The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

FEMINISM

  One might say that the politician, the doctor, and the dramatist make their living from human misery; the doctor in attempting to alleviate it, the politician to capitalize on it, and the dramatist, to describe it.

  But perhaps that is too epigrammatic.

  When I was young, there was a period in American drama in which the writers strove to free themselves of the question of character.

  Protagonists of their worthy plays had made no choices, but were afflicted by a condition not of their making; and this condition, homosexuality, illness, being a woman, etc., was the center of the play. As these protagonists had made no choices, they were in a state of innocence. They had not acted, so they could not have sinned.

  A play is basically an exercise in the raising, lowering, and altering of expectations (such known, collectively, as the Plot); but these plays dealt not with expectations (how could they, for the state of the protagonist was not going to change?) but with sympathy.

  What these audiences were witnessing was not a drama, but a troublesome human condition displayed as an attraction. This was, formerly, known as a freak show.

  The subjects of these dramas were bearing burdens not of their choosing, as do we all. But misfortune, in life, we know, deserves forbearance on the part of the unafflicted. For though the display of courage in the face of adversity is worthy of all respect, the display of that respect by the unaffected is presumptuous and patronizing.

  One does not gain merit from congratulating an afflicted person for his courage. One only gains entertainment.

  Further, endorsement of the courage of the affliction play’s hero was not merely impertinent, but, more basically, spurious, as applause was vouchsafed not to a worthy stoic, but to an actor portraying him.

  These plays were an (unfortunate) by-product of the contemporary love-of-the-victim. For a victim, as above, is pure, and cannot have sinned; and one, by endorsing him, may perhaps gain, by magic, part of his incontrovertible status. (An ancient poker adage has it that the Loser can’t get enough to eat, and the winner can’t sleep. Its application to the postwar West, I leave to the Reader.)

  But a synergistic elaboration of the essence of the victim play was that the Afflicted could in no wise be portrayed as flawed. But, if they could not be flawed (that is, if they had not made, as heroes of the drama, a wrong choice), how could they be the fit subject of a drama? They could not.

  My first personal experience of Political Thought in the Arts dates from my first commercially produced play. This was Sexual Perversity in Chicago, which ran, for some time, off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York.

  A woman critic at the Village Voice accused me, in a review of this play, of misogyny. Why? Because misogyny was a subject of the play.

  In my play, two couples, two men and two women, contend. The younger man and woman, Dan and Deborah, have fallen in love, and the older pair, respectively, their best friends, scheme to keep them apart. A common, and, I thought, inoffensive theme. But the champion of the Oppressed took against me. How odd, I thought, for one might have supposed the title, characterizing the behavior in the play as perverse might have allowed the poor critic, if not some enjoyment, at least a guide to her conjectures as to my motives. (Cézanne’s labeling various still-lifes as dealing with fruit, for example, sparing his critics the misapprehension that they were portraits of the table.) But, no.

  I have received many close-this-play reviews over the years, and that is both part of the cost of my doing business, and one of the prices of a Free Press. The same Constitution which protects my right to write my plays, shields the right of the critic to write drivel. Why do I instance this long-ago hatchet job?

  Because, to this day, nearly forty years after that review, I am asked, in lectures, classrooms, and interviews why I hate women.62

  A rhetorical question is essentially an attack, and this protracted attack must be laid, not to the account of the poor writer at the Village Voice, but to that “movement,” for which, I presume, she thought she spoke: the “Feminist Studies” so beloved of our great Universities.

  I found these attacks upsetting first because I am a sensitive fellow, and, second, because, to the contrary, I love women. I’ve been privileged to have spent my life surrounded by them; and it seems to me a matter of course that men and women should get on well together, which was, after all, the theme of Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

  Here is another question spawned by the University: Why do I not write for women? (This expounded by the students, I believe, burdened by the rigors of studying both feminism and drama.)

