Remediation in David Mamet's The Water Engine.

The work of David Mamet is marked by many "remediations" of sorts--from his early drama's refashionings of Beckett and Pinter (Price, 1993) or the conversion into film scenarios of his own plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna), to his screen adaptations of other writers* novels (James M.Caan's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Thomas Harris's Hannibal), from the often remarked-upon lyricism of his realistic speech (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 ones (also illustrated in Mamet's hypertextual novel, Wilson), is an interesting one for demonstrating that remediation disregards chronology. As if eager to preserve their cultural status (or their practitioners' livelihood), the older media will indeed appropriate the newer, whether it is television adapting the split screen technique and windows of computers, or print publications emulating webpages and hypertext (which is what the footnotes somehow do in Wilson). According to the same principle, Mamet, when discussing the genesis of The Water Engine, the work I here want to focus on, acknowledged having "learned a lot about playwriting," a two thousand-year old art form, by "writing for radio," a much younger technology (1986: 13).

In the following comments I consider the medium-specific implications of some 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), but it was first produced on stage by the St.Nicholas Theater Company, Chicago (1977), as directed by Steven Schachter. It was subsequently adapted to the screen by Mamet for Turner Network Television (1992). Far from being neutral operations, each of these media transpositions has had a profound impact on the work, including the media featured within it (postal service, telephone, train, car, plane), thereby extending the material's ostensible concerns and format (a melodramatic thriller set during the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition) to a complex critique of performative and social production. Given the devious production history of The Water Engine, it is likely that each of its subsequent versions (wittingly or unwittingly) retains traces of its earlier incarnations. Similarly, the remediated forms which Mamet's material has assumed offer 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 upon these diverse remediations the more fully to establish its underlying points. For one, The Water Engine, in whichever of its generic guises, is no dead art "object" but a medium similar to radio and television or cars and planes, or the roads and corridors travelled. And as the demarcation lines between genres get blurred in the postmodern world, these genres also fuse with the media in a constant process of remediation, one in which chronology and sequentiality give way to a recombinatory logic.

The definition of remediation I here rely on is that provided by David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), in which not just the contents of a work (characters, plot) are repurposed, but the earlier medium, too, is represented in the remedial process, apart from its coming to terms with the media's social functions. To the extent that Bolter and Grusin build on Marshall McLuhan's ideas (1964), they also distance themselves from any overly deterministic or utopian interpretations, subsumed by the reformist potential of remediation and implied by The Water Engine's underlying environmental concern. Charles Lang's invention would seem to allow for an environmental restoration, embodied by 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 type to an electronic culture would permit mankind's return to a globalized Garden of Eden, aided by the media's compression and virtualization 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 Century of Progress Exposition, the impending World War II, the present of a radio studio, the utopia of a clean environment, the dystopia of lost knowledge), Mamet makes the most of radio's capacity for compression and virtualization. That no restoration comes about, however, should not entirely be blamed on the world's ostensible forces of evil (Gross, Oberman). The popular sense 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 represents a naive belief in illusory solutions and as such figures as one of the urban legends circulated by the Chainletter. This interpretation is supported by the slow progress made by hydrogen technology and by the printed text (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 so cheap, it would no longer pay to meter it (Christie 239).

