David Mamet Writes Tough Stories About Weak Men

In which I come to terms with yet another disappointing creative role model.

May 07, 2025

I’ve been disappointed in David Mamet for a while now. But I’m starting to think that the disappointment is misplaced. That feeling has been sharpened by Samuel G. Freedman’s recent piece in The Nation, “What If David Mamet Was Always a MAGA Fanboy?” I don’t know Freedman or his work. I don’t follow The Nation, and I didn’t read this when it was published about three weeks ago on April 15.

I found the article while googling “david mamet donald trump” out of morbid curiosity. I was offput by Mamet’s truly childish 2008 essay “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” and then genuinely disgusted by his full embrace of the anti-intellectual fascist golem Sarah Palin when she became the VP nominee later that year. Ever since then, I try to keep his politics out of my mind.

But I was weak this morning. I flipped past his bizarre memorial to Gene Hackman (with whom he worked on 2001’s Heist) on the Instagram account he hastily put together to promote the new Broadway run of Glengarry Glen Ross—and it got me thinking: Does he still have a head full of shit?

Instead, I found Freedman’s article. And its central premise sort of smacked me in the face…

[E]ver since seeing this new production of Glengarry, I have found myself thinking a heretical thought. What if we have been wrong about the play all along? What if, instead of offering a ruthless critique of capitalism at its amoral nadir, instead of witheringly depicting a salesman as a con man, Glengarry is instead celebrating the deceit, in fact presenting it as the epitome of manliness? What if Glengarry Glen Ross, quite possibly in ways a younger Mamet himself did not entirely fathom, offers us a joyful ethnography of Donald Trump’s America? How different, after all, is Glengarry’s preening, potty-mouthed alpha dog, Ricky Roma, who dazzles the audience as he peddles worthless tracts of Florida swampland to “dumb Polacks” and “deadbeat wogs,” from the world-class grifter pushing Trump University diplomas and $TRUMP meme bitcoins?

And, apparently, I get my answer…

Several weeks after last November’s election, Mamet wrote in The Wall Street Journal to congratulate the president-elect for staving off the “decline and fall” of America by slaying both men’s favorite enemies: “the superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, and the media [who] have colluded to suppress the true and impose the false.”

Look, you want to lionize the moronic? L’chaim! Go live your life. But Mamet’s turn for the idiotic hurts me in particular, because he’s such a huge influence on my creative life. It’s very apparent in my dialogue (which you can read here), in which I try to focus more on how people sound when they talk than what they’re saying. Not saying my dialogue is of his caliber, just that I consider myself of his lineage. Less obviously, but probably more importantly, is the economy of ideas he brought to storytelling. His book On Directing Film, which I absorbed back in my 20s, influenced my various projects in ways I can no longer tease out. (I have so much more to say about that, and maybe I will one day, but this essay is unfortunately about something else.)

So, back to my misplaced disappointment and Freedman’s article. It’s an extremely depressing moment when you realize that a person whom you thought was on the side of humanity was really all along just on the side of their own humanity. Their little slice of the world they consider human. Realizations of this sort seem to pop up daily lately. And with this new information, it becomes so obvious that what you initially took as satire wasn’t written satirically. Unlike Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, I don’t think Glengarry Glen Ross is criticizing the system that causes these men to attack one another like wild predators circling a carcass. I think it’s just observing them, like a wildlife documentary. This is how real men behave in the real world. It’s tough and its ugly, but there’s also a sort of beauty in it.1

There’s value in that. I’m not saying there’s not. But I’m less interested in it. Partially because it’s not true. It’s its own sort of mythology. Yes, there are lots of men out there in the world who look tough, and act tough, and do tough things. Make tough decisions with unpleasant consequences because they think that’s how tough men act. But they’re not tough. That’s the thing.

The toughness exemplified in David Mamet’s work is a very outward-facing toughness. It’s directed at others. “I’m so tough that I’ll beat the shit out of you if you cross me.” That’s not tough. That’s just being a bully. So, it makes perfect sense that sort of toughness is a virtue then you’d be all in for Donald Trump America’s aggressive “you’ll suffer for my needs” worldview. But again—THAT’S NOT TOUGH.

Okay, it’s tough in a sense. Like the hide of a pineapple is tough. It’s hard and prickly—you don’t want it smacked against your face. But if you know what you’re doing, you can can in there real easy, slice that outer layer away, and what you’ll find underneath is soft and fleshy. You can squeeze its juice out with one hand. Real toughness is more like a coconut. It seems soft to the naked eye, easily bruisable. But if you cut through that soft exterior, you’ll find a rock hard core that you’re not getting through anytime soon.

David Mamet’s plays and screenplays are all peopled by men with very squeezable interiors. The sort of men who don’t say “thank you” or “sorry,” but punch the steering wheel of their car if they feel disrespected by a cashier. Men who would rather drink and drive themselves off a cliff than sit down with a therapist. Men who are afraid of unfamiliar things and need their gun collection displayed just right or they can’t go to bed. Men who would disown their trans child rather than hear the taunts from other “tough” men.

You know exactly the men I’m talking about. You probably know them personally. And, unless you’re one of them—or an eleven-year-old boy—you can see exactly how tough they actually are.

All that said, David Mamet remains a genius of storytelling to my mind. What he’s given to the world, and what he’s given to me personally, is immeasurable. I’ve simply thrown him onto the pile of other weak men who used to be role models. Men I never should have idolized to begin with.