  The answer, I do write for women, is unsuccessful in averting wrath, for the wisdom inculcated by the University is not, it seems, of that weak variety which bows before fact. I have written many plays and parts for women; nearly as many as I have written for men, and, probably as many as any other dramatist of my generation, man or woman. But the question, again, is not a request for information, but an attack. Well, that’s all right.

  I came across an old trunk, full of bills and posters, playbills, and correspondence of my youth. The correspondence was almost exclusively of two kinds, rejection slips and love letters.

  I remember of the rejections, at the time of their receipt, that I, after the first momentary blaze of indignation, felt, of the producers, agents, and publishers who had rejected my work, “too bad for you, who are going to be the loser thereby”; and I remember feeling at the time, of the letters, and feel still today, a gratitude for and wonder at the generosity of women.

  A writer’s life is lived, and, I think, must be lived, in solitude. For it is a dialogue with one’s own thoughts, and, often, a dialogue about one’s own thoughts; and the corrosive nature of this struggle is often unpleasant, devouring one’s time and weakening one’s capacity for simple human interaction. This is a minuscule price to pay for the privilege of earning one’s living as an artist; but the price, though small (if it is a price, and not, rather, an attribute), unfits the writer, or, at least, unfitted me, for participation in a wider society. I need to be alone. And am very grateful that this state has been not only ameliorated but beautified by the society of my wife and my children, many of whom are women.

  Part of the Left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

  The intellectual elite which is the Left can preserve neither its hegemony nor its pretensions in the light of facts, for the fact is that Governments cannot create wealth. Wealth, and prosperity, is creatable only by workers, which is to say, by those who are going to employ their gifts, their time, and their energy and intelligence to create something others might want. Every worker knows this: work hard, and get ahead. (May the hard-worker be overlooked, or gulled from his just reward? Of course; but the potential reward for his application is completely denied to his brother who will not work.)

  Sarah Palin was a commercial fisherman. She actually worked with her hands, and, so, she like Harry Truman, was, to the Left, an object not only to be dismissed, but to be mocked. For the Left loves “the workers” only in the abstract; to find that they not only exist as individuals, but are willing to bet their subsistence upon their principles of hard work and thrift—this, to the Left, is an unanswerable indictment of Socialism, Globalism, and Statism. The enemy of the Intellectual is not the Capitalist, but the individual, which is to say the Worker.63

  A few words about Marilyn Monroe.

  A student, lawyer, teacher, artist, mother, grandmother, defender of animals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman, rescuer of children—all these are futures we can imagine for Norma Jeane. If acting had become an expression of that real self, not an escape from it, one can also imagine the whole woman who was both Norma Jeane and Marilyn becoming a serious actress and wise comedienne, who would still be working in her sixties, with more productive years to come. But Norma Jeane remained the frightened child of the past. And Marilyn remained t
he unthreatening half-person that sex-goddesses are supposed to be. It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations.—Gloria Steinem, foreword to Coffee with Marilyn, by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  Marilyn Monroe, then, though her work brought and brings delight to literally hundreds of millions of people, although she created for herself one of the most revered icons in show business, had an impossibly successful career, though she did this through persistence, talent, hard work, and guts, must be dismissed by the wiser, nonworking Left, which finds her neither a serious actress nor comedienne. She did not, sadly, fulfill the vision which Gloria Steinem had for her, because she was not an intellectual—she was an actual worker.

  In a more equal world, a top-down world, a world of equality (as envisioned and enforced by the Left) Ms. Monroe might have been taken in hand (by whom?) early on, and cured of her unreal escapist self (her talent), and still be alive playing Mother Courage in some Resident Theatre somewhere.

  Can this be Feminism? A dismissal of the greatest comedienne in the history of the screen because her work did not meet the high standards of Gloria Steinem?