Despite its validity, Mamet's ostensible interpretation glosses over the complex mediations of his material, beginning with the reversal of frame and inset in the Chainletter's appearance within (if not alongside) Lang's tale. This reversal results in a variation upon what narratologists have called the short-circuiting of ontological levels, occurring when the author (the primary medium) appears to intervene in his or her story (McHale 213-215). Mamet provides several examples of this self-referential technique, as cautionary tales within the Chainletter's exploitative scheme: the murder of Stanford White (7), the match king's jump from a building he built (53), and the further embedded story of the engineer profiting from travelling on the train he designed (45). Taken together, these authorial interventions betray Mamet's insistence upon his authorial presence, also evident in his presentation of radio drama as essentially free from the kind of production values that may detract from his writerly authority (Writing in Restaurants 15-16). Within the present argument, though, the prior existence of The Water Engine as a radio play, rather than Mamet's authorial prerogatives or the story's melodrama, accounts for Mel Gussow's complaint about the stage version's underproduced and schematic character, even if, according to Dennis Carroll, The Water Engine's alleged sketchiness is chiefly a readerly impression gainsaid by the contextual suggestiveness of actual stagings, like that of Steven Schachter's 1978 New York production (125, 131-139). This sketchiness or the minimalism of Mamet's scripts has indeed been a recurring critique from the very beginning of his career.

Radio's relative underproduction (which may be more circumstantial than intrinsic to the medium) enhances its psychic impact or immediacy. In its acoustic incarnation, then, The Water Engine easily conveys a paranoid sense of voices from all over the world converging onto the listener. Quite fittingly Richard Eder has compared the radio station to "a kind of cockpit receiving peculiar and disquieting signals from the universe." John Cheever, too, drew on the medium's psychic power, when fantasizing an "Enormous Radio" (1953) which progressively obsesses a couple because it allows them to tune in on the neighbors' private lives in their high-rise apartment building. The short story's generically determined understatement (following from its limited length) for that matter easily rivals radio's relative underproduction in triggering the reader's imagination and infusing everyday reality with a touch of magic. In fact, this may be one reason why The Water Engine originated in narrative rather than dramatic form. Radio, however, can fail to achieve its sense of psychic immediacy. And the failure or refusal to achieve immediacy through transparency, i.e. to repress the mediation, according to what Bolter & Grusin have called the double logic of remediation, inevitably results in the immediacy of the now opaque medium. In just such a manner, The Water Engine's ontological short-circuit of the Chainletter (the frame) and Lang's story (the inset) momentarily materializes the media involved. In this particular case, the Chainletter's ostensible written nature has been remediated to the point of going largely unnoticed in the radio play, where it has become a voice-over--pure, disembodied sound--unlike in the stage play, where the Chainletter is reembodied in the visible performer or maybe materialized as a prop, handed around and read.

According to Steven Price, the "sensitivity to the possibilities of different media interactions" in Mamet's plays "emerges particularly in moments of dramatic anxiety or stress" (A.T.&T. 60), as these relate to the potential disruption of power structures (Accursed Progenitors 64) by offstage forces. Price omits a discussion of The Water Engine, instead comparing Mr.Happiness with Nathaniel West's novel, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio (1985), yet his discussion of how the telephone impacts on power relations and dramatic action (in Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Speed-The-Plow, and Oleanna) clarifies Lang's "frame-up" by Mrs. Var_c. It is not so much that the woman, who "only" does the cleaning (58), by proxy gains power over her intellectual neighbour, but that the figures of authority behind her very much retain their power, by absenting themselves and refraining from using the phone, a medium which in McLuhan's analysis bypasses hierarchy and precludes delegation (271). A further irony is that the outside forces have by now invaded the privacy of home, which Lang, calling from the Hall of Science, has been irretrievably dispossessed of, unlike in the traditional fable and fairy tale's temporary dispossession. In such collusions of media and power Price (Accursed Progenitor 66) discerns counter-evidence for Mamet's allegedly uncritical consolidation of authorial control, as in my example of his arguing for radio's underproduction. Indirectly the critic points to the need for a position in-between Bolter & Grusin's transparency and opacity, to the extent that in the plays discussed "Mamet's figures of authority retain{ed} their power by using media as a semi-permeable membrane: information flows only one way. Telephones, radio, computers and cash are both the barriers between the senders of prescriptions and their addressees, and the means by which these prescriptions are carried" (Accursed Progenitor 66).

