STUDIES AND RESEARCH

David Mamet’s films: demystification of popular culture

One of the contemporary writers particularly fascinated by the narrative formulas of popular literature is David Mamet. In his numerous plays and his three recent films he pays heightened attention to the narrative construction – the advancement of action – and to the formulaic plot patterns. The study reviews Cavellty’s classification of crime plots, and observes Mamet films as a play on the register of some of these plots. In the Things Change, a script for the movie, plot can be conceived as a parody of »gangster saga«. In the House of Games Mamet plays on a kind of a psychoanalytical thriller in Hitchock’s manner, but reversing the direction of psychological manipulation, and treating the psychology as a means of deceit. In the Homicide the pattern of the »police procedure« plot is used to detect the »nature of evil« in institutional manipulation of individual.

Mamet films can be viewed as the use of popular genres to expose the myths they rely upon, and the main source of the myths is »The American Dream« which was shattered at the very beginning, and what was left were just the twisted scraps of it. The function of art – as Mamet sees it is to draw the attention to facts, and to expose the negative power of the myths.

Dunja Krpanec