The Politics of Oscar: David Mamet Turns to the Dark Side

The Oscar race is a funny thing.  It is not all that different from any other fairly meaningless contest in our culture.  It is based on momentarily likability.   Your vote is personal.  It was with great interest, then, that I’ve watched this whole “David Mamet becomes conservative” story.

He isn’t really just quietly becoming a conservative, of course, he’s burning down the house – calling liberalism an addiction, a disease and so on and so forth.  Naturally, we liberals are going to take issue with this. My knee-jerk reaction is this: so you finally got sick and tired of paying taxes?  Does this signal a possible shift of more filmmakers taking a major stand against “liberal Hollywood?”

I haven’t read the book yet so I don’t know exactly what he’s saying, save for the pull quotes in interviews and his vague response to it all.   But being a conservative has never hurt Clint Eastwood either at the box office or with the AMPAS.  No one really cares that much what Eastwood believes.  But that’s because he isn’t trying to burn down the house.

Mamet been one of my favorite writers for years now.  I probably don’t go any given month without saying “never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”  But he’s only been nominated twice for an Oscar – once for his adaptation of Wag the Dog and once for The Verdict, also adapted.   Missing won instead.  So it’s not like it’s any great loss particularly, Oscar-wise (as if that matters in the least bit; it does not).

But part of my adoration of his work, I suppose, came from the idea that fundamentally we agreed about this crazy experience here — certainly The Edge and Glengarry Glen Ross, two of my favorite works by him, reflect survival of the fittest – though in one, we sympathize with the working man who can’t wrestle out of the capitalist system.  And in the other, we are to feel sorry for “a man who owns a plane.” Why? Because, “first it’s the girl then it’s the boodle.”  Anthony Hopkins plays a man who has acquired great wealth by being smarter than everyone else (“why isn’t the rabbit afraid?” “Because he’s smarter than the panther.”) His strength and good looks are unimportant. He survives solely on his wits and he triumphs in life and in the wilderness.

The conservatives are giddy about the turn of events.  Here is Big Hollywood’s Andrew Klavin:

So I rejoiced—and I also sympathized. Breaking free of leftism while working in show business is like escaping from “The Matrix” only to find oneself in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” You wake to a risky but bracing new reality of individual liberty, limited government and free markets and are instantly beset by zombified statist dreamers determined either to make you rejoin their ranks or to destroy you. Mr. Mamet reports that a certain prominent left-leaning newspaper actually panned his first openly conservative play not once but twice for good measure. (Libertarian humorist Greg Gutfeld has introduced a “Mamet Attack Clock” on his late-night cable show to measure just how fast critics will now downgrade their opinions of the playwright’s work.)

Under such circumstances, it is natural that Mr. Mamet would develop the urge to cry out, like Kevin McCarthy in the famous last scene of “Body Snatchers”: “Listen to me! Please listen!” From that urge, no doubt, arises Mr. Mamet’s new work of nonfiction, “The Secret Knowledge.” It is his attempt to explain and disseminate the thinking behind his conversion to the right.

“Liberalism is a religion,” he writes. “It affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed. Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.”

So far, there hasn’t been a lot of blowback yet that I can find.   The reaction ranges from MEH to mild disappointment.  But since his ideas are always thoughtfully put forth, he doesn’t seem to be inspiring hysteria.  Yet.