Pan, God of the Woods.About the only positive thing you can say about famed play/movie writer David Mamet deciding to file an amicus brief in support of Texas in that state's appeal of a district court correctly tossing the state's social media content moderation bill as unconstitutional is... that it has fewer swear words than your typical Mamet production. [...] Mamet, if you don't know, took a Trumpian turn...
Brief of Amicus Curiae David Mamet In Support Of Defendant-Appellant:
He now looks out, but he can't find the objects the chart informed him he'd see. He concludes that he is lost. How can he determine his location? He has a map, but he's just misused it. How?
The Map is not the territory. The territory is the territory. The pilot's answer to the question "where am I?" lies not on the map, but out the windscreen. That's where he is. It doesn't matter where he calculated he should be, the territory below him is where he is. [...]
I report as an outdoorsman, that Panic is real. It is the loss of the mind and will to Pan, God of the Woods. The affected loses his reason, and runs about unable to recognize those actual signs (a road, his own footprints), which might bring him back to safety.
The use of "Panic" here here makes me think he is (unsuccessfully) stealing a bit from Burroughs in Ghost of a Chance:
In Mammet's case, though,I picture some real life event with Mammet disoriented, 50 yards from the fire road and a quarter mile from a state highway, lost for all of 6 minutes in a modest patch of woods, trying to decide if he should kill and eat his dog to survive, stripping down, humping and sobbing against the trunk of a tree, screaming for god to "Show Yourself!" and smashing his cell phone against a rock, firmly convinced that civilization and its technologies have abandoned the planet, leaving him and a few scattered others - perhaps - to begin anew.
I picture some real life event with Mammet disoriented, 50 yards from the fire road and a quarter mile from a state highway, lost for all of 6 minutes in a modest patch of woods, trying to decide if he should kill and eat his dog to survive, stripping down, humping and sobbing against the trunk of a tree, screaming for god to "Show Yourself!" and smashing his cell phone against a rock, firmly convinced that civilization and its technologies have abandoned the planet, leaving him and a few scattered others - perhaps - to begin anew.
Myself, I've been doing this since I first read "Oleanna." But it's good to have company.
Ah, Mamet... when he isn't writing a neo-Con book about "up-by-the-bootstraps" bullshit or writing a play defending Harvey Weinstein, then he's defending friends William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman for "Operation: Varsity Blues".
He specifically did so because universities have discriminated against Jews and Asians... despite Macy and Huffman being neither.🤷🏿♂️
(And we in SF's theatre scene know even more about Mamet, but that's another story...)