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No longer 'brain-dead'

By Kelly Jane Torrance
March 21, 2008

David Mamet's differences with liberal assumptions can be seen in 1999's "The Winslow Boy" (above) with Jeremy Northam.

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The entertainment industry is well-known as a hotbed of liberalism, particularly the more intellectual professions of author and playwright. So when playwright, screenwriter, director and author David Mamet published a piece provocatively titled "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'" last week, pundits from both the left and right took notice.

Even observers abroad found the writer's coming out as something of a conservative to be big news. Billed as an "election-season essay" and published in the dependably left-wing Village Voice, Mr. Mamet's piece "appalled many of his liberal admirers," the Independent newspaper of London declared, and left the intelligentsia "startled."

Anybody who has closely followed the writer's 30-year career, however, shouldn't be surprised. Mr. Mamet, the chronicler of the con, the detailer of the dark side, has always understood that human nature is much more complicated than the naive meliorism of his old ideology could imagine.

The 60-year-old playwright contrasts "the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view" in his slightly rambling essay in the Voice.

"As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative and that people are generally good at heart," he writes. Mr. Mamet still seems to accept — to varying degrees — those first two tenets, but perhaps he finally has realized that his own work is a refutation of the last one.

Anyone who has seen "Oleanna" knows it is not the work of a doctrinaire liberal. This searing indictment of political correctness was written in response to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. In the 1994 film, William H. Macy plays a college professor accused of sexual harassment by a student; the charge ruins his career. It was exceedingly brave of Mr. Mamet to reserve most of his sympathy for the professor at a time when the country's intellectuals were at their most fevered about power imbalances in sex relations.

"Oleanna" was hardly the only sign of Mr. Mamet's lack of strict conformity to liberal orthodoxy. Who but a budding conservative could have made a throwback like "The Winslow Boy"? Mr. Mamet is best-known for his obscenity-laced looks at the contemporary world, but "Winslow" is set in a very proper Edwardian England. Mr. Mamet never challenges the society's emphasis on reticence and honor.

"The Winslow Boy" is one of Mr. Mamet's few films with a strong female character (who ends up interested in a man who doesn't support a woman's right to vote). There was another clue — liberals always have been interested in the plight of the female in a patriarchal society, whereas Mr. Mamet's films wallow in a macho man's world. "Winslow" was the exception that proved the rule.

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