Customer Reviews

Three Uses of the Knife

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I think that this book follows Mamet's M.O. to a tee - It is very erudite, yet I find myself laughing. His writing is very thought provoking in this essay on using your writing to convey meaning. It is not his best book, but it is certainly worthy of the 1 hour it takes to read.

I think this book, as other Mamet books, benefits by his ironclad belief that there is one way to do things. He may actually argue that his POV is not consistent with my last sentence, but he is such an ornery S.O.B., that it is simply a pleasure to listen to him go off on his tirades and tangents.

Will this book allow you to write better? - Maybe. Will this book thoroughly entertain you and enlighten you with Mamet's POV on the issue? - Absolutely. It reads almost like fiction.

Mamet explicates a compelling theory of drama that links the fine and liberal arts with multifarious forms of American religion and social experience. Though he falters into occasionally harsh prescriptivism, he offers a look at one way American dramatists can and do communicate their world to an audience--and, in many ways, how they communicate the audience's own world as well.

At the heart of Mamet's theory is his claim that all of us make drama out of the ordinary matter of our lives. The dramatist simply takes that hunger and constructs a public spectacle around it. This spectacle raises us up as human beings, and purges the emotions we harbor but which are unacceptable in our modern era. Theatre, in other words, retains its Aristotelian purpose in cleansing the soul.

But Mamet broadens the scope of drama, away from stately tragedy and into more humane territory. As he says, "a play is not about nice things happening to nice people. A play is about rather terrible things happening to people who are as nice or not nice as we ourselves are." In other words, though theatre still requires that characters have their hard-won pretenses stripped away, it is not only kings who must lose everything.

From this it's a short step to Mamet's assertion that "the purpose of art is not to change but to delight. I don't think its purpose is to enlighten us. I don't think it's to change us. I don't think it's to teach us." This is especially good advice for young writers who have been coached by public school English courses to see literature as a manifesto to be decoded. Too many young writers think their work will transform society and remake us as better people. In the name of enlightenment they inflict on audiences the dreariest dumbbell harangues mankind can imagine.

No, much better to delight first. But for theatre to have Mamet's holy purification role, we must broaden the definition of "delight" to encompass the whole range of human emotion, uplifting or otherwise. The role of art is to make us feel deeply, not think correctly. And if, in performing the former, it accomplishes the latter, so much the better, but reversing the order will create sterile, unengaging work.

Mamet's theory is based on his own works, and the goals he sets for his own writing. Therefore, easy as it is to agree with his statements about the audience, the problem play, or the MacGuffin, it's tough sledding when he says that we CAN'T commit acts he considers errors. Plainly we can, since Clifford Odets' agit-prop plays still get produced, and plays that most disdain the audience are often the ones with the biggest endowments. Yet for those who aim for Mamet's scale of accomplishment, this theory is a confident place from which we can begin our own creative process.

In a few places Mamet pitches high and outside. His claim that the forced monologue he disparages as "The Death of My Kitten" interferes with the audience's reception of the play is tough to stomach. There are reasons why we don't want to sit though maudlin accounts of old news, but Mamet says: "If we are to identify with the Hero, which is to say, to see her story as our own, she can have had no `state' before the beginning of the story."

This is palpable nonsense, and surely Mamet himself doesn't believe that. If he did, why bother mentioning Shelly's daughter in Glengarry Glen Ross? Or John's mortgage and tenure troubles in Oleanna? If we are to claim the Hero as ourselves, she must have a state, even if a dull disquisition isn't the way to illuminate it.

Similarly, his round condemnation of American musicals, packed flippantly in with his excoriation of "problem plays," doesn't fit squarely. It's true that musicals are often plot-driven and suffer with timid characters and pat endings. This is incompatible with what Mamet sees as the purpose and origin of drama, but it doesn't mean all musicals are equal or that they are a blight on the theatre. It simply means that they subscribe to a different dramaturgical theory.

