Mamet and Letterman Wage TV War at the Crossroads of 9/11
David Mamet and David Letterman both turned 54 having traversed a similar cultural/temporal landscape when arriving at the post-9/11 crossroads. Letterman veered left, and Mamet moved right. Mamet is a religious man. Letterman, apparently, is not. More to the point, Letterman became a “believer” and Mamet listened, reasoned and read his way out of the cliché of Jewish-American socialism that was a profound Woody Allen joke by 1977 (Alvy Singer’s defense? “I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.”)
“This is the essence of Leftist thought,” writes Mamet in The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, his new book of 39 short essays. “It is a devolution from reason to ‘belief,’ in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness.”
Letterman came undone in Bush/Cheney apoplexy, fell to adultery, was extorted by one of those scrupulous producers at CBS News, adopted a surly, saturnine view of America often indistinguishable from the antiwar radicals of Code Pink and, irony of unfunny ironies, now yucks up CBS’s Late Show under threat of death, a frat boy with a fatwah on his head. Apparently, the Islamic radicals in his audience don’t get the joke, much less credit his appreciation of their worldwide “struggle.”
Mamet, showing shades of the emasculated and latently enlightened detective of his intriguing movie Homicide (1991), fiercely reverted to conservative Judaism—and an Old Testament thirst for justice that one can trace to the climactic summation in his screenplay for The Verdict and his revision of The Winslow Boy. Mamet cleaved to his family, traded required reading with Jon Voight, listened to Glenn Beck and Dennis Prager and absorbed economists Thomas Sowell and Friedrich Hayek. In his book, Mamet restates the angst of Salem Radio talk show hosts in his own voice—the cover of fiction lifted, the lilt of dramatic rhythm retained, no hiding behind ad hoc or dramatis personae but for the inventive use of parable and metaphor, literary techniques that make the book lucid and entertaining. It is a righteous jeremiad.
“We’ve lost 5,000 fellow New Yorkers, and you can feel it,” said Letterman on his return to air after a week-long comedy blackout, Sept. 19, 2001. “And it’s terribly sad.” With nary a mention of Islam or Muslims—a pattern on TV as recognizable as the Indian wearing a feather headdress—Letterman said the perpetrators “were zealots fueled by religious fervor—religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that ever make any goddamn sense?” His audience was left awkwardly unable to applaud on cue.
That same night, what seems more than a decade ago, a weepy Dan Rather praised President Bush for calling for firepower, willpower and “staying power.” He characterized al-Qaida (though not by name or religion) as a “hydra-headed operation in 55 countries around the world” and urged a focus not just on Afghanistan but on the Sudan, Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq. That was shortly before the reliably wrongheaded New York Times suggested Afghanistan would be the next Vietnam quagmire. They might still be railing that it is, but for later declaring Afghanistan/Iraq as the good/bad wars. Had the Times likewise condemned the congressionally approved, Clinton-signed Iraq Liberation Act (1998), with its explicit goal of regime change? Like the best cons of Mamet movies, the switch takes place before your eyes.
In 2004, a perverse inversion was taking place at Black Rock: While CBS News was telling the demonstrable lies of Rathergate, CBS Entertainment was closer to the truth that’s always the value of good fiction. Thanks to The Unit, the series Mamet created, sometimes wrote, rarely directed and nominally supervised from 2006 to 2009, the network engaged in the rarest of realpolitik. With its deep source Eric L. Haney’s Inside Delta Force, Mamet’s show oozed authenticity and experience about the U.S. military mission, unavoidably entangled family lives, and its frisson with the intelligence apparatus and diplomatic corps (drop the “p”s, Mr. President).
Though it sometimes leaned on G.I. Joe the Explainer for its mass (and now military-distant) audience, The Unit just as frequently rewarded those in on the argot of soldier swagger: Sergeant Major Jonas Blane (Dennis Haysbert) barges into a hangar full of National Guardsmen awaiting orders during a terrorist hostage crisis and bellows with authority, “Who can show me a Ranger tab?”
Bouncing through the Serengeti, puffing cigars under boonie hats; puke-faced after being skyhooked a thousand feet from the ground to a HC-130 aircraft by only a harness; angrily pumping iron, minutes after a training-bullet grazing; defusing stray bombs matter-of-factly (not as a metaphor for insanity as in Kathryn Bigelow’s smug little contrivance, The Hurt Locker), it was a weekly shower of testosterone, impeccably cast with fresh scar-faced and smooth-cheeked stone-cold studs. And just for fun, the occasional bad guy gets plugged through the heart after yelling “Allahu Akbar!”
In the end, Mamet’s counter-terrorist drama was a bracing tribute to unceasing, unapologetic interventionism of necessity. Consigning prime-time P.C. to subplots (a soldier’s wife has a crisis of faith for what is apparently the dark 42 minutes of the soul; the obligatory paean to the homosexual veteran; the rescue of insultingly characterized Christian missionaries; the collusion of white-supremacist hillbillies—not university professors—with foreign terrorists), the show invariably overcame TV’s disastrous tendency to socio-political pandering. Even when it threatened to run off the rails by the third-season introduction of a gorgeous female unit operative—jogging memory of The Simpsons parody when Poochie joins Itchy & Scratchy—it satisfactorily resolved into something Howard Hawks, maybe even James L. Brooks, might approve of. Meanwhile, it maintained its credible survey of the threat map, down to the detail of an Iranian woman spy nervously working at her embassy under the picture of smilingly anti-Semitic Ahmadinejad.
