Constant Viewer: Redbelt
D.A. Ridgely on May 11th 2008
Daniel: Hey, what kind of belt do you have?
Miyagi: Canvas. JC Penney, $3.98. You like?
Daniel: [laughs] No, I meant…
Miyagi: In Okinawa, belt mean no need rope to hold up pants.
– The Karate Kid
Not unlike, although for mostly different reasons, David Lynch, many people find that a little David Mamet goes a long way. Constant Viewer likes Mamet’s work and thinks he is among our very finest contemporary American playwrights and screenwriters. As a director, however, the best thing that can be said about Mamet is that he’s a competent enough craftsman who, by default, is probably the best guy available when it comes to the particular task of filming a David Mamet screenplay.
Speaking of which, Mamet’s Redbelt is a bit of a puzzler even by Mamet standards. Oh, sure, it’s got the signature elliptical, overlapping dialog fragments, the scant bordering on nonexistent expository back story and the pervading undercurrent of surrealistic menace; but what, exactly, is it all about? Well, the IMDb says “A fateful event leads to a job in the film business for top mixed-martial arts instructor Mike Terry. Though his refuses to participate in prize bouts, circumstances conspire to force him to consider entering such a competition.”
Hmmm…. sounds like an action flick. Hey, what say we take a look at the official film site and see what (presumably) Mamet, himself, says about the movie:
Set in the west-side of Los Angeles fight world, a world inhabited by bouncers, cagefighters, cops and special forces types, Redbelt, is the story of Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Jiu-Jitsu teacher who has avoided the prize fighting circuit, choosing instead to pursue an honorable life by operating a self-defense studio with a samurai’s code.
Terry and his wife Sondra (Alicia Braga), struggle to keep the business running to make ends meet. An accident on a dark, rainy night at the Academy between an off duty officer (Max Martini) and a distraught lawyer (Emily Moritimer) puts in motion a series of events that will change Terry’s life dramatically introducing him to a world of promoters (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna) and movie star Chet Frank (Tim Allen). Faced with this, in order to pay off his debts and regain his honor, Terry must step into the ring for the first time of his life.
An accident on a dark, rainy night, eh? Circumstances conspire? Wait a minute. This is a Mamet flick, so maybe, just maybe the only truthful word in both those phrases is “conspire.”
Unless you, dear reader, have never seen a Mamet film before, it is hardly a spoiler to acknowledge that not everything is as it seems and this means, first and foremost in this case, that whatever Redbelt is, it isn’t an action movie. Yes, there is the de rigueur ‘big fight’ at the end — because, apparently, not a single security guard at the arena had even so much as a stun gun — taking place not inside but right next to the ring. Did Mamet see Never Back Down or was that truly terrible movie’s screenwriter, Chris Hauty, channeling Mamet? In any case, calling a David Mamet film an action movie is like calling most of Woody Allen’s later movies comedies, technically correct but highly misleading.
Ah, but Mamet probably enjoys being highly misleading. In fact, he’s pretty much made a career out of it. Increasingly, in fact, a David Mamet movie is becoming more and more like a Woody Allen movie in that it predictably serves a tiny and quite possibly shrinking niche market. CV wouldn’t mind even that, were the ‘accident’ that sets Redbelt’s ‘conspiring circumstances’ into motion not, itself, an utterly implausible motive force. (Note to Mamet: Yes, we do, in fact, live in a police state now; but, no, merely accidentally firing a handgun in a panicked response to an unidentified police officer is not attempted murder.)
Mixed martial arts movie fans will be disappointed by most of the fight scenes in Redbelt, while the rest of us, those of us who are not utterly bewildered, will be disappointed by the rest of the movie. If you don’t bother fastening Redbelt in the first place, you can just avoid the bumpy ride.
Filed in The Bijou
“Yes, we do, in fact, live in a police state now;”
DAR, I know this was a throwaway line, but it stopped me in my tracks. Are you serious?