In staged productions of The Water Engine, the tension between frame and inset or the mediation proper can become a constant concern, though the note Mamet appended to the printed text again appears to downplay radio's technicity and ignore the medium-specificity of the Chainletter altogether, in favour of some ideal(ized) McLuhanesque communicative transparency:

   In Steven Schachter's {stage} productions, in
   Chicago and New York, many scenes were played
   on mike, as actors presenting a radio drama, and
   many scenes were played off mike as in a traditional,
   realistic play. The result was a third reality,
   a scenic truth, which dealt with radio not as
   an electronic convenience, but as an expression of
   our need to create and to communicate and to
   explain--much like a chainletter.

Schachter's practical solution to The Water Engine's prior existence as a radio drama was to set the play in a radio studio, designed by David Emmons for the 1977 Chicago production and by John Lee Beatty for the 1978 New York revival. For the 1989 London staging (directed by Robin Lefevre), Robin Dion had elaborated Schachter's idea. Possibly inspired by the complete radio station built inside the Hall of Science at Chicago's World's Fair (Rydell 103), Dion had designed a set whose sliding front looked like a huge Bakelite radio receiver, including illuminated wavebands (Jane Edwardes and Christopher Edwards in Saner 334). Together with the elevator cage at the back (Harry Eyres in Sauer 334), the scenography perfectly caught the Chinese box structure of Mamet's tale. Similarly, the progressive retrenchment from theatre house to radio studio to elevator firmly established the parallel between Lang's persecution, the Depression era's psychic (and ideological) sense of containment, and radio's compression of time and space. Even so, critics like John Simon (Sauer 330, 337) and Charles Spencer (Sauer 336) felt that Schachter's directorial concept did not work, apart from the fact that it may not have been that original, for offering the reverse remediation of radio plays incorporating theatrical performances into their soundscapes (e.g. John Arden's contemporaneous Pearl {1978}, written for the stage but first produced on radio and discussed in Guralnick 152-189).

Even if the participation of any live theatre audience would seem axiomatic (in the sense of allowing for feedback), Schachter stepped it up, by turning that audience into characters within the primary fiction, if not necessarily into players within the secondary fiction of the corrupt capitalist game, hovering between a sense of guilt and victimization (depending on their identification). Just as the performers of The Water Engine switched between reading (often from behind a long table), miming, and acting out their parts, the live theatre audience wavered between its real life status and that of studio guests, asked to applaud on cue, warned about being "On Air," and cajoled by ads for the show's sponsors (Barnes in Sauer 327). With regard to this packaging (the plugging of products by way of radio entertainment), many reviewers agreed that the American dream was being sold, and sold out, too. However, all media involved in Mamet's The Water Engine collude with commerce, witness the Chainletter's calculated bunkum (62), Murray's promotional newspaper article (63), and the radio play's sponsored platitudes. Even so, certain reviewers still wanted to believe in the McLuhanesque global community ("all people are connected" 61) for better or worse (Glenna Syse in Sauer 332), as a counterforce to the radio play's Chandleresque conspiracy and Lang's embroilment in it (Spencer in Sauer 333, 336). The occasional reviewer also tended to give in to the story's nostalgia (John Gross in Sauer 335), "for that simpler day when technology meant a better life for everyone" (Feingold). Insofar as this was a nostalgia for the heyday of radio, it was not that different from Woody Allen's ambivalent sentiment in his coming-of-age movie, Radio Days (1987), featuring the radio voice of William Macy, who created the part of Lang for the stage premiere of Mamet's play. If anything, Allen and Mamet yearn for days bygone, yet criticize that yearning for being foolish and dangerous (Zinman).

