Friday, December 14, 2007

More Mamet on the State of the Nation

More Mamet on the State of the Nation


Some of the assertions made in the play, Glengarry Glen Ross, about marketing ethics made me more curious about David Mamet, and I found a 1997 interview of him by Salon magazine that contains some interesting quotes. Here is the URL

http://www.salon.com/feature/1997/10/cov_si_24mamet.html

I’ve cut and pasted some of the quotes from the interview that I thought are pertinent to some of the discussions we’ve had about the American market place, planned obsolescence and such. He makes a very interesting, thought-provoking comment that one of his characters even views love as a “commercial endeavor.”

Mamet makes some interesting comments on consumerism as a value in America and observes that we haven’t been very conscious about why we do it. Some of the observartions he makes about technology are also rather interesting and tie back into our discussions about Steve Jobs and Apple marketing overpriced, glorified phones that none of us really need.


Are your films a reflection of the way you look at life? Is all of life a con game of some sort?
No, I don't think that all of life is, but I certainly think that all of commerce is. In the United States, it's our pleasure and joy to consider life as a commercial enterprise. That's our national character.
When do we get out of that mode?
I think that's part of our national problem, how to extricate ourselves sufficiently to be able to take a look at the life we lead and perhaps have a better time.
You said in your recent book of essays, "Make Believe Town," that Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" was your favorite American novel and that the story shows how violence takes precedence over love in America. Could you explain that a bit?
If you look at "An American Tragedy," which I've always considered the great American novel, the reason it's specifically an American tragedy is that the problem with the hero is that he sees love as basically a commercial endeavor. He wants to trade up. He finds this perfectly nice girl who wants to sleep with him and who loves him and whom he's very fond of and then he finds someone he likes better. And the only way he can get rid of the first girl is to kill her. That's the American tragedy.
How has that changed over time?
I don't think it has. It's still a problem of the national character. I don't think any country has it better than any other country. For example, in Scandinavia, they have to eat very, very salty fish. One wouldn't want to live like that either. But in America, our problem is we're a consumer culture and there's nothing we won't do if someone tells us -- or we intuit -- that it's going to make money, or it's going to make us happy through consumerism. That's our American problem. It's the American equivalent of the salty fish. We're constantly buying crap we don't need and devoting ourselves to endeavors which, perhaps on reflection, with a little bit of distance, would reveal themselves to be contrary to our own best interests.
How do films feed into this?
We have our own film tradition which has created some extraordinary works of film, some masterpieces. Nonetheless, the American tradition of film overall is that it's a commercial medium. That's not necessarily bad. The films of William Wyler came out of that and the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick happened in spite of that. Nonetheless, we don't have a tradition of film as art. As the media gets more and more powerful, film as mass entertainment, which is to say solely as marketing of the consumer product, that tradition gets much, much stronger. The job of mass entertainment is exactly the opposite of the job of art. The job of the artist gets more difficult. On the other hand, maybe that's always been the case.
Why is the job of the artist the exact opposite of mass entertainment?
I like mass entertainment. I've written mass entertainment. But it's the opposite of art because the job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it.



Somewhere, you wrote about the mass media, including the computer industry, conspiring to pervert our need for community. That the dream of having all this information at our fingertips to make us godlike is really doing the opposite and making us forget our humanity. Could you elaborate on that?
It's not really that they're conspiring to, but they might as well be. If you sit down in front of the television with 700 channels, there's probably something on those channels that's going to interest you. It's a very good way to get stupid very quickly.
There's nothing you get from television? The information is just a delusion?
I absolutely think so. If there's any information, it's purely accidental. Furthermore, I don't think there is any information to be gotten from television. I think it's an illusion. It's an interesting narcotic.
Even documentaries or historical programs?
No, it's television.
What about the Internet and the promise of all this information becoming available?
I don't know anything about it, but I'm sure it's worse.
I also wanted to ask you about pornography and why it seems to be on the rise in mainstream films.
That's true. It's on the rise because it doesn't work. It's like the defense department. If you have this fiction of wanting to become the principal power of world domination, no amount of arms is going to work. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, believing that arms are going to make you safe. It's like buying a car to make you beautiful. It doesn't work. So next year, you buy another car and hope that's going to work. It doesn't.
What's the connection between those examples and pornography?
The relationship is that it might seem provocative and fulfilling to see a moment of pornography in a feature film, but it's not. And because it's not, we have to have two moments of pornography. Because that's not fulfilling, we have to have another moment. It's really the compulsion to repeat, to come back to that thing that didn't work previously, because we're addicted to it. A good example is cigarettes. One keeps smoking because it seems like a good idea, but as soon as you light up, you say, "Oh my God, what have I done?"
That's what you mean when you say audiences need to see gratuitous sex in films?
I don't think they need to see it; I think they're habituated to it. Most of the time sex scenes in movies are like the plastic frogman in breakfast cereals. They're put in to fool the audience that what they're getting is a better product.
Some producers think they need to have sex scenes.
That's why they call them producers. It's a fairly ironic name.

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