  Is it possible that the wise Ms. Steinem mistakes the performances of Marilyn with the person? She does conflate, and seems to connect causally, Marilyn’s screen persona with her use of sleeping pills, suggesting that she killed herself (an open point) because she was “denied the full range of possibility” and, so, was forced to disappoint Gloria Steinem.

  Would Ms. Steinem be happier if Marilyn had lived to play Medea and Queen Elizabeth? Is she ignorant of the working life span of an actress? Did she never laugh or smile at one of Marilyn’s performances? Of course she did, but now she wants to throw it in reverse and, having derived enjoyment from her work, derive further enjoyment from her superior sad understanding of Marilyn’s essential “slavery.” Marilyn, though vastly wealthy, though widely accomplished, though revered worldwide (and to this day) was somehow a “slave to men.” Why? Because she was a woman, and acting, thus, was somehow not “an expression of her real self.”64

  What balderdash. Shame on you, Ms. Steinem, for promoting hypocrisy. For, anyone who might be foolish enough to nod along with your sanctimony, will, along with you, the next time they watch one of Marilyn’s films, laugh and smile; you, then, are promoting a dual-consciousness, an indictment of that which one enjoys, of a legitimate pleasure brought about through the work and the talent of an actual human being, who, in your sad lament, you belittle and patronize. Were or are you smarter or more talented than Marilyn Monroe? Make me laugh.

  And where was the Left, and where the Feminists, during President Clinton’s savaging of Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, and Monica Lewinsky? These women, who suffered, if anyone has ever suffered, “workplace harassment,” were dismissed from consideration by the Left, who mentioned their struggles not at all; and Monica Lewinsky, a Nice Jewish Girl from Brentwood, working as an intern in the office of the most powerful man on the planet, was treated to the silence of the feminists as she was accused, by her employer, the President of the United States, while he was committing perjury, of being unbalanced and, perhaps, of having had a “bad childhood.” How, by the Left, can this be excused? It cannot. But it may be partially explained—Flowers, Jones et al., were dismissed by the Left not merely because they accused the Left’s avatar, but because of their class. They were, to the Left, “trailer trash,” and so, de-facto, undeserving of a hearing yet alone a defense. The Feminists of the Left were voluble in their indictment of Justice Thomas, in Anita Hill’s, at best, “he said, she said” controversy; using racist language and innuendo against him unheard in this country in decades. They supported Tawana Brawley’s improbable claims of rape up to, and, indeed, past the point at which they had been proved fraudulent and her testimony found perjured. But what of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne by drowning? What feminist spoke up for the dead victim? Or against the man who drove her to her death? He remained an icon of the Left for the rest of his life. Are those feminists, then, spokespersons for the Rights of Women? Demonstrably not. They are not even spokeswomen for the rights of Liberal women—Ms. Kopechne was working for a Democrat, as was Ms. Lewinsky. They are advocates only of the positions of the Left—at whatever cost to women. If Feminism does not consist in the actual defense of actual women, what in the world are those people talking about?

  Matrimony and monogamy have forever been linked with property and inheritance, the nuclear family, in the West, having been decided upon through trial and error as the most effective unit for preservation of both.

  In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is an illusion that we all can share, that there is naturally occurring wealth, and that the constituency with which we all will share it is expansible. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan—room and board included prepaid—and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods.

  Liberalism is a parlor game, where one, for a small stipend, is allowed to think he is aiding starving children in X or exploited workers in Y, when he is merely, in the capitalist tradition, paying a premium, tacked onto his goods, or subtracted from his income, for the illusion that he is behaving laudably (cf. bottled water).

  So the Socialists want to do away with the notion of Property, and, so inclined, they want to do away with marriage. The Right sees an erosion of marriage (evidenced by sex education, cohabitation, homosexuality, single motherhood, abortion), and understands it as a moral affront. But it is additionally, and, perhaps, more basically, an attack on property. If the very poor and the very rich can breed without a stable home into which to introduce their children, then what of inheritance? The poor do so, as their children will perhaps be taken care of by the state, or by their grandparents; the rich, as they consider the child an affordable luxury, whose sustenance will not significantly affect the parent’s fortune. What of the middle class, upon whose fortunes the future of our country rests?

