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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9227236 David Mamet and film: Illusion and disillusion in a wounded land Brewer, Gay, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1992 UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 DAVID MAMET AND FILM: ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION IN A WOUNDED LAND DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Gay Brewer, B.A., M.A. * - k * * The Ohio State University 1992 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Walter A. Davis Barbara Rigney Daniel R. Barnes Advisor Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincere appreciation to Dan Barnes, Barbara Rigney, and especially Walter Davis for their readings, suggestions, and encouragement by example; Harvey and Gail Brewer for a lifetime's support and belief; Mike Ritchie for innumerable newspaper clippings and reviews; Eric Walborn and the staff in Denney 468 for their patience in my illicit use of university equipment; Klein and White Marketing for Homicide materials; and finally to Claudia Barnett, who was with me that night at American Buffalo and without whose late computer assistance and proofreading generosity this study would have been much delayed— to her, for these and other things, the book is dedicated. ii VITA April 3, 1 965 ............. Born - Louisville, Kentucky 1985 ...................... B.A., University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 1988 ...................... M.A., Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1986-Present ............. Graduate Teaching Associate, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS A Detective in Distress: Philip Marlowe's Domestic Dream. Chapbook. Madison, IN: Brownstone Books, 1989. Reprinted in hard covers by The Borgo Press, San Bernardino, CA: 1989. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................ ii VITA ................................................... iii CHAPTER PAGE I. HOUSE OF GAMES: REVENGE, CONTROL, AND THE UNINFLECTED S H O T ............................. 1 II. RECENT PLAYS IN CONTEXT: THE SHAWL, SELECTED SHORTS, SPEED-THE-PLOW ...................... 40 Introduction ............................. 40 The S h a w l ............................... 44 The Spanish Prisoner, Prairie du Chien, and V i n t ................................. 62 Speed-the-Plow .......................... 68 III. THINGS CHANGE: FINDING A FAMILY .............. 86 IV. THE SCREENPLAYS: CRIME, LAWLESSNESS, AND THE QUEST FOR GRACE ............................... 128 The Postman Always Rings Twice.......... 128 The Verdict ............................. 140 The Untouchables ...................... 154 We're No Angel~s~........................ 179 V. HOMICIDE: DARK CONCLUSIONS .................. 200 NOTES ................................................... 232 FILMOGRAPHY ............................................ 259 WORKS CITED ............................................ 261 iv CHAPTER I House of Games: Control, Revenge, and the Uninflected Shot House of Games, David Mamet's cinematic debut as director, not only supports and elaborates themes persistently found in his drama, but corroborates what is for Mamet a developing definition of himself as artist, writer, and creator. Mamet's recent book, On Directing Film , restates in a filmic context his concern for society's impending collapse: "...it is not the dramatist's task to create confrontation or chaos, but, rather, to create order....The entropy, the drama, continues until a disordered state has been brought to rest."1 The director, then, is the godhead who both determines initial disorder and manipulates a situation toward resolution. "Don't let the protagonist tell the story," says Mamet. "Yo u tell the story; you direct it."2 The operative word is control, clearly a power Mamet enjoys. "I like to make decisions, and I like to be at the center of things..."3 Considering Mamet's remarks in relation to his work, the director's control—and the dramatist's—begins to suggest the ideology of the confidence man, the hustler whose cool head and insider's knowledge 2 elevates him from an unwitting "mark." Filmmaking's central precepts, as Mamet outlines them, are sticking to your plan, keeping it simple, and "withholding information."4 Only barest essentials, minimum necessary facts for drawing an audience deeper into a story should be given. Consider the analogous manipulations of Mamet's salesmen and hustlers: inH ouse of Games, head trickster Mike doles out teasing information, "directs" the cuts, scenes, and "movie" of his enterprise. Mamet has frequently contended that the center of interest in a play or film is the desire of the protagonist. "What does he or she do to get it—If you don't have that, you have to trick the audience into paying attention."6 While Mamet argues for his respect of audience, a reciprocal admiration, the giving over of oneself to the filmmaker's story, sounds nearly indistinguishable from the mark's gullibility—or from Margaret Ford's enjoyment of the hustlers' demonstrations of applied psychology. Mamet is well aware of the director's power over audience perception and reaction, his ability to grant, to withhold, to tease, to trick. "It's very easy to manipulate an audience...because you've got all the cards,"6 says Mamet, appropriating a gambling metaphor. Through involvement with story, through arrival of propelling or explanatory information, an audience effectively casts itself into the film's game. This occurs through the director's careful presentation: "Now we've put the audience in the same position as the protagonist"7— note the conspiratorial use of the plural pronoun. The audience, like any set of good marks, perpetrate their own deepening involvement; "it's in the nature of the audience to want to help the story along..."8 Analogies between director/con man and audience/ mark go deeper in Mamet than any simple metaphoric definition of creator and consumer. Not only are business charlatans, crooks, and shysters rampant in Mamet's plays, several critics have recognized that his cinematic styleper se suggests a filmmaker's con game. Stanley Kauffmann considers House of Games "a series of artifices, like the morality of the world that inhabits it."9 The deepest thematic deception he finds in the movie, "the illusion of control,"10 applies as well to the film as to its plot. David Denby calls House of Games "especially untrustworthy. It takes us in as it goes along, then reveals that it’s been fooling us as a way of gaining our belief"11; this latter trick is the central tenet of the hustler creed. Part of the film's manipulative power is, of course, its spiraling intricacies of plot, the story of the professional con man that has always compelled audiences. But Mamet, as director, is culpable in ways beyond plot. "For Mamet," writes Dave Kehr, "the movies are a con game, too...film's ability to present an apparently unmistakable truth...while hiding everything that's most essential."12 Elements beyond the screen's edge, information withheld, are answers Mamet alone possesses. Peter Travers bluntly observes Mamet's "expertise in sleight-of-hand" that asks us to enjoy our susceptibility at how he "sucked you into the game."13 Other critics cite an identification with the con man's "constant play with illusion and reality"14 or suggest the novice director is actually "bluffing outrageously"15 in his premiere attempt. The explanation for this visceral response by so many critics lies in the cinematic style Mamet has adapted, a la Eisenstein. He explains: "You always want to tell the story in cuts. Which is to say, through a juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected."16 The effect of this procession of images is a flatness, a calculation both emotionally and intellectually akin to the con game. Mamet's credo of simplicity begins to seem the deceptive ardor of a manipulative agenda. The image on screen must be used to "take charge of and direct"17 the audience's attention, and the juxtaposition mustsuggest by implication

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