David Mamet does The Unit

Sonny Bunch’s short Weekly Standard essay on the new David Mamet-created military thriller, The Unit, is a nice, succinct take on the show. He seems to like it a little more than I did, but does a good job of disposing with the Post Express’ moronic write up, which calls the show “mindless flag-waving, fear-mongering and Arab-stereotyping,” as if terrorism doesn’t happen and it would be reasonable to go to Afghanistan and find, say, pharmaceutical executives in charge of multinational terror groups, rather than, um, Afghanis.

I especially like his point about Mamet’s recurring cynical views on the media.

Manipulating the media is a running theme of Mamet's; in his most recent film, Spartan, the death of the president's daughter is faked, but the public is told that a DNA test confirmed it was her. When the hero finds out the girl is still alive, he asks a secret service agent "How did they fake the DNA?" The agent responds "You don't fake DNA. You issue a press release." This manipulation continues at the end of The Unit's premiere episode, when the press accepts the president's description of the operation (where Haysbert threatened the FBI agents) as "a perfect example of coordinated, interagency cooperation."

This is, of course, also prevalent in his wonderful moviemaking satire, State and Main (one of the best movies of the last few decades, comedy or otherwise, about filmmaking), where Hollywood is portrayed as the ultimate bullshit machine, even on an intimate, personal level. And more generally, it plays into his post-Pinter, post-Beckett view of language as obstruction; for Mamet and his predecessors, dialog is rarely a way for people to communicate or express themselves clearly. It's as if language is a problem that must be solved, with every line creates as much confusion as revelation. And although Mamet hasn’t gone the full Beckett route and given up on language altogether—Beckett eventually descended into writing odd bits of rhythmic, choreographed movement—he’s stuck with his insistence that clear language is never really clear.

It does irk me, though, that Bunch’s essay yet again refers to The Unit as being similar to 24, when I don’t see much of a parallel other than the obvious military unit versus terrorists angle. Bunch says, “The show [combines] the best of Fox's 24 and ABC's Desperate Housewives,” and I can maybe see the Desperate Housewives angle, though I’m not familiar enough with the show to judge, but as far as 24 goes, it lacks any of that show’s narrative drive. One of 24’s strengths is in creating long form tension, drawing out conflicts over many scenes, even many episodes. The Unit, so far, doesn’t come close.

Nor does The Unit seem to yet have a clear idea of what its characters are really like. The first episode was devoted almost entirely to explaining the "secret unit with wives who must keep their secret" setup, but it never really gave us any idea what sort of people were involved. The characters on 24 may be fairly basic—a few familiar conflicts that each one must continually choose between—but their personalities, thin as they are, are immediately obvious in every single scene, from the time we meet them to the time they die. We know, for example, that Jack will continually have to choose between family and duty, protocol and patriotism, desire for revenge and decency. Mamet has yet to establish such clear choices in his characters, and until he does, the show won’t be worthy of such Bauerific comparisons.