The work of David Mamet is marked t...

The work of David Mamet is marked through many "remediations" of sorts - from his early drama's refashionings of Beckett and Pinter (Price, 1993) or the conversion into film scenarios of his confess plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry vale Ross, Oleanna), to his sieve adaptations of other writers' novels (James M.Caan's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Thomas Harris's Hannibal), from the repeatedly remarked-upon lyricism of his realistic dialect (Goldensohn) and the presence in his drama of specifically narrative forms like interior monologues (Maufort) to his incorporation of cinematic techniques into the theatre (Blattes; Callens). The latter case, of older media recycling newer the sames (also illustrated in Mamet's hypertextual novel, Wilson), is an interesting single for demonstrating that remediation disregards chronology. As if eager to conserve their cultural status (or their practitioners' livelihood), the older media will indeed appropriate the newer, whether it is television adapting the split veil technique and windows of computer or print publications emulating webpages and hypertext (which is what the footnotes in some way do in Wilson). According to the same principle, Mamet, when discussing the genesis of The Water Engine, the work I here want to focus forward acknowledged having "learned a accident about playwriting," a two thousand-year ancient art form, by "writing for radio," a frequently younger technology (1986: 13).

In the following annotates I consider the medium-specific implications of near of the forms which The Water Engine has assumed. Originating as a story and movie treatment, this work was reconceived as a radio play for National Public Radio's Earplay (1978) unless it was first produced upon stage by the St.Nicholas Theater Company, Chicago (1977) as directed according to Steven Schachter. It was subsequently adapted to the guard by Mamet for Turner Network Television (1992) Far from being neutral operations, each of these media transpositions has had a lively impact on the work, including the media featured within it (postal service, telephone train, car, plane), thereby extending the material's ostensible interests and format (a melodramatic thriller risk during the Chicago Century of Progres Exhibition) to a intricate critique of performative and social production. Given the devious production history of The Water Engine, it is likely that each of its following versions (wittingly or unwittingly) retains traces of its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the remediated forms which Mamet's material has assumed move analogues to the remediations discussed within the story, i.e. the historically developing forms of transportation and means of communications. It is as if the material itself insisted on the subject of these diverse remediations the more completely to establish its underlying points. For single in kind The Water Engine, in whichever of its generic guises, is no dead art "object" nevertheless a medium similar to radio and television or cars and planes, or the roads and corridors travelled. And as the demarcation lines between genre commit to memory blurred in the postmodern world, these genre also fuse with the media in a constant proces of remediation, single in kind in which chronology and sequentiality give way to a recombinatory logic.

The definition of remediation I here rely forward is that provided by David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) in which not just the eases of a work (characters, plot) are repurpos unless the earlier medium, too, is give an account ofed in the remedial process, apart from its coming to boundarys with the media's social functions. To the stretch that Bolter and Grusin build onward Marshall McLuhan's ideas (1964), they also distance themselves from any overly deterministic or Utopian interpretations, subsum on the reformist potential of remediation and implied by dint of The Water Engine's underlying environmental affair Charles Lang's invention would appear to be to allow for an environmental restoration, embodied from the country dream he and his sister Rita share, as if his water engine could literally empower their escape from their industrial, urban prison. The water engine "is like a sailboat," Rita says, banning factories (20) While already deceased before the advent of the personal computer McLuhan (1911-1980) also believed that the transition from Gutenberg's movable model to an electronic culture would permit mankind's turn back to a globalized Garden of Eden aided from the media's compression and visualization of time and space, as if the material world and media had thereby become limpid as water.

By expertly entwining diverse localities and temporalities (Chicago's centenary of Progress Exposition, the impending World War II, the current of a radio studio, the Utopia of a clean environment, the dystopia of squandered knowledge), Mamet makes the mostly of radio's capacity for compression and virtualization. That no restoration advances about, however, should not entirely be blamed in succession the world's ostensible forces of evil (Gros Oberman). The popular mind of aggrievement when unrealistic reformist drives are shunted-and the abdication of personal responsibility this allows-is what The Water Engine supposedly is about. According to Mamet himself, Lang's invention exhibits a naive belief in illusory solutions and as as it was figures as one of the urban doubtful narratives circulated by the Chainletter. This interpretation is supported through the slow progress made by way of hydrogen technology and by the printed verse (8, 71), including Mr.Wallace's joking comparison of his son to Charles Proteus Steinmetz (17) the electrical engineer (1865-1923) renowned for his misguided prediction that electricity would become in such a manner cheap, it would no longer pay to meter it (Christie 239)