  Monogamy and property came about as human beings developed away from the life of the cave and the savannahs; the question of their usefulness seems to signal a desire to return to that pre-agrarian state: all will own everything, children will be raised by a “village,” no human being need make the commitment of marriage, they may simply follow the dictates of their hearts.65 These dictates, however, everyone of a certain age knows, are sometimes misleading. And they are, at certain points in life, not only damned near irresistible, but are many times in opposition: the desire to breed promiscuously, and the desire to fall in love, for example. Here the organism is endeavoring to adjudicate not only its societal but its genetic course, for, as the desire for unfettered procreation, strengthened as the societally imposed condition of marriage is weakened, the chemical urge is ratified, and human beings may self-select for greater sexual athleticism (mass nonfamilial breeding), rather than for “falling in love” (monogamy), which, we see, is already coming to be thought effete.

  See the lyrics of songs. These, in my youth were moony, about the One Boy and Girl, then became about the joys of Freedom from Entanglement, and the folly of love, and now, in rap music, actually assert the desirability of spousal abuse and misogyny. Here we have a glimpse into the operation of evolution, and how the social and the genetic are linked; human life will change not because we have eaten more or less leaves off the trees (pace, the environmentalists) as if we were giraffes, but because we have become infected with the bacillus of socialism—destroy the family, and trust the State.

  But to follow the reasoning one step further, is it possible that the actual delusion of Socialism is a reaction to scarcity or to the p
erception of scarcity? That the herd, troubled by a burgeoning world population, has simply decided to stop: to stop breeding, to stop producing (the Net Exports of Goods & Services fell from–$78 billion in 1990 to–$669 billion in 2008) to stop consuming (green movements) and exploring (environmentalism)—that the herd reaction to supposed scarcity is a return to the savagery of the savannah, which, after the fact, is rationalized as Socialism?

  I saw a Prius on the street, with a bumper sticker reading “The only nuclear reactor I want is 93,000,000 miles away.” Fine, but if one rejects nuclear, and coal, and drilling for oil, what will run the presses that print the bumper stickers?

  The battle between Left and Right can be seen to take place on a chemic level. The Right says one must breed, one must produce, and explore, to keep our civilization vital and strong. The Left says we must stop doing all these things, and simply widen the herd. That if we widen the herd sufficiently there will be no more struggle and, so, no more anxiety—thus those institutions which sequester property to the use of its producers (the nation-state, marriage, etc.) may be and, indeed must be discarded as divisive and productive of rancor. The blather about “Americans’ image in the world” is an instance of this unconscious implication of a fraternity of the good-willed, from which we, because of (fill in this space) have been excluded.

  What would make the Islamic Jihad happy? Our death, according to their repeated assertions. How might one placate them? One cannot (see the State of Israel’s efforts over sixty years). What, then, is our Image in the World?

  Socialism is attractive because the effects of individual enterprise are unforeseeable and the weakened individual is incapable of dealing with anxiety.

  One could not predict air travel in 1850, or penicillin in 1920, or the personal computer in 1940. One can, no less, predict today the marvelous and less than marvelous effects of free enterprise, either for the nation or the individual. The effects of the Socialism at the heart of the Left’s agenda, on the other hand, are completely predictable: a disappearance of the nation-state, and its conquest by the stronger-willed. This horrific vision offers only one benefit: it is completely predictable. See the Jews pleading with Moses to go “home” to slavery. “Were there not enough graves in Egypt?” (Exodus) But the magic return to nature seems to awaken no fear, for then we will simply love each other, share everything, and care for the earth of which we are stewards. Well and good, but under what system of laws? And what of those who, though recipients of our wisdom, want something more than or different from that which we have in our kind wisdom awarded them?