David Mamet

From reviews and from my vague memories of Mamet's other work, I always imagined this as being all about Hollywood executives talking fast and being abrasive and screwing each other over. Those things are in Speed-the-Plow, and Mamet definitely likes writing that kind of dialogue; but I was surprised at how well this worked for me dramatically, with some really unexpected variations in subject and tone, and how much I ended up wanting to see it performed (especially if I could travel back in show more time and see Elisabeth Moss in it).

It starts out as an exercise in figuring out, with basically no exposition, how these two dickhead producers relate to each other business-wise and personality-wise while they rattle off a lot of entertaining Mametisms, and setting up the idea of a big score that'll clearly be what gets them into trouble somehow, and our main boy Gould's pathetic designs on the secretarial temp Karen. That's all nicely done and economical; a whole play of that would be pointless. The second act briefly lets us think that this is still on the same track and that Gould's scheme will either succeed or fall flat, until, with really nice comic timing, it suddenly becomes clear that the author is more imaginative than the character and that this will now be about something completely different. The central dialogue between Gould and Karen (which of course is how they're listed in the cast: he's the kind of guy who has a last name) has got to be a treat for actors, as you can see a previously opaque character unfold in a way the other person clearly did not expect and has no idea how to deal with while trying to find some way back to the original goal, all during a discussion of a terrible philosophical science fiction novel (which, I was delighted to learn, is actually a parody of a short story that had been written several years earlier by... David Mamet) that Gould is looking for excuses not to buy the rights to. The new situation that this ends up in is clearly destined to be torn down somehow, and although we're given a strong argument for that, the person giving that argument is so terrible and the new dynamic of act two was such an interesting surprise that it's hard to say whether restoring the status quo would avert a tragedy, or be a tragedy. I'm really not sure where Mamet's sympathies lie here, if he has any: I've come to think of him as a misanthropic asshole due to his later behavior, but I like the kind of ambiguity I see in Speed-the-Plow where even if the author actually sees things the same way Fox does in the end, what he's given us makes it equally plausible that Fox just lacks the imagination to understand a person whose issues are so different from his; I'm OK not knowing, as long as that guy will never know either.

I think the third act is still too long, and its action feels less interesting because the final move is accomplished so easily and relies so much on someone immediately giving up, but I'm often OK with a hasty ending if what led up to it was as involving as the first two thirds of this. show less

This is a brief, intense, alternately reverent and crotchety, unsentimental paean to Vermont that was, Vermont that still is, just barely. A collection of 15 loose essays -- each one circling around an aspect of Vermont that has meaning for him: his old post and beam house, his woodstove, his daily trip to the local coffee shop, to guns, to clothing...

Mamet moved to Vermont in the mid-60's -- part of what I think of the first wave of flatlanders to 'discover' what seemed like an utterly show more forgotten rural paradise (even with the rugged winter). He went to Goddard and then he stayed, in love with the place enough to get whatever jobs he could swing. And he has stayed. I admire that. He writes with great delicacy of the uncomfortable feeling all those from 'away' who have come to live here, who weren't born in Vermont, feel around those who have, say, lived or worked or farmed for more than a century (precious few of those left, of course). Dorothy Canfield Fisher strongly and generously makes the point that Vermont thrives on waves of newcomers, that it wouldn't really work without them, and I think she even anticipated that there would be some new permutation, that in 1952 when she wrote her book about Vermont, things were on a downslide in a country that was gearing up for a new era. Mamet is more pessimistic, thinks Vermont is well on the way to becoming merely a suburb of the great metropolitan sprawl from Boston on down.

Some of the meatiest writing is about our love affair with machines -- a great number of people who move to Vermont embrace the older crafts, the old way of doing things, weaving and pottery -- a getting down to basics that Mamet truly feels is an essential part of living a grounded and sane life - he builds his own stone wall, and ruefully admits it is already falling down..... but he loved building it.

