Hey all! Got a short one today. I’ve been busy and tired, and also preparing my Birthday Lecture. So, a review and a Mithra pic. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Mamet, Bambi vs Godzilla
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: The Good Girl
REVIEWS
David Mamet, “Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business” (2007) - David Mamet is probably the dumbest dude who could conceivably be considered a great writer. People throw around the phrase “idiot savant,” but part of what makes the parts of the Mamet canon that work – The Spanish Prisoner, Redbelt, Ronin, I like Spartan even though it’s goofy, every part of GlenGarry Glen Ross other than the stupid Alec Baldwin speech – work at all is Mamet’s unswerving devotion, his bone-deep certainty that the silly scenarios he crafts and ludicrous phrases he puts in characters’ mouths constitute Art, Art that both reflects and enhances reality. I don’t know enough about Japanese art to say this, but I sometimes think of Mamet as doing a kind of American kabuki, a hermetic world of symbols and valuations… except, being American, it’s loud and verbose instead of silent.
I had some idea that Mamet was also an opinion-monger. He’s a dude who seems to hold peculiar ideas about masculinity, fairly standard meat-headery but usually at least a few degrees off the mean. Like most director/writers with some pretense of being auteurs, he’s expressed disdain for the current state of Hollywood, and has a certain irascibility about him (he had a falling out with another director who I once knew, when this director refused to cast Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, in some project, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that Rebecca Pidgeon is a prominent candidate for the title of worst actress in the history of American cinema). He’s taken a minor but time-honored road to right-wing crankdom: a successful but in some cases stymied career in a field that puts one in touch with many phony liberals (with the possible exception of academia, the liberals don’t get any phonier than they do in entertainment), plus attachment to a cause that used to have more liberal adherents but has fewer as the crank gets older (in Mamet’s case, Zionism).
“Bambi vs Godzilla,” arguably his best-known book, was written before his Trump-era turn into full-on wingnuttery. It is, as the subtitle says, about the movie business, which is political but in an odd kind of way. I’ll be honest, reader: I somehow got the idea, I think from (mis-)reading reviews of this back when it came out in the late aughts, that this book contrasted Bambi and Godzilla as different approaches to culture and filmmaking, where Bambi represented what’s good and Godzilla represented what’s not. “What a perfect example of Mametesque foolishness!” I thought. But I was wrong. Apparently there was an animated short with the same name, where Bambi is gamboling around before being stomped by Godzilla. For Mamet, this is symbolic of how business destroys art.
Truth be told, blockhead or no, Mamet’s points about the movie business aren’t entirely wrong, and many of them point to better, dare I say socialist, ways of doing things. He points out how people who want to make movies have very different interests from movie studios and their main manifestations on film sets, the dread producers. He applauds the craft dedication of “below the line” film workers, from makeup and wardrobe departments to electricians to craft services. He hails unions, especially the Teamsters, and talks shit about Reagan killing the American dream, briefly. Of course, this was in 2008- one wonders what Trump-supporting 2022 Mamet thinks, or if he has as many good things to say about unions when the kid making his coffee tries to secure one…
That’s all well and good, but there are problems throughout and they get worse as the book goes on. Mamet dialogue can work, if you appreciate it as profoundly un-naturalistic, with great performers like Jack Lemmon, Chiwetel Ejiofor, or Val Kilmer… but I’m not sure even they could save fifty thousand-odd words of David Mamet monologue. The dude just writes wrong. He uses words wrong. He descends into British idiom for no discernable reason. You’re from fucking Chicago, you’ve never been “chuffed” in your life, dumb-dumb. And that’s just the uncomplicated wrongness of simple error. There’s also the needless, compound wrongness of his aesthetics and worldview, the hash he has made of efforts to apply psychoanalysis, existentialism, quarter-understood nuggets of history, and some very unusual and seemingly arbitrary ideas of dramaturgy to the contemporary movie industry. It makes for a confusing book, made more frustrating by the flashes of insight Mamet occasionally shows in spite of himself. He’s at his best not when he happens to agree with me, but when he talks about old movies. There, he’s just geeking out. I can get behind that. The rest of it is a slog.
There’s probably more complication here, but for my money, Mamet is one of those artsy dudes who tries to make up for the fact he makes up imaginary stories for a living by injecting an affected masculinity into other aspects of his life. Male creative writing instructors display this all the time, getting all macho about how hard writing is and the rules you need to follow to do a good job (often involving a “spare,” “hard” prose style, ala Hemingway), flaunting dude-ish hobbies and preoccupations like baseball or martial arts, on and on. Being fucking weird, Mamet’s preoccupations are maybe a little less typical, a little more interesting, so this book isn’t just a list of how Hollywood should be more manly again. Mamet’s is an auteur manliness. That helps, but not enough. This is a real head-scratcher of a book, in a lot of ways. Who is it for? Who knows? Who cares? **
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Good Girl
Seriously… look at how good she is
Hahaha that was a pretty satisfying take-down that perfectly explains my conflicting emotions ( Hmmm, is this as deep as it's supposed to be?) after seeing Oleanna as a teenager.
I really enjoyed this edition of the newsletter!