David Mamet Is a Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity The playwright won’t play along with woke signaling, talismanic masking or deference to petty tyrants. Barton Swaim
“Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along.”
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, innumerable films, TV documentaries and history textbooks instructed us that the 1950s were years of conformity and conventionalism: “The Donna Reed Show,” McCarthyism, “The Organization Man,” TV dinners. In fact, the ’50s were a time of extraordinary artistic creativity, boundless technological innovation, original thinking in politics, intellectual diversity in journalism and higher education, new energy in religion, and enormous progress in race relations. What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally evolved cultural solidarity—something nearly everybody, on the left and the right, longs for now.
An informed observer of present-day America might reasonably conclude that our own decade—at least among the educated and advantaged classes—is far more imbued with the spirit of conformism than the ’50s were. Corporate managers and military leaders parrot nostrums about diversity, inclusion and sustainability that few of them believe. Museums and orchestras studiously avoid programming that might offend ideologues. Reporters and producers in the mainstream press seize on stories—or ignore them—solely because that’s what everybody else in the press is doing. Large majorities in wealthy cities dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the same reason.
Maybe America’s deciders and describers (to use Nicholas Eberstadt’s phrase) aren’t the independent-minded lot they think themselves to be.
These and related ironies were on my mind in February when I received a galley copy of the playwright David Mamet’s “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of Free Lunch,” published Tuesday. The book is a collection of essays written over the past two years on an array of cultural and political topics: pandemic zealotry, Donald Trump, terrorism, California’s punitive tax code, Christianity and Judaism, Broadway and the movies. The essays are by turns witty, insightful, affecting and cryptic. What struck me most about the book, though, was how superbly out of place its author must be in the eminent environs of his chosen industry.
In March I visited Mr. Mamet’s home in Santa Monica and asked him about, for lack of a more original term, the Age of Conformity. What is the source of this sudden impulse to go along with the crowd that we see at high levels of American society?
“It’s that time-wasting machine,” he says, pointing to the cellphone with which I’m recording the conversation. “We’re all connected. But connected for what purpose? The idea that everybody has to behave the same way is part of the breakdown of what was a cohesive society.”
He brings up the 1950s without prompting. “When I was a kid,” he says—Mr. Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947—“people went to different churches, they were from different ethnic backgrounds, their parents came from different countries, but somehow they managed to have a collective life. All of their self-worth didn’t come from belonging and staying connected to this one uber-group.”
Mr. Mamet’s works include the Pulitzer-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1984) and the screenplays for “The Untouchables” (1987), “Hoffa” (1992) and “Heist” (2001). He speaks the way he writes: in short, forceful sentences and with constant recourse to wild anecdotes, uproarious jokes and literary quotations bent to his purpose.
Do people in the entertainment industry censor themselves? “They do not walk around saying things that are dangerous to express, no. People whisper out here. They have to. To say, ‘Well maybe Trump did some good things’—you can’t do that. You’d risk your home, your job, your family, your friends.”
Mr. Mamet is convinced that the “woke agenda” (his term) is basically an act, so in some ways it works well in Hollywood. “Nobody really believes it,” he says. “Nobody really believes boys turn into girls and girls turn into boys—no one does. But it’s put into a different category, so that it becomes dangerous to question it. If you question it, you’re out.”
Are the young buying it? My own observation suggests some substantial minority do not. Academics and college students I’ve spoken to since 2017 indicate that social pressure to signal assent to a rotating series of orthodoxies, from public health to race and gender theories, has sparked a quiet revolt. Post a black square on Instagram to show that America is systemically racist, even if you don’t think that’s true; wear a mask even though you know it doesn’t work and you’re 20 and vaccinated; share your pronouns whether you accept or reject gender ideology—a reaction seems almost guaranteed.
“People of that generation,” Mr. Mamet agrees, “a lot of them just aren’t scared anymore.”
Not that he expects anybody among our institutional leaders to admit they were wrong, on Covid or crime or anything else. He mentions Stacy Schiff’s “Witches,” a 2015 history of the Salem trials. “The delusion ran for about 18 months,” Mr. Mamet says, summarizing the book, “and after that, since they couldn’t explain it, they just forgot it. It never happened.” The phenomenon by which authorities and experts make a hash of things and then move on as if nothing happened is one attentive readers will recognize. Mr. Mamet offers some encouragement. “The thing about history,” he says, “is not that people change. People don’t change. But people die. So a new generation comes up and says, ‘Yeah, I get it, that’s stupid, I’m not gonna do that.’ ”
As if to demonstrate noncompliance, one of Mr. Mamet’s poodles, Ruby, jumps on the couch and sniffs my face. “Manners!” he shouts. “Come on, you’re embarrassing me in front of my guest. Sit!” The dog pays little attention. Made at last to submit, Ruby reluctantly goes elsewhere.
