Three Uses Of The Knife

On the Nature and Purpose of Drama

David Mamet

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350129009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Now published in the Bloomsbury Revelations series, this is a classic work on the power and importance of drama by renowned American playwright, screenwriter and essayist David Mamet. In this short but arresting series of essays, David Mamet explains the necessity, purpose and demands of drama. A celebration of the ties that bind art to life, Three Uses of the Knife is an enthralling read for anyone who has sat anxiously waiting for the lights to go up on Act 1. In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, public spectacle to private script. Self-assured and filled with autobiographical touches Three Uses of the Knife is a call to art and arms, a manifesto that reminds us of the singular power of the theatre to keep us sane, whole and human.

Chapter 1

THE WIND-CHILL FACTOR

It is in our nature to dramatize. At least once a day we reinterpret the weather—an essentially impersonal phenomenon—into an expression of our current view of the universe: “Great. It’s raining. Just when I’m blue. Isn’t that just like life?”

Or we say: “I can’t remember when it was this cold,” in order to forge a bond with our contemporaries. Or we say: “When I was a lad the winters were longer,” in order to avail ourselves of one of the delights of aging.

The weather is impersonal, and we both understand it and exploit it as dramatic, i.e., having a plot, in order to understand its meaning for the hero, which is to say for ourselves.

We dramatize the weather, the traffic, and other impersonal phenomena by employing exaggeration, ironic juxtaposition, inversion, projection, all the tools the dramatist uses to create, and the psychoanalyst uses to interpret, emotionally significant phenomena.

We dramatize an incident by taking events and reordering them, elongating them, compressing them, so that we understand their personal meaning to us—to us as the protagonist of the individual drama we understand our life to be.

If you said, “I waited at the bus stop today,” that probably wouldn’t be dramatic. If you said, “I waited at the bus stop for a long time today,” that might be a little more dramatic. If you said, “The bus came quickly today,” that wouldn’t be dramatic (and there would really be no reason to say it). But you might say “Do you know how quickly that bus came today?”—and all of a sudden, we’re taking the events of life and using dramatic tools.

“I waited half an hour for a bus today” is a dramatic statement. It means: “I waited that amount of time sufficient for me to be sure you will understand it was ‘too long.’”

(And this is a fine distinction, for the utterer cannot pick a time too short to be certain that understanding is communicated, or too long for the hearer to accept it as appropriate—at which point it becomes not drama but farce. So the ur-dramatist picks unconsciously and perfectly as it is our nature to do, the amount of time that allows the hearer to suspend his or her disbelief—to accept that the half-hour wait is not outside the realm of probability, yet is within the parameters of the unusual. The hearer then accepts the assertion for the enjoyment it affords, and a small but perfectly recognizable play has been staged and appreciated.)

“This is only the third time in nfl history a rookie previously benched with what was believed to be a serious injury returned to rush for more than 100 yards in a postseason game.”

That nfl statistic, like the wait for the bus, takes the unremarkable and frames it to afford dramatic enjoyment. The ejaculation “What a run!” is given a statistic to allow us to savor it better/longer/differently. That run is assigned the dramatic weight of the incontrovertible.

Take the useful phrases “you always” and “you never.” In these we reformulate the inchoate into the dramatic. We exploit the utterance and give it dramatic form, for some personal benefit. We might gain transcendence over our significant other, as in the case of “you always” and “you never.” We might open a dinner-table chat with a nice topic of conversation: “I waited half an hour for a bus today.”

In these small plays we make the general or the unremarkable particular and objective, i.e., part of a universe our very formulation proclaims understandable. It’s good dramaturgy.

Bad dramaturgy can be found in the palaver of politicians who have somewhere between nothing much and nothing to say. They traduce the process and speak, rather, of the subjective and nebulous: they speak of the Future. They speak of Tomorrow, They speak of the American Way, Our Mission, Progress, Change.

These are mildly or less mildly inflammatory terms (they mean “Rise Up,” or “Rise Up and Rush Around Boldly”) that stand in for drama. They are placeholders in the dramatic progression, and they function similarly to sex scenes or car chases in a trash film—they are related to no real problem and are inserted as modular treats in a story devoid of content.

(We may assume, similarly, that as Democrats and Republicans respond to each other’s positions by screaming “scandal,” their positions are essentially identical.)

We can see the natural dramatic urge in newspaper quotes of a film’s grosses. The dramatic urge—our impulse to structure cause and effect in order to increase our store of practical knowledge about the universe—is absent in the film itself, but emerges spontaneously in our proclamation of a naturally occurring drama between films. Just as, when we have exhausted our interest in Zeus, we spontaneously create the pantheon.

