Books, Arts & Manners: Dead as Doornails

SCHOPENHAUER defined the arrogance no great man is without—the one that contemns the views of his contemporaries and lets him, undisturbed, create what they censure, and despise what they praise. David Mamet has devised a different arrogance: concocting plays and movies of a self-indulgent, uncommunicative sort, then browbeating the public into acclaiming them and him. The tricks are excessive ellipsis and undue convolution: surface portentousness hiding shallowness, hollowness, or actual nonsense. The cinematic variety, somewhat different from the theatrical, is typified by his latest, The Spanish Prisoner.

The idea—if it deserves the name—is that almost everyone is corrupt if not utterly evil, appearances lie, and only our hero is thoroughly good, even if more gullible than a dozen Candides. The hero as dope is a very hard sell, especially where there is no shred of credibility, not even enough for a g-string to cover the naked untruth.

JS

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John Simon

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SCHOPENHAUER defined the arrogance no great man is without—the one that contemns the views of his contemporaries and lets him, undisturbed, create what they censure, and despise what they praise. David Mamet has devised a different arrogance: concocting plays and movies of a self-indulgent, uncommunicative sort, then browbeating the public into acclaiming them and him. The tricks are excessive ellipsis and undue convolution: surface portentousness hiding shallowness, hollowness, or actual nonsense. The cinematic variety, somewhat different from the theatrical, is typified by his latest, The Spanish Prisoner.

The idea—if it deserves the name—is that almost everyone is corrupt if not utterly evil, appearances lie, and only our hero is thoroughly good, even if more gullible than a dozen Candides. The hero as dope is a very hard sell, especially where there is no shred of credibility, not even enough for a g-string to cover the naked untruth.