If the reviewers were divided as to the effects of the radio studio setting and the performers moving in and out of character, few (except for Simon, Spencer, Feingold, and Zinman), explicitly linked the radio elements to the story's prior format. Some felt less, not more involved, by the stage production's retaining and exposing of radio conventions (like the visible sound effects man). Thus to Harold Clurman, the "radio coverage kills off the implicit drama of its story" (Sauer 327). Richard Eder recognized that we can be "moved" by a "vision of alienation" (Sauer 326-328). Similarly, Julius Novick stressed that "by distancing the story Mamet and his director Steven Schachter actually bring it close to us, by disarming our skepticism" (Sauer 326-327, 329). The latter reactions confirm Bolter & Grusin's point that foregrounding the mediation also has the potential to increase the authenticity of the experience. What Schachter in fact did was translate Bolter & Grusin's double logic of remediation (transparent immediacy/opaque hypermediacy) into the perhaps more familiar terms of the stage's simultaneity of material foreground and immaterial dramatic fiction. Depending on the theatre tradition (the open, metatheatrical, or the closed, mimetic one), this inevitable simultaneity is acknowledged (as in the gestural acting of Brecht, with whom Mamet here shares his didacticism) or repressed (as in Diderot's sentimental drama, though not in his essay, "The Paradox of the Comedian"). Going by the note to the printed text of The Water Engine and the author's preference in True and False for "organic" actors, who walk the line between superficially rendering their part and totally internalizing it, Mamet's theatre belongs to the former, metatheatrical tradition, marked by a double vision. In the case of The Water Engine this kind of stereoscopy is strengthened by the double logic of remediation which governs the play's material and which allows the artist simultaneously to keep an eye on the reality of the fiction and its material mediation or artifice.

Schachter's 1992 television adaptation seldom underscored the medium-specificity of that artifice, except for radio's already contested metaphorical "blindness," embodied in the physical blindness of Rita (as played by Patti LuPone). While dropped from the printed text, Rita's "accident," for which she received no damages in court, is again referred to in the movie. This happens during the first encounter between Oberman (Joe Mantegna) and Charles (William Macy) (27-33), which pits corporate theft (Dietz and Federle paying Lang ninety cents an hour) against private theft (Lang fitting out his lab with tools and material from his employer). When Charles ventures that he "will take {his} chances in court" to settle his rightful ownership of the engine, Oberman reminds him that "The family has had some unfortunate experience with the courts." As if to clinch his argument, Mantegna takes off his glasses and ostensibly wipes them.

In the St.Nicholas Theatre production, Rita was Lang's sweetheart (Carroll 133; Kaplan in Saner 325), but in the screen version she has become his sister. The character's changing identities possibly betray Mamet's initial confusion about her narrative function, if not her intermedial one. On the level of plot and characterization, the industrial accident, which robbed Rita of her eyesight, provides a personal incentive for her brother's research, just as his emotional attachment to his sister can be exploited by his enemies. Her blindness must have facilitated her abduction, too. In keeping with the status of classical drama's blind seers (like Teiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus King), Rita's warnings to Charles also acquire the force of fateful predictions. They set off her brother's Oedipal or Faustian moral blindness for underestimating the likelihood that fully exercising his reason and claiming its rewards (Jokaste; the country dream), could bring him and his sister down. From the intermedial perspective, though, Rita's condition has made her more than dependent on the radio as a companion and pastime. Consequently, Charles's angry destruction of the set, in his frustration over his wrecked laboratory, signals the implosion of the technology-driven dream in its private and public incarnations (just as Oedipus' personal guilt symbolically accounts for the barrenness of Thebes). After all, the radio voice (Martin Sheen), like that of the Chainletter (not credited in the movie titles), interconnects every dimension of Mamet's work (Lang's home, Wallace's shop, the elevator in Gross's office building, Chicago's World's Fair). But in the same breath with which this radio voice fosters illusions (through the romantic music, the snippets from Captain Hale's adventurous Tales of the Frozen North), it craftily undercuts them. Thus, the announcer wishes Lang and Rita sweet dreams after they have been "transported" by their country life fantasy (22-23). Similarly, Wallace's broken phone (52) and the interrupted Chainletter spell the general communication breakdown and loss of communality.