Serious enough. I am aware, of course, that some constitutional limitations on police power continue to be enforced; but I’ve seen a fairly steady expansion of police power at the state and local level in the last several decades and a gradual erosion in the notion of presumption of innocence, judicial review of executive power, blurring of the posse comitatus distinction between military forces and civilian police, the highest incarceration rate (now a full one percent, I believe) among western nations, secret tribunals, seriously argued Department of Justice legal opinions to the effect that there are no constitutional restraints whatsoever on a sitting president during a (perpetual) state of war, more and more federal resources devoted to domestic propaganda ranging from everything to the war on drugs to the war on crazy men living in caves, et cetera ad nausium.
Do you seriously believe we live in a society as free as the one we lived in 25 years ago?
More or less. Maybe a little less free than 25 years ago but more free than 35 years ago — do you remember wage and price controls? For all the discussion of an imperial presidency under Bush, Nixon and FDR were far worse.
It is too late in the evening to address all of the specifics you mention, but a huge difference is that we do not have the enforced slavery of the draft. Yes, we still have stupid drug laws and the police still use them as an excuse to throw blacks in jail, but now it seems the black community agrees with the laws. As for secret tribunals, I’m guessing you are referring to are FISA, but it dates from the 70s. Like most things, a big difference it is that more out in the open. We at least know about it.
Under any circumstances, whether things are worse or better, we are nowhere close to a police state. Of course things could get much worse, but an asteroid could hit the earth as well.
I just finished an excellent biography of Einstein, the author (Walter Isaacson) mentions mentions his initial love of the freedom in the US, but later despair at the red scare and the McCarthy witch hunts.
Isaacson wrote:
“Einstein and some other refugees tended, understandably, to view McCarthyism as a descent into the black hole of fascism, rather than as one of those ebbs and flows of excess that happen in a democracy. As it turned out, American democracy righted itself, …”
FDR was worse, Nixon would have been worse if he had been better at it. The problem is that all the ratcheting of federal power from FDR on has largely been a one way street. Yes, the draft is gone and, yes, wage and price controls were bad but I have little reason to believe we’ll never see either again in our lifetimes. The police were always thuggish toward blacks, but I don’t give a rat’s ass whether the black community approves of the war on drugs or not, Twenty five years ago Mayberry RFD didn’t have its own SWAT team; today it does and its just itching to use it, the color of the suspected perp be damned. (I guess that is progress of sorts,) Don’t tell me Guantanamo Bay existed as a prison camp 25 years ago or that even John Mitchell’s Justice Department turned out memos like John Yoo’s.
Look, of course there are things about American society that are more free than they were 35 years ago. But much if not most of that expansion of freedom is about equal protection and enfranchising parts of the population that had historically been institutionally and legally discriminated against. On balance, looking at freedom as absence of state control, the past quarter century and the past five to ten years in particular have been a disaster.
“Nixon would have been worse if he had been better at it.” — this is the first time I have heard anyone suggest Nixon was less competent than Bush. :-)
We could go point to point in terms of better vs worse: McCain Feingold — bad, increased freedom of speech and expression via the internet — good, increased use of SWAT teams — bad, DNA testing exonerating innocent people — good, …. but even if the current trend is wrong, we are nowhere close to a police state.
We aren’t living in an ideal state, but secret police aren’t arresting citizens for political speech. Radley Balko would not be free in a police state. George Bush will step down in January ‘09. Sadly his replacement will be either McCain, Clinton, or Obama.
Stuart, look, I haven’t gone off the reservation entirely here. Of course one can point to all sorts of other nations, past and present, that better approach the Platonic ideal “police state.”
If you reserve the phrase for nations so overtly oppressive that freedom of speech is nonexistent and jackbooted thugs literally do come in the dead of night not only for those who are suspected of drug possession but for the likes of Mr. Balko, you and me, fine. That’s entirely fair.
But “we are nowhere close”? Maybe not to the sort of dictatorships that represent the extreme of that phrase; but in many and, worse yet, increasing ways we are precariously close to having traded real freedom for the illusion of security, and that is a trade-off that, once made, rarely gets reversed.