Observer Review: Three Uses Of The Knife By David Mamet Essay, Research Paper

Short, crisp & # 8230 ; Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of DramaDavid MametMethuen? 12.99, pp128It is surprising, given his dramas & # 8217 ; deficiency of self-contemplation, how much David Mamet loves to speculate about theater. But the fierceness of his speculating & # 8211 ; that of the & # 8216 ; possessed, vehement teacher & # 8217 ; & # 8211 ; is distinctively Mametian. Three Uses of the Knife is a typically aggressive short ( overpriced ) treatise on our dramatic inherent aptitude. Instinct, because Mamet begins with an history of the & # 8216 ; dramatic impulse & # 8217 ; as an indispensable biological device by which we make sense of an impersonal universe. Making secret plans in which we are the hero & # 8211 ; wanting some things and coming into struggle with others & # 8211 ; is our manner of supporting ourselves from the nonsense of life.Most play, both on phase and elsewhere, offer false solaces. ( Mamet, composing during the humbling comedy of Clinton & # 8217 ; s 2nd term, makes the phantasies of politicians a cardinal illustration. ) Most normally they seek to do us experience more powerful than we truly are. Problem or issue-based dramas give us the semblances of rational command ; love affairs give us a quasi-religious belief that, after a & # 8216 ; truncated and formalized & # 8217 ; period of proving, the strength to prevail over hardship will lift up within us.What we lack is a sense of battle and an honorable recognition of our & # 8216 ; powerlessness & # 8217 ; . This, says Mamet, we will happen merely in calamity: & # 8216 ; Tragedy celebrates the single & # 8217 ; s subjection and therefore his or her release from the load of repression [ of that truth ] and its attender anxiety. & # 8217 ; He draws expressed analogues with faith: we must & # 8216 ; admit our sinful, weak, impotent province & # 8217 ; and can so happen peace.How convincing is this? Readers of Mamet & # 8217 ; s old theoretical work will recognize old subjects: the importance of the unconscious ; the ill will to didacticism ; his insisting, derived from Aristotle and Stanislavsky, on the domination of secret plan and the through-line of the supporter. & # 8216 ; That which the hero requires is the drama, & # 8217 ; declares Mamet. But his new accent on calamity as about the lone true sort of play ( with reverberations of Nietz

sche’s The Birth of Tragedy) signals the sharply increasing pessimism of Mamet’s vision of the emptiness and indulgence of contemporary culture. ‘In times of surplus,’ he writes, art ‘disappears.’ The result is highly readable and always interesting. Yet like many aphoristic writers, Mamet relies too often on the provocative half-truth.Do we really think that Shakespearean tragedy is best understood in the neo-Aristotelian terms so beloved of Hollywood script consultants? What of the theatre of the absurd, which often breaks the three-act structure and begins – with a recognition of powerlessness and pointlessness – where tragedy ends? Isn’t the idea that tragedy can be reduced to a ‘cleansing lesson’ itself didactic and utilitarian? Do we still believe in the tragic hero’s accession to wisdom? Does Lear really learn? Does Cleopatra?Perhaps most telling is the interaction between Mamet’s theories and his own work. The emphasis on power and impotence is apt: Mamet’s great dramatic theme is the contradiction between men’s great compulsion to appear strong and their actual weakness. But this is less metaphysical and more related to maleness and the American dream than his theories would suggest.It’s striking that Mamet, a playwright famed for the flinty brilliance of his dialogue, should pay so little attention to language. The languages of salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross and of small-time crooks in American Buffalo – creating whole worlds of need and evasion – are more than an incidental pleasure. By contrast, when Mamet is preoccupied with generating clever plot reversals, as in Speed-the-Plow or The Spanish Prisoner, his work feels shallow. It’s curious, too, that such a funny writer should have so little to say about comedy.Some writers-turned-critics offer ideas about literature that are really self-analysis (TS Eliot has this tendency). By contrast, Mamet’s theorising seems too compulsive, too belligerent, to match the complexity of his achievement. When Mamet says of Brecht that his theories ‘bear little relationship to his plays, which are extraordinarily charming and beautiful and lyrical and upsetting’, he could almost be writing about himself.