(Photo by Pam Susemiehl)

Reading David Mamet’s new book of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, I was reminded of how loosely jointed and shape-shifting an essay can be. In this collection, a single essay can pivot from palindromes to springboks to why theatrical events always begin a few minutes after the hour. (Without fail, Mamet says, it takes six or seven minutes for the audience to become quiet with anticipation.) This same eight-page piece of writing then launches into an elaborate comparison of our current anxieties about race, sex, and the environment to the feelings that gave rise to the Salem witch trials.

The book’s weird and wide-ranging variety helps make it an unsettling read. There is a conspiracy afoot, you begin to think, of human nature against itself.

Mamet cites the influence of Rebecca West, George Orwell, and Samuel Johnson. Yet his forays more often made me think of Mencken and Nietzsche (whom Mencken admired and popularized) first in their overall mood and darkness of vision, and second in their tightly packed but sometimes puzzling one-liners.

Take the essay that starts, "Some hold that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name." Yeah, think about that for a moment or two. It seems to be an involuted joke. And nothing else in the paragraphs that follow makes its meaning any clearer. The line just hangs there, uncomfortably in your memory, asking to be filed away as a bit of misdirection or incongruous theme-setting.

Elsewhere this same tendency brings out Mamet’s charming storehouse of weird folk wisdom. In the middle of a denunciation of lawyers and doctors, he pulls over to the side of the road and announces, "The old Vermont folk song had it that there are only two things that money can’t buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes."

Of course, Mamet’s plays are memorable for their standalone observations which, though framed as dialogue, can be plucked and quoted in other situations. It takes very little prompting to get men of a certain age to repeat Glengarry Glen Ross’s famous salesman shtick. I myself have a weakness for a line in the movie Heist, wherein Joe Moore, played by Gene Hackman, is asked how he came up with an idea. Moore answers, "I tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, What would he do?"

There is a purpose, Mamet says, that unites his essays as a group. It is an overtly political purpose, a response to the unsettling political and social dramas of the last 10 to 20 years. But not only does he want to survey the damage. He wants to sketch a kind of unified theory to explain what has happened.

"This book is an attempt to identify," Mamet writes, "a seemingly unconnected set of symptoms as a single disease."

The symptoms include presidents with unpatriotic agendas: "Obama was a Marxist and Islamist opportunist," writes Mamet. Elections that can’t be trusted: On the subject of coups he notes that "since the Civil War, we’d had none here until the election of 2020." Changes in how we think of gender, allowing the "sexual mutilation of minors." The party of the left: "The totalitarian suppression and brutality of the fascists and communists … describes today’s Democratic Party." And DEI programs: "Diversity, equity, and inclusion is just thuggery."

Mamet, whose political conversion to conservatism was announced in 2008, has turned full-on MAGA. He believes the United States is in decline but remains hopeful, saying, "Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment."

What’s behind our political sickness, according to Mamet, if I read him correctly, is a compound of human failings. First, there is the mendacity of politicians whom he compares to the shill in a game of three-card monte—the shill being a person who pretends to be a player, encourages others to risk their money, but is working in cahoots with the dealer. Next is the gullibility of voters about whom it can be said that they basically want to be lied to. Here the similarities between politics and entertainment begin to stand out.

"The lights go down on stage or screen and we are involved in a complicity. We will suspend our disbelief in return for being told a story," Mamet writes.

Finally, there is the all-too-human desire to be accepted into the tribe. Mamet psychologizes this as a misguided attempt to fit in and survive. "Membership in our various correct-thinking groups is actually an unconscious attempt to reconstitute the family—the group which might offer protection." This natural urge has been cranked into overdrive by the rise of the internet and those devices that keep us connected to it. "The addictive ‘connectedness’ offered by the computer awakens our human instinct for constant connection to the group." Mass psychology takes over and people begin denying their own individual or subgroup identities.

Mamet, who has been an outspoken defender of Judaism longer than he has been a conservative, is especially hard on Jewish Democrats. "Today the Democrats have become the party of anti-Semitism," he writes, complaining especially about Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) "a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. … Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?"

Mamet’s book, even if you disagree with much of it (and I do), offers the frank example of a brilliant writer whose anger and frustration has placed him fully on one side of the great political divide in our polarized era. It is not, however, a work of persuasion. It speaks in its political essays almost only to the converted. But on the margins, especially where politics meets culture and history, it can still be compelling even to those who march to a different drummer.

When the subject turns to theater and show business, however, Mamet speaks with a level of authority that makes him formidable. On method acting, on the power dynamics between actors and directors, on Top Gun: Maverick ("no drama at all," Mamet says, "Maverick is a computer game"), and a hundred other matters of show business, he is simply more penetrating. More stressed out and battle-scarred, and wise too, reminding you that a man’s politics is not always the most important or interesting thing about him.

The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment
by David Mamet
Broadside Books, 238 pp., $32.99

David Skinner is an editor and writer who writes about language, culture, and history. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

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