A last quote that I'm only adding for its delightfulness: "A carpenter, working at my place that previously he had been tearing down some home in Montpelier. He was in the process of demolishing what he said was a particularly stupidly conceived improvement in a staircase. He took a crowbar to it, and found scribbled on the back of the lath: A fool is paying me to do this job.

I heartily recommend South of the Northeast Kingdom to anyone who loves reading about rural life and likes the essay form. I give it ****1/2 because I had a lot of fun reading it and recognizing things, but be mindful that this is a book I could not read objectively, so that 1/2 is about my own pleasure. show less

The Disenlightenment by David Mamet is by far the strangest book I have read in a decade or more. It is puzzling to me how a wordsmith and expert dramatist like Mamet can put together a screed of nearly 50 chapters that amount to absolutely nothing. Worse, it is a Trojan Horse to get across his personal fealty to - Donald Trump. Yes, Donald Trump.

The thing about Mamet is his understanding of communication. He makes his character rich and deep, but they all have the critical talent of moving show more the story along as economically and powerfully as possible. For The Disenlightenment to meander, switch gears and constantly circle back to Donald Trump is a shock readers will likely find offputting. And as there is no story here, no real point to absorb, it is all in the cause of nothing. What difference does it make in June 2025 what David Mamet believes of politics? He doesn’t say.

It begins very badly, with Mamet discussing dramatization, and suddenly switching to this: “Since Obama the deep state of the American Left has been the enemy of Constitutional democracy,” which elicits a “Huh?” from the reader. But Mamet is not just throwing off a reference. The paragraph becomes: “…their unwarranted prosecutions tormenting President Trump, could only be understood as tactics in an ongoing coup. The Left’s strategic objective was the destruction of representative government, and all its contributory tactics made sense.” But leave us not mince words. Mamet just comes straight out and says “Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment.”

This is a structure repeated dozens of times throughout the book. What begins as a look at film, TV, theater, writing, directing, studios – suddenly switches to withering accusations and lies about Democrats and the mythical Left, and endless pity and praise for Donald Trump, Our Savior.

So, in a chapter called Gandhi and Me, the first paragraph is about Mohandas Gandhi, and the rest is about – Donald Trump. Another one, titled Woody Allen and the IDF, has nothing whatever to do with the Israeli Defense Forces, but everything to do with – you guessed it – Donald Trump.

In a chapter on The Kennedys, whose huge families were their calling card, Mamet says “The modern left works, consciously or not, to destroy the family as the basic unit of loyalty and replace it with allegiance to the state, which can only mean those proclaiming themselves the champions of the state (political chieftains), the states’ incarnation (dictators), or their like in the states’ demise (effectively warlords).” This constant breaking away from his own narrative ruins every single chapter in the book.

He praises the Mafia for its focus on making money as the measure of its success, and then asks “What is the business of government?” Government, of course, is not a business, by definition, so the question is moot, dead on arrival.

Thirty-nine pages in, Mamet decides to let the reader in on the secret: “This book is an attempt to identify a seemingly unconnected set of symptoms as a single disease.” And by page 50 he’s going after specific sectors of society: “The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, communists, and the media have colluded to suppress the true and suggest the false.” The true being Trump and the false being The Left. And it gets worse as it goes; Mamet never needs to come up for air.

If you didn’t get his reference to what the book was about, by page 64 he “clarifies” it somewhat: “Government can be compared to Hollywood, and both to myth, which is perhaps the subject of this book.” Well, if he doesn’t know, whom should the reader ask?

But soon, we’re down another rabbit hole: “That you or I could not, perhaps, imagine the operation or makeup of a return to constitutional American democracy is understandable. That Trump and his supporters did is an instance of extraordinary intellectual courage.” This is the Trump who on a Sunday morning news show just one month before publication of this book was asked “But don’t you need to uphold the constitution?” And Trump answered: “I don’t know.” I don’t know?! (4 May 2025)

But it gets even worse. Mamet starts spouting truisms he makes up, and tries to make points with them. He says “It is impossible to cheat a peasant, and a lead pipe a cinch to take someone who believes in his superior intellect.” Peasants, of course, are cheated all day long every day. And we have only to look at self-important billionaires to know the second part of Mamet’s statement is just as wrong. They’re too busy cheating the peasants.

