Book Review: David Mamet's Everywhere an Oink Oink

Known for pioneering a clipped and circular style of tense workplace conversations in plays like Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed the Plow, David Mamet spent a good 40 years influencing luminaries like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Then, he instantly torched his career with his 2008 Village Voice article, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” A 2013 Emmy nomination for a Phil Spector biopic notwithstanding, no giant of American Letters has fallen so hard, fast, or far. 

Yet, as Mamet posits in his latest book, Everywhere an Oink Oink, though he may be on the outs with Hollywood, he’s in a much better place than his former industry is with a large swath of the American public. Part memoir steeped in free association, part catalogue of spicy insider baseball, the book proves that, despite his fall from grace, Mamet could read and write us all under his beloved poker table. 

It’s quite telling that those who deigned to read Mamet’s latest opus all opted for the comparison of him as the reader’s conservative uncle at Thanksgiving. Writers prone to such pablum neglect that Mamet’s vitriolic stance against Hollywood and the liberal consensus stems largely from the industry’s post-70s penchant for dramatic and artistic failure. Recalling how the 2007 WGA strike killed many a writing gig on its way to the greater good (including Mamet’s staff on CBS series The Unit), he chides the tendency to be too close to the fantasy of reconciling the Hollywood life with half-formed notions of worker solidarity. For him,“New speak slogans suggesting we ‘embrace our humanity’ are inducements to self-congratulation. But we scream with laughter at the recognition that our beloved ‘humanity’ is a joke.”

Reserving his harshest provocations for Hollywood’s producer class, the Pulitzer Prize winner deviates from the typical conservative influencer groupthink by not merely railing against DEI, but contextualizing it within the power player bubble. “The destruction of the Biz by Diversity Commissars is not the cause, but a result, or corporate degeneracy. The hegemons, as they grow fat, become less sassy, and the confusion about objective (making money by supplying a need) caused by affluence attracts exploiters as the sun calls forth maggots from a dead dog.”

Part of the theatre landscape since the mid-70s, Mamet has earned the right to curmudge. However, those already familiar with his work know his contrarian bravado has remained unwavering. And, for at least a little while, Broadway and Hollywood were all the better for it.

Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood is available from bookstores nationwide.