Where David Mamet Went Awry
Once upon a time in a Texas high school classroom, I asked my students to stand up together and read, as loudly as possible and without a trace of fear, a line from a great American play:
“Fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie…!”
The faces of those high school juniors told the tale: Holy shit, I did not know that you could do that. The wounded urgency of American Buffalo’s dingy little Chicago pawn shop took life in a new generation. David Mamet, at one time America’s greatest dramatist, lived again.
Beginning in the late ‘70s, Mamet detonated American drama and remade it with the jumpy minimalism of how people really talk. He cut away the fat and ditched the emotionally-pat. Gassy monologues: out. Verbal headshots as dialogue: in. Charming dilletantes: down. Clammy working-class dudes high on their own supply: up. He summoned voices of flinty American ambition and dunked them in jet-black heavy-tar absurdity. Then he made those voices play off each other, in percussive, irresistible chains of rancorous American bullshit. Without Mamet there is no Aaron Sorkin, no Lena Dunham, no Taylor Sheridan, no Tony Gilroy. If you don’t see Mamet’s direct influence on roughly two-thirds of top-quality scripts today that’s because it’s easy to not notice how rich, dark, smelly mulch makes gardens possible.
At the start of Mamet’s career, the theater world rewarded him aggressively: two Tony nominations, a half dozen Drama Desk nominations, two New York Drama Critics’ Circle wins and a Pulitzer in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross, along with another Pulitzer nomination a decade later for his haunting child-of-divorce chamber piece The Cryptogram. He wrote the uproarious Speed-the-Plow, one of the two or three best Hollywood satires in any medium, and had the chutzpah to cast Madonna in its opening Broadway run in 1988. It was David Mamet’s world, and we were just living in it, motherfucker.
A decade after he became the most urgent force in American theater, he took his act to Hollywood and wrote some of the best scripts ever: The Untouchables, The Verdict, Wag the Dog. His elite record of award recognition followed him there: nominations from the BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Emmys and the Oscars. He took the crown of angry, irresistible American oracle from Paddy Chayefsky and posed for author photos wearing berets and smoking cigars. There are heat checks, and then there are Mamet’s two overlapping heat checks in two different genres: a writing-for-stage heat check from 1977 to the late 1990s and a writing-for-stage heat check from 1981 until the mid-2000s.
Lesser writers have their characters speak from their heart, whatever that means. Mamet’s characters speak from their liver and spleen and stomach. He wrote the “Chicago way” scene in The Untouchables and got Sean Connery an Oscar in 1988. For my money, though, Connery’s character smiling and saying “Oh, what the hell! You gotta die of something,” as he rides on horseback to intercept a heavily-guarded shipment of illegal booze is the Untouchables quote I’d tattoo up my arms.