On the coffee table between us are several books by and about James Joyce, and an oversized edition of the Torah. “It’s all there,” Mr. Mamet says, pointing to the holy book. “Everything we’ve been living through.” The habit among America’s wealthy, privileged influencers of reviling the country that gave them privilege and influence, Mr. Mamet says, is in various way a re-enactment of biblical events. He refers to the narrative in which God provides manna for the Israelites in the wilderness: “The people are hungry, there’s nothing to eat in the desert, so God says, I’ll give ’em manna. They say, What does manna taste like? Answer: It tastes like whatever your favorite food is. They say, I don’t want whatever my favorite food is. And so they stage another rebellion.”
That is a heavily abridged version of the accounts in Exodus and Numbers, but he is right about the biblical pattern: Prosperity, particularly unearned prosperity, tends to generate folly and vice. “When do violent revolutions happen?” he asks. “They happen when things get too good.” We live in the “most prosperous country in the history of the world, and so what’s our response?” Mr. Mamet waits for me to answer, but I keep silent. “The response is: We don’t need God. We don’t need the Constitution. We don’t need anything. Go study semiotics. Go become an energy therapist, whatever. Someone will take care of you and tell you what to do.”
Mr. Mamet announced a turn to the political right in a 2008 essay for the Village Voice, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’ ” but he was a black sheep long before then. His 1992 play “Oleanna,” for instance, features a male academic whose life and career are ruined by a calculating female student’s spurious accusation of sexual harassment.
Was there a moment when he decided to break ranks altogether? “I met a guy at my synagogue here maybe 20 years ago,” he says. “He was talking about Milton Friedman and [Friedrich] Hayek and Thomas Sowell. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I was impressed by his attitude. He wasn’t strident or arrogant. It was that guy’s attitude that impressed me.”
The man lent Mr. Mamet some books by these authors. “I said to him, ‘Good, I’ll read them. But,’ I said, ‘when my friends come over, I’ll have to hide them.’ He said: ‘I don’t.’ And that changed my life. What was I saying? Did I really think I had to hide books from my friends? How sick was I? It was a Road to Damascus moment.”
(Mr. Mamet, an observant Jew, freely uses Christian imagery, as in this reference to the Apostle Paul’s conversion. In “Recessional” he remarks, apropos of Billy Graham’s oratory, that he “would be thrilled to accept the Christian tradition and Christ as my Savior” but that “I am prohibited from doing so by my own religion.” Here, at least, he conforms.)
He recalls another incident around the same time, not long after he bought his house in Santa Monica. The house was, and still is, surrounded by enormous hedges—you can hardly see the building from the nearby street. He received a letter from the City Council demanding that he cut the hedges down to a certain height or be fined $25,000 for every day the hedges remained too high. He eventually won that wrangle, he recalls, but the episode led him to believe that many government officials simply enjoy forcing law-abiding people into compliance with arbitrary dictates.
“I thought at the time: I’ve seen these people before.” The “hedge commissioners,” as he calls them, were the theater critics he’d known earlier in his career. “They would come in on opening night and strut around and stand with their backs to the stage, looking at the people coming in. People used to say, and maybe they still do, that the critics just liked having the power to shut the play down. And the critics would say, ‘No, ha ha, we don’t have that power.’ But they did have it, and they loved it.”
Like many people who find themselves dissenting from the dominant outlook of their cultivated and post-religious peers, Mr. Mamet felt that modern conceptions of human nature had become hopelessly naive. A rosy view of human proclivities leads easily to groupthink and its invariable accompaniment, scapegoating. Since the existence of evil is undeniable, if it isn’t intrinsic to all of us, it must come from some disfavored person or group.
Which led him back to biblical religion. “The Bible starts with perfidy, and perfidy is everywhere in it. There are very few people in the Bible you want your kids to be like,” he says. We exchange our favorite bits of biblical realism. Mr. Mamet notes that the genealogies of David and other heroes don’t bother skipping over—indeed they seem to go out of their way to mention—adulterers. “What the Bible is telling us is that the human race is unalterably flawed. It’s not a matter of doing away with the ‘haters’ or with this group or that group. We have to deal with our own mind.”
A robust understanding of your own and others’ propensity to bad behavior, he seems to suggest, has a way of inoculating you against groupthink.
Woke signaling, blind compliance with public-health authoritarianism, deference to theater critics and tyrannical city officials—Mr. Mamet doesn’t play along. I’m reminded of the line spoken by Richard Roma, the aggressive and highly successful real-estate salesman in “Glengarry Glen Ross” played by Al Pacino in the 1992 film adaptation. “I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion,” Roma says. “If everyone thinks one thing, then I say bet the other way.”
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