Mamet also has it in for the trans community, bringing it up in different chapters: “If someone told you twenty years ago that people are regularly born into the wrong sex and must alter themselves surgically, you would think them deranged. What has changed?” What has changed is useful knowledge. Trans is not a fad. Trans people have always been with us because sex is a spectrum, not a rigid border. There are an estimated 80 million non cisgendered people in the world, and denying their existence is totally beneath David Mamet – or at least it should be. Instead, Mamet uses them as a cudgel, claiming their role is to destroy the nuclear family: “To assert that they are not interrelated is a sign not of social disintegration, but of the mass preference for social disintegration.” This is a kind of diverting tactic used by college professors on unsuspecting freshmen, throwing them off the track: it is not fact, it is a preference. Mamet does this a few times in his arguments in the book. It doesn’t so much change minds as make people wonder why bother responding at all.

And of course, he attacks the Biden Administration with all the lies Trump regularly uses on it, from the “government-mandated removal of the southern border” to “A Jew who votes for Democrats is a damned fool.” Or how about: “Biden was simply a figurehead hack. Trump was an entrepreneur from Queens, and the media furor a Manichean myth of good versus world destruction.” With Trump as the Good and Biden as the Destruction. “It was absurd to believe 51 percent of the country would agree in bulk to the various enormities of: inflation, crime, abolishment of police, abandonment of Afghanistan and Israel, DEI, sexual indoctrination of children, censorship; and the candidacy first of an obviously senile crook; and, after him, an incoherent nullity.” In case this why you bought the book.

In general, “The Left is a regression to infancy” is an easy way to avoid defending his position while he equates “common sense” with “conservatism”.

But even Democrats will reap the rewards of our savior Trump: “They will also benefit—each of them—from the decrease in crime and inflation, a happy stock market, …”

Then, just for fun, there are cheap shots for all tastes: “Quakers were laissez-faire fools.” “Books today are being censored and banned by protocommunist forces.” And the “woke” are “maniacs who were then applauded by cowards.” Such a pleasant read.


Basically, the book is a sickening jumble of personal prejudices, political, social, and sexual. It is written so clumsily, readers could easily delete one sentence from every paragraph and it would make no difference to the flow, to the buildup (of which there is none) or the conclusion, which is stated at the beginning: Trump is our savior. A total disaster of a book, and so ironic for a wordsmith normally so precise and skilled in making an argument or a story work for him to resolve a problem.

David Wineberg show less

Reading this shortly after having read Speed-the-Plow was like finding some soup in the fridge that you remember was tasty, heating it up, and realizing too late that it's been in there way too long. Like that play just four years earlier, this pits a grandiose abrasive middle-aged man against a younger woman whose goals aren't immediately clear, with the power dynamic between them changing several times; also in both plays, the characters talk about a book containing rants about modern show more society that Mamet probably intends to be over the top. But virtually none of the things he did so effectively earlier work this time, and it's just a moldy, poisonous glop; where I envied actors who got to do some of his scenes in 1988, I feel sorry for anyone who had to try to give life to the stilted screeds in this.

There was a lot of talk in 1992, and again when he did the movie, about how Oleanna was supposedly a brilliantly ambiguous thing where either character might be in the wrong, that men would definitely see it one way and women the other way, and that it would start fights in the audience (which was supposedly cool). I'm glad those critics got something out of it, I guess, but I feel like a much more accurate description would be this: Mamet wrote two acts of a play where the man is a fairly realistic arrogant asshole who does some asshole things that he's fairly realistically oblivious of, and then some more extreme things that are also plausible but that he has no possible excuse for being oblivious of—and in this play, the woman is a fairly realistic confused college student who may not be a great student, but definitely doesn't need to hear about this guy's mid-life crisis or his philosophical pretensions and is perceptive enough to be creeped out by his increasing lack of boundaries. Then, Mamet wrote a third act of a different play where the man is an even worse asshole but he's totally justified because the woman is a PC totalitarian schemer straight out of a Rush Limbaugh fever dream, taking direction from a shadowy "Group" of similar creatures, and she's out to destroy him. Then he pasted them together.