But for all his high-handed pietism, Mamet offers a compelling theory of American drama in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries. His vision, though perhaps tinted by his own work, at root makes contemporary the theories that have guided drama since time out of mind. In an age when much writing drifts listlessly, with neither audience nor intention visible to the naked eye, Mamet offers badly needed direction, and hope that writers can be about something in the tricky modern world.

It's rare that I regret buying a book, but I'm not happy that I spent money on this one.

I don't argue that Mamet is a good playwright. Glengarry Glen Ross is brilliant, and American Buffalo isn't too bad, either. But reading this book makes me wish Mamet would stick to playwriting and not impose his narrow ideas on others.

Essentially, the book oversimplifies matters in astonishing ways. For instance, Mamet dismisses the American musical out of hand. Many successful playwrights cringe at the thought of watching The Music Man or Kiss Me Kate one more time, but does his comment apply to more intense productions like Cabaret? That's a major distinction that Mamet fails to make, and it's not the only one. Also, lumping together all political theater as an automatic failure, and excusing Brecht from the rest by claiming that Brecht didn't know what he was talking about when he called his own theater political? The logic escapes me.

As far as Mamet's self-aggrandizement goes-- well, I can't say I didn't know it was coming. But that he lets it interfere with the construction of solid arguments is troublesome. For a book on how to construct or read a play, look at Louis Catron's book, or even go back to Stanislavski or Chekhov. They will be much more helpful to the working writer.

While Mamet's booklet is essentially an exposition of opinions with little or no discourse, it is extremely thought provoking and provides ample fuel for thinking about drama - and art in general - as lying at the edge of reason.

In a treatise that mirrors the three act structure he discusses, Mamet eloquently puts forth the idea that much of political drama, by instructing us what to think and feel, is mere melodrama and that "the theatre exists to deal with problems of the soul, with the mysteries of human life, not with its quotidian calamities." He assails avant-garde artists for taking "refuge in nonsense" and electing themselves "superior to reason," yet also criticizes the "hard-bitten rationalist who rails against religious tradition, against the historical niceties, against ritual large and small."

"Three Uses of the Knife" is a book that will be read quickly, but will stick to the back of your mind for sometime afterwards.

As an aspiring playwright currently developing a script, I found Mamet's book to be an invigorating and succinct investigation of the function of true drama ("The theater exists to deal with the problems of the soul, with the mysteries of human life, not with its quotidian calamities."). For me, the most arresting and appealing aspect of Mamet's aesthetic philosophy is his candid unearthing of the roots of our dramatic urge in the collective human psyche. This urge manifests itself in our natural impulse - indeed, "our unique survival tool" - to structure our perceptions of the world into `event-complication-denouement' sequences, in other words, to seek a three-act structure (the book's title, with a hat-tip to Leadbelly, derives from this progression). Mamet cites Aristotle in delineating a protagonist/hero's dogged and single-minded pursuit of his/her goal within this framework of a play.

Also intriguing in "Knife" is Mamet's association of theater with myth, magic, religion, and dreams - all of which address the most fundamental non-rational human needs, compulsions, and feelings of powerlessness in the face of death.

"Knife" is a bracing must-read, and left me hungry for more.

This reads like a weekend brainstorm into the dictaphone, or party-chatter with metropolitan friends. First glance - you've got the large font, wide-margins and generous line-spacing to pad these notes out into something resembling a book. Then you notice that nearly every paragraph includes several parenthetical thoughts (like I just had another way-outer to squeeze in here, okay?), plus quoted after-thoughts (sorry, couldn't find "the right words" just then, you know?) - and foreign phrases swept in from every part of the old country - like this gem: "This pronunciamento can be taken as a jejune promise". Footnoted brain-sprinkles complete the overall intellectual profile of this work.

The reader doesn't get any help to piece it all together. Eventually, you might suspect Mamet has something to say about the "three acts" of theatre (no other dramatic structures apparently exist). Mamet dips here and there into the function of drama, his bold thesis being that theatre is magic. Theatre, he declares, is a place of wonder, and no place for popular entertainment or politics. We are to walk out of theatres with "cleansing awe", knowing we are "sinful and worthless".

