Demigods and Monsters
David Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla Slays Even the
Most Savage of Beasts

The pecking order gets cold-cocked, the laissez-faire gets run off, and the hypocrisy gets hipped to its own hiplessness.

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe
By John Hood

David Mamet never met a word he wanted to mince. Ever. Yet his by-now trademarked diction (dubbed Mamet-speak) still manages to mince quite a few. Not because of any real aversion to them, mind you, but because his characters — like us all — too seldom know just what to say.

Oddly, Mamet’s depictions of those at a loss for words have made him one of our greatest wordslingers. Glengarry Glen Ross, Homicide, Wag the Dog, Heist, Ronin and The Spanish Prisoner, to name but a storied few, all are peopled by folk who are fluently tongue-tied, reticently verbose and loudly mute.

Very much unlike the man himself. An intellectual who likes to thug it up, Mamet’s never been shy about saying what he means and saying it mean. Demigods and monsters of every persuasion have felt Mamet’s blows, from method actors in True and False to liberal placates in The Wicked Son, so it’s no surprise that his Bambi vs. Godzilla (Pantheon, $22) takes on the whole of Hollywood, and takes it down.

Mamet swings with the refined hand of a back-alley fighter, and Bambi, above all, is a brawl. The screed takes its title from an old animation titled Bambi Meets Godzilla, in which our fearful fawn crests a picturesque hillside, senses danger and gets crushed by a foot bigger than Hollywood’s collective ego.

As a metaphor about art vs. commerce, it makes sense. It’d make more sense if Mamet wasn’t the antithesis of the babe in the woods. Mamet is no Bambi. Not even close. And, here, Godzilla is no match.

Culled mostly from his columns for The Guardian (with a smattering of Harper’s thrown in for mean measure), Mamet runs the gamut of cinema, from silents (much preferred) to sequels (much despised). The pecking order gets cold-cocked, the laissez-faire gets run off, and the hypocrisy of it all gets hipped to its own hiplessness.

But Bambi’s not all bash and bury. Mamet advises (“The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true”), remembers (collides with the likes of Preminger and Rafelson) and raves (The Godfather seems to rate the most ink), and because Mamet is not meek, the three books he recommends the budding screenwriter read are Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces and his own Three Uses of the Knife.

The whole thing’s a throwback to a more muscular time, when men were he-men and the pen was mightier with the sword. To Mamet, film writing “is a daunting process,” calling for “perseverance, honesty and, by turns, blunt candor, invention, humor and humility.”

Bambi’s got all that and then some, all but the last one, that is. Which makes the book just about perfect. Who the hell really likes the taste of humble pie, anyway?

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com.

Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.