Now, it's true that different viewers or readers could take this in different ways. Like, if you're a middle-aged dude who's paranoid about feminists and students and has heard horror stories about how bad they are and so you're predisposed to think the third act is realistic, then obviously the student is a horrible villain and the first two acts don't really matter even if the professor is kind of a dick—surely no one deserves to be destroyed like that even if they innocently got a bit upset (his wife's fault really, look how she stressed him out on the phone) and ended up physically restraining someone who was screaming "LET ME GO", I mean, that'd just be a slippery slope leading to innocent dudes being thrown in jail just for giving someone a nice compliment... etc. Whereas if you're a woman or pretty much anyone else with some experience of life and no massive axes to grind, you can see that the third act is just that first dude's paranoia in script form, and that the female character in that part is neither right nor wrong because she's not a person, she's a cartoon monster who has almost nothing in common with the character of the same name in the first part (or with anyone else in particular for that matter, since she changes from a meek nervous wreck with a basic vocabulary to some kind of Red Guard cadre who happens to rant in exactly the same elaborate style as the professor, and back again, depending on which key Mamet feels like pressing on his two-note piano)—and so you just ignore that part and judge the characters by the first part, in which the guy wasn't a cartoon monster but was still quite an asshole, of a type you've probably met in the actual world, who did exactly what she says he did. So this is only a clever test of the audience's unconscious bias in the same way that surprising someone with first a stuffed skunk, and then a Freddy Krueger mask, and seeing which one scares them more, would be a clever test of whether someone believes in Freddy Krueger as an imminent threat and has never seen a skunk in his life. There might be an unfortunate number of such people, but if the lesson you take from that is not "WTF, they are confused" but rather "I guess no one's entirely right or wrong", either you have failed or the teacher has.

(Speaking of teachers, the older character in this play supposedly is one. I defy you to figure out 1. what subject he could possibly be teaching, as an associate professor, to students who are in their junior year, where the required reading is his own book about why higher education is all bullshit and why they probably shouldn't even be here, 2. how he's managed to get by with no complaints till now, and 3. how he's about to get tenure even though he likes telling random people that the tenure committee are all fools.)

Whether Mamet is really on the professor's side, and thinks Act III Carol represents a real danger to civilization, is almost beside the point; even if he'd written this as a parody of what a self-pitying right-wing sexist might believe, that wouldn't make it work as a play. As I read it and started to get a bad feeling about where it might be going, I tried to just enjoy the use of language, and realized with dismay that I didn't; even early on when the characters are more recognizable, the dialogue is neither natural nor stylized in a way that indicates a good ear, it's just randomly emitted out of them as if the playwright is poking them in the back with a sharp stick. When they start three different sentences and can't finish, it doesn't seem to be because they're trying to tell the other person anything in particular, it just means the playwright needs them to sound inarticulate. When they start babbling and saying inappropriate things, it means the playwright needs to give the other person an excuse to be offended. The dialogue in Speed-the-Plow, even at its most exaggerated, had clear emotional through-lines and a sense of why things were moving from one state to another; here, despite a few good turns of phrase, it's more like Mamet had a note card saying "He has to get more upset by this point" or "She tries her same thing again." That kind of writing always makes me suspect the author is driven less by an interest in human behavior, and more by having a specific ending they're determined to get to, and/or a massive ax to grind. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that Mamet did not set out to write an illustration of how men and women see things differently and no one's entirely right or wrong, that that was a rationalization after the fact by nervous producers or critics, because he is smart enough to have made it genuinely ambiguous if that's what he wanted rather than stacking the deck this way. show less