conservative, as in the anti-union On the Waterfront, or radical, as in the pro-strike Waiting for Lefty. Their characterizations emphasized the psychological inevitability of Freud as he was understood in midcentury. With more alienating and ambiguous playwrights like Strindberg, Brecht, or O'Neill, the performance style was not successful.

The universalizing assumptions of American Stanislavskism hold little interest today. Symbolism and myth are no longer our preferred rhetorical vocabularies. The political excesses of 1930s Marxism and 1950s isolationism embarrass many former adherents. The sexism and the homophobia of midcentury Freudianism have led some to reinterpret Freud's original writings, others to reject him altogether. And although they are still considered powerful playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller are currently admired less as great truth-tellers than as superior representatives of their particular literary traditions—Southern gothic, gay, Jewish-American.

For we are no longer certain that people are basically all the same. Modern cultural debates—from referendums on bilingualism to the Miss Saigon brouhaha—concern the importance of ethnic difference and subcultural integrity. And to the extent that Mamet's theatrical methods presuppose cultural uniformity, his moral pronouncements seem beside the point. We do not care whether “thieves” are loyal or “secretaries” on the make, for we doubt the similarity of all thieves and all secretaries. We want to understand, instead, the social conditions and individual temperaments that lie behind a person's descent into theft or drug addiction. And even fairy tales like Working Girl or Pretty Woman (not to mention “Material Girl”) represent more specifically than Speed-the-Plow the variety of ways in which women today negotiate the marketplace.

By chronicling the American love of “skill and the short con,” Mamet found dogmas that could pass for morality in the depleted 1970s. But to the extent that these were just the pieties of another age's theatrical technique, he has taken us not beyond Watergate, he has taken us back to Disneyland. And in fretting over the Mouseketeers' honesty, Mamet reveals himself to be just one more casualty of the very Hollywood platitudes that he aims to expose.