The movie acoustically links the water engine with the radio, by letting Charles smash the set (much to Rita's regret) during a car commercial ("Tomorrow's car today"). The tell-tale association is visually expanded when the script's knifegrinder (29; played by Ricky Jay) passes in front of a billboard poster, showing a happy family on a car trip and touting the "American Way," a phrase which was a staple at New York's 1939 World's Fair (Rydell 142, 249). Here it appears that Rita's physical blindness is a means of acknowledging the movie's abandonment of the radio studio, the better to take advantage of film's superiority over radio and theater in materializing different locations. Film, in fact, would seem to have the express obligation to do so, as a primarily visual medium. This point about cinema's underdeveloped medium-specificity has been repeatedly made by Mamet (in On Directing Films), in his attempt to loosen the medium from its narrative moorings,' granted that such loosening takes more than Schachter's simply showing the wreckage of Charles's lab, referred to in the dialogue.

The screen version relies on other means to flesh out the self-reflexiveness, yet none of these is really medium-specific in the strict sense of pertaining to the remediation of The Water Engine's material (as a work for radio, stage, television, and video). Following up on the indirect authorial intrusions into the play script (by way of the already mentioned references to Stanford White, the match king, and the train engineer), Mamet appears on the bus taking Lang to the Lincoln Park Zoo for his meeting with Murray (Treat Williams). No matter how short, the writer's appearance (in a scene with J.J. Johnston) foregrounds how trafficking in The Water Engine (much as in American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross) constitutes theme and action (its vehicle or medium). By the same token, Mamet's cameo reminds the illusion-bound spectators that the viewing experience, too, is a negotiation, an economy of exchange, of partial, subjective positionalities. By putting the author in the picture, Schachter takes the spectators out of it, and out of the illusion, thus inverting their respective positionalities. Conversely, the medium's sudden "opaqueness" metaphorically blinds the spectators and puts them back into the dramatic equation, next to Rita and Charles on account of their physical and moral blindness.

If the author's presence within his movie draws attention to the artifice of a medium generally considered illusionistic, so does the newly integrated Ella Fitzgerald classic, sung live in the dance hall which Rita and Charles attend to celebrate the engine's invention. According to the lyrics by E.Y.Harburg and Billy Rose, the world is a stage, with "a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard scene." In terms more appropriate to the play's central trope (the engine) and action (trafficking), the world is also "a temporary parking place," a "penny arcade" and "a Barnum and Bailey world/ Just as phoney as it can be." In such a world people play roles. As the dance hall shill (Felicity Huffmann) reminds Charles, the whore with the golden heart does not exist. And without the potential love, the human relationship is stripped to its commercial essence, an exchange of objects (a ticket for a dance). A further irony is that in real life Macy and Huffmann are married, and from the patriarchal perspective, which feminist critics have accused Mamet of, women tend to be the objects of exchange among men. The Water Engine substantiates such view through the blackmailing scheme, in which Rita is held hostage in return for the blueprints of the engine. All of which may further explain the already mentioned confusion about Rita's narrative functions, since her being Lang's sweetheart (as in the play) or sister (as in the movie) deprives her of an autonomous fictional identity. Other movie sequences equally convey the social pretense, without the dialogue necessarily drawing attention to it, thereby exploiting the movie's visual character. Mike Nussbaum (Mr.Wallace) well conveys the gap between the imposed upon social role and the reality of a shopkeeper's life (the financial bottom line). Without missing a beat he drops the bantering small-talk with Lang to instruct his son, deadpan, on how to handle the cash register when dealing with customers (any customers, which means that he remains suspicious of Lang, despite his helping him escape from the police.) Just so, Joanna Miles (Mrs. Var_c) instantly exchanges her hysterics when framing Charles over the phone, for the restrained, suspicious demeanor of her final dealings with the police. Her confusion as to its identity (the force of good called upon in distress or the very evil Lang needs protection from) adds much to the combined artistry and artificiality of her performance. Just so, the deceptive use of the phone further detracts from the utopian promise of the communication medium featured.