Mamet never considers any ideas apart from his own. He draws heavily on the Old Testament and a primer on Freud for back-up, but no theatre theorists ever get a mention - apart from Brecht, with a single word, namely: "problematic".

Most of "Three Uses" is actually nothing to do with theatre. It's a flippant toss-off of vacuous quotables about statesmanship, the "Information Age", the psychology of the masses, the causes of gambling ... all argued with arrogant inconsistency: Mamet rails against "centralisation by the body politic", and then derides all manner of extremism; he argues against "avant garde nonsense" with absurd phrases like "In endorsing a blank canvas, or the Domino Theory, the individual becomes like a King Canute". For Mamet, "good art" is no more than The Bible, Shakespeare and Bach, plus an American work - "Death of a Salesman", of course. There are no surprises in the ideas, however much they're dressed to impress with showy associations and stiff fundamentalism. Too bad that the result is more like a freshman's freewheeling weblog on "life", than anything from the likes of Brook or Grotowski on "the theatre". American critics equating it with such works is plain chauvinism.

One use of the knife Mamet forgot was editing. Then he might have been able to communicate something useful here - into 3 or 4 pages. But there's no holding back the primary process exhibitionist. You have to get out the knife and do the editing yourself.

Oh, yes, the knife. Nice title, and it's the substance of a few lines near the end, which Mamet cares - and seems only able - to explain by offering more curly metaphor: "the knife is the dramatist's bass line". Meaning? Dramatists are misanthropes who basically want to kill their audiences? Who knows, but the meandering content and grandiose style of this work sure suggests Mamet's fundamental contempt for the reader.

Mr. Mamet cuts and exposes the grooves that we both claim and deny. Three Uses of the Knife is much more than the subtitle "On the Nature and Purpose of Drama" would lead you to believe. (In fact, I am not quite sure that the Vanity Fair review that appears on the cover could have been written by someone who really read this book. It seems banal and patronizing = "[Mamet] brings his usual passion and provocation to his treatise on what makes good drama.")

Anyway..far from a "treatise on...good drama", this is a book that calls for honest introspection and critical consideration of the pop drama of daily living (sports, politics, race, etc.). A case in point: I dare you to lay the current drama of internet madness in the context of this book -- It will be most revealing and this will become the best internet book you have read.

O.K., nuff hyperbole -- the book is simply on target as a structure for social criticism. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, you can't shirk the debate and keep your integrity.

It is a very short book well worth reading and re-reading.

Through studying David Mamet's theories, I came to realise that a character can be understood not only through what they do, but also through what they say. My style has started to incorporate Mamet's technique of having characters talk, often to each other, as well as to express themselves through physical acts like gestures and walking. The education in this book has convinced me to abandon my earlier style, where characters have wordless internal monologues while not moving for a play's 2 or 3 hour duration.

3 stars.

I read this book every year, and every year I take something new from it. There's SO much in this short book. It's FILLED with truth about life, art, and life & art.

I just got this book this morning and these are preliminary reactions.
First of all, the content rocks!
Mamet suggestivey points out how we dramatize our lives in our banal exchanges with each other about impersonal things like the weather. In doing so we endow our lives with significance. The insight reminds me of how charged the world once was when I was in love for the first time. I am sure that the access that this small volume gives to an interesting mind repay reading and reading. This is one of those books that makes you think and makes you feel clever for the thinking the thoughts it guides you to.
Unfortunately, I find the poor word-processed typography is distracting. One line has the the initial capital of a sentence squeezed up against the period of the preceding one. The next line has wide open spaces between the words. Paragraph after paragraph finishes with the dangling ends of hyphenated words. I would rather pay a dollar more for a clean view of a remarkable mind.
Surely a respected publishing company can do better than just feed the author's data file to a poorly automatic compositing application and then print the results unperused by human eye?