In these disappointing essays, David Mamet can’t close the deal
There’s an essay early in David Mamet’s new book, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,” that offers a tantalizing glimpse of what the book could have been, were the celebrated playwright’s brains not so irradiated by right-wing media and memes. The essay, “King Kong,” takes as its starting point the racial and erotic subtext of the 1933 movie about a big black ape who desperately, violently desires a White woman.
Kong dies, writes Mamet, “clutching both her and the world’s biggest erection, overcome by the mechanical contrivances of the puny white men who, as unaided individuals, had no hope of combating his animal lust.”
Why, asks Mamet, were White audiences so eager to watch such a film? His answer, informed by Freud, is repression. Repression followed by the need to deal, unconsciously, with what has been repressed. Fear of Blackness. Guilt and shame at the violence visited on generations of Black people. Envy, etc. A bouillabaisse of conflicting and unacknowledgeable desires, fears and animosities that needs somehow to be metabolized. This is where the alchemy of popular culture comes in, says Mamet.
A movie like “King Kong” takes the repressed feelings and then veils and remixes them enough to allow them back into view, where they can be eagerly consumed by a public in need of relief from its agitated unconscious.
So far so good. This is interesting cultural criticism, written by someone who knows from culture. I can imagine a different book in which Mamet takes such insights and goes even deeper into the American unconscious, past and present, airing its hidden racial and sexual laundry, drawing on the well of dark genius that produced plays like “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Oleanna” to wave back at us all our unmentionables.
Who better, in this hypothetical, to challenge and provoke the left than a bareknuckle Jew like Mamet, Chicago-born and bred, conqueror of the New York theater world, veteran of the L.A. movie world, scourge of selfdelusion and performative piety, relative latecomer to conservatism? Who better to tell us what acts of repression and self-deception are being performed right now by right-thinking leftists and liberals? God knows we could use it.
If only. Telling an author what he should have written is one of the cardinal sins of book criticism. In the case of “Recessional,” though, it seems like the only critically generous thing to do. Because the alternative is to dwell on the book as it is, which is a pale facsimile of my hypothetical. “Recessional” isn’t really a book at all but a McBook. It’s a collection of disparate pieces, written mostly as columns for National Review, that are given back to us in book form only because the author has a big name and there’s some money to be made - or at least a valuable relationship to be massaged. Mamet doesn’t like public school teachers. He doesn’t like pacifists. He likes Donald Trump. He likes Israel. He doesn’t like Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street. He likes God.