Some say the land is growing hotter. No, say the others, it is not, and your senses are at fault. And, so, we have the wind-chill factor. Since we cannot wish away our anxiety about climate change, we dramatize it, transforming even that (one would think) least personal, most scientific measurement, the temperature, exactly as we dramatized our wait at the bus stop.

I need to feel maligned, so I say, “And the damn bus was One Half-Hour Late!” I need to feel other than anxious, so I say, “The temperature may be hotter than normal—but, with the wind-chill factor...”

(Please note that this is a rather elegant dramatic device, for the wind does not blow at the same speed all the time, and can be tempered by one’s position in or out of its path. The “factor” allows one to suspend one’s disbelief for the pleasure it affords.)

When the contents of the film or the decisions of the legislature do not satisfy (i.e., do not still our anxiety, do not offer hope), we elaborate their arid action into a superstory—just as the creation myth is superseded by the pantheon, internecine battles replacing primordial being/nothingness anomie. (If we watch any television drama long enough, the Clinton White House, or Hill Street Blues, or ER, we will see the original dramatic th rust give way to domestic squabbles. After a while, the new is no longer new, and we require drama. It’s how we perceive the world.)

Our survival mechanism orders the world into cause-effect-conclusion.

Freud called music polymorphous perversity. We take pleasure in the music because it states a theme, the theme elaborates itself and then resolves, and we are then as pleased as if it were a philosophical revelation—even though the resolution is devoid of verbal content. Like politics, like most popular entertainment.

Children jump around at the end of the day to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama—which is to say to order the universe into a comprehensible form. Our sundown play/film/gossip is the day’s last exercise of that survival mechanism. In it we attempt to discharge any residual perceptive energies in order to sleep. We will have drama in that spot, and if it’s not forthcoming we will cobble it together out of nothing.

The Perfect Ball Game

What do we wish for in the perfect game?

Do we wish for Our Team to take the field and thrash the opposition from the First Moment, rolling up a walkover score at the final gun?

No. We wish for a closely fought match that contains many satisfying reversals, but which can be seen, retroactively, to have always tended toward a satisfying and inevitable conclusion.

We wish, in effect, for a three-act structure.

In act 1 Our Team takes the field and, indeed, prevails over its opponents, and we, its partisans, feel pride. But before that pride can mature into arrogance this new thing occurs: Our Team makes an error, the other side is inspired and pushes forth with previously unsuspected strength and imagination. Our Team weakens and retreats.

In act 2 of this perfect game Our Team, shaken and confused, forgets the rudiments of cohesion and strategy and address that made them strong. They fall deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. All contrary efforts seem for naught; and just when we think the tide may have turned back their way a penalty or adverse decision is rendered, nullifying their gains. What could be worse?

But wait: Just When All Seems Irremediably Lost, help comes (act 3) from an unexpected quarter. A player previously believed second-rate emerges with a block, a run, a throw, that offers a glimmer (a glimmer, mind) of the possibility of victory.

Yes, only a glimmer, but it is sufficient to rouse the team to something approaching its best efforts. And the team, indeed, rallies. Our Team brings the score back even and, mirabile dictu, makes That Play that would put them ahead.

ONLY TO HAVE IT CALLED BACK, yet again, by fate, or by its lieutenant, a wrongheaded, ignorant, or malicious official.

But see: the Lessons of the Second Act¹ were not lost on Our Team. This or that one might say it is too late, the clock is too far run down, our heroes are Too Tired, yet they rouse themselves for One Last Effort, One Last Try. And do they prevail? Do they triumph, with scant seconds left on the clock?

They all but triumph. As, in the final seconds of the play, the outcome rests on That Lone Warrior, that hero, that champion, that person upon whom, in the Final Moment, all our hopes devolve, that final play run, pass, penalty kick—Yes.

But wait: that Warrior we would have chosen for the task, that Champion is injured. No one is left on the bench save a neophyte, et cetera, et cetera.

In which conceit we see that not only does the game recapitulate the drama, but each act of the game (the Perfect Game, mind you) recapitulates the game (following the paradigm: “Yes! No! But wait . . .!”), just as each act of the play recapitulates the whole. The ball game, then, is perhaps a model of Eisenstein’s The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• 1 The Wind-Chill Factor
• 2 Second Act Problems
• 3 Three Uses of the Knife
• Index
• Copyright