The last such medium I here want to mention is the video of The Water Engine, produced by Turner Homework Entertainment. This provides a case of remediation as merchandising, more obviously so than the earlier uses of Mamet's material, motivated as these were by his still unsatisfied need for a primary production platform and audience (reader, cinema or theatregoer). As the end station of the remedial chain to which The Water Engine has been subject, a provisional one in the absence of any novelistic treatment, the video allows for the material's further circulation and instrumentalization, albeit along divergent channels and to different effects. When viewed at home in the privacy of the family, the personally owned video is subject to the distracted glance of the consumer, making for a casual viewing experience interrupted by trips to the restroom and kitchen (just as the original televison broadcast of Schachter's movie must have been interrupted by commercials). True, the "home cinema" technology commodities not just the movie as artistic product but tries to remediate the more intense collective cinema experience as well. Beyond that, the video can and is being used in the semi-public educational sphere, where the reformist potential of remediation again moves to the fore. There, the screen version becomes the object of a more rigorously regulated scrutiny within the teacher/student hierarchy, granted that the American interactive class format creates more leeway than, say, the European ex cathedra teaching. Regardless of such geographical and educational differences, the video preserves some of its popular entertainment value on television, when relied on in drama courses to enliven classes. As a pedagogical means of insisting upon the necessary staging of any dramatic text, however, it is a more ambiguous tool since the visually imaged world, ontologically speaking, would seem to exist in-between radio's more radical disembodiment and the theatre's live embodiment. In addition, the potentially limitless circulation and reproducibility of the television movie's video version compounds cinema's (medium-specific) spatial and temporal displacement (the intial gap between production and consumption), even if live television's ontology (before the era of constant reruns) used to be based on "immediacy" and presentness, after the theatre and radio models (Williams). What television retains of these models, despite the medium's growing accommodation to hypermediacy, is the sense of a larger community, granted that it is first and foremost constituted electronically, and only in the second place embodied (e.g. when the television programs become the topic of face to face conversation). Individualized video programming, by contrast, seems to preclude such larger community, beyond that of a subculture of Mamet aficionadoes buying into the same products.

The video experience of Schachter's screen adaptation of The Water Engine moves the present discussion of that work's remediations into the murky atmosphere of the postmodern "televisual." To Tony Fry this signals "the end of the medium, within a context, and the arrival of television as the context" (qtd in Bolter & Grusin 57). To the extent that the current cultural and economic dominance generates a relentless need for the reproduction of images, possibly to compensate for their very ephemerality, the televisual helps to explain the final remediations to which The Water Engine has been subject, beyond Mamet's experimentalism, his need to probe the potential of different media and genres, or the already mentioned demands of the creative material itself. For insofar as each of the media and genres involved maintains a relatively discrete identity, interactions between them are secured within and between works. Ironically, Mamet contributes to and resists the postmodern hybridization and televisualization, as equally illustrated in the impact of plot-driven movies on his dramatic story-telling or his opposition to the phenomenon of videographics (Some Freaks 161) and the spectacularization of films and performance theatre (On Directing Films 62-63).

The ambivalence of Mamet's position neatly emerges from "Encased by Technology" (1989: 158-164). In this essay, whose title seems to support Fry's point about our encapsulation by the televisual, the author assesses motion pictures and video by situating them within a nutshell history of remediation: i.e. "in between the past" (live theater, drawing, painting and the printed word), "and the future" (electronic media and digital computers) (159). By mixing the fine arts with ever advancing technologies, Mamet acknowledges what Fredric Jameson (qtd in Bolter & Grusin 56) has called the arts' postmodern mediatization and its attendant remediation. Like any other art form, "Motion pictures," says Mamet, "draw on the existing arts and combine them into a legitimately new art" (Some