Here’s what Mamet’s The Unit sees around the world: Latino drug dealers smuggle across the California border an Indonesian terrorist out to wreak nuclear havoc—like the real José Padilla, a name that would live in infamy if not for liberal media bias. Arab terrorists hijack business flights in Idaho. Biological weapons stolen from U.S. depots ride on autopilot toward Busch Stadium. The socialist Spanish government uses the unit through the CIA to absolve itself of assassinating a local terrorist—then hangs them out to dry. Russians try to sell nuclear technology to Iran. Twenty-two men fall to an RPG at an insertion point because one of the wives talked. Even the episode on “rendition” avoids David E. Kelley agitprop, counterweighted by a depiction of the real torture suffered by soldiers as part of routine SERE training.
Above all, The Unit rediscovered something television had lost since Vic Morrow was wounded a hundred times in Combat!: It thoroughly respected American soldiers, not just as men, but as men at war, fighting men—not as the uniformed peaceniks, wisecrackers and cranks of TV’s M*A*S*H—as well as the choices they made every day to remain worthy of tribal loyalty.
At the beginning, all late night rebooted in a patriotic mood. Leno paraded celebrities past a 9/11 charity Harley to sign—in Hollywood terms, it was practically equivalent to a loyalty oath. Letterman conspicuously elevated Fleet Week with a nostalgic panorama of audiences filled with sailors. Letterman seemed sincere, in contrast to leftists who pay lip service to our troops as a way of parading their moral superiority not just to the right but to ’60s radicals.
But eventually Letterman lost it. His 2008 interview with celebrated-and-discarded ex-Bush press secretary Scott McClellan (appropriately named, as it were, for Civil War buffs), pushing a self-aggrandizing turncoat’s memoir. Letterman found no more need to cloak his enmity in monologue tradition. Letterman’s unit—his increasingly liberal audience and fawning band members—applauded McClellan’s treachery and asinine effrontery, telling Letterman that Bush “doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting. I think he should spend more time reflecting.”
“Is Cheney a goon?” Letterman asked. Would Bush defer to Cheney because “he was intellectually lazy?” “There is certainly a lack of intellectual curiosity on the part of the president,” McClellan sheepishly grinned. “My feeling about Cheney and also Bush is that he just couldn’t care less about Americans, and the same is true of George Bush,” Letterman bawled. “And all they really want to do is kiss up to the oil people so they can get some great annuity when they’re out of office. ‘Here you go, Dick, nice job, here’s a couple of billion for your troubles.’” McClellan smiled and nodded. “He pretty much put Halliburton in business and the outsourcing to private mercenary groups,” Letterman blathered. “Is there any humanity left in these guys?” Could an original 9/11 conspiracy theory be far behind? The usual intellectual self-deprecation aside—it’s only part of Letterman’s shtick—had he in fact become a “useful” idiot?
The transformation fit Letterman’s version of comic-turned-dramatic figures, trying Bill Maher-style band-wagoning before anything but tough rooms. Late-night stooge McClellan would go on to endorse Obama. Letterman would lose at least one career-long admirer.
Now it’s Mamet who lives in career limbo, risking retrojected condemnation of his recent stage plays November and Race, which will come as no surprise to the dramatist whose play about misogyny, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, was naturally branded misogynist by a female critic at The Village Voice. “That was,” Mamet recalled “my first personal experience of Political Thought in the Arts…to this day, nearly 40 years after that review, I am asked in lectures, classrooms and interviews why I hate women.” For his part, Letterman now routinely picks on-air fights with conservatives like O’Reilly—try sleeping on that blowhard vs. blowhard—and chases Jon Stewart’s Daily Show demagoguery, genuinely funny men who inflate their self-importance, then deflect criticism by claiming comic dispensation.
Yet, Letterman has yet to top Fox commentator Greg Gutfeld for political commitment: His response to a triumphalist mosque/madrasah near ground zero was to lease space to open a Muslim-themed gay bar across the street (he’s torn between calling it Suspicious Packages or Turban Cowboy). When The Secret Knowledge came out, Gutfield vowed to monitor what he predicts will be Mamet’s declining reputation among New York’s critical apparatchiks in light of Mamet’s much more courageous coming out. Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens, who usually writes for the socialist The Nation—43 issues for $32, all material copyrighted—already found a home at the Times to irritatingly, smugly slam The Secret Knowledge as “irritating” and “smug.”
In The Secret Knowledge, Mamet braves a political truth while mere entertainers like Letterman arrogate opinion vicariously via the cosseted Connecticut crowd and Hollywood’s dacha-on-the-Pacific socialists. What Mamet knows from history is no secret, that the “supposed intransigence on the part of the Religious Right is far less detrimental to the health of the body politic than the Left’s love affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism and the Command Economy which,” he writes, “one hundred years of evidence shows leads only to shortages, despotism and murder.”
Let’s see how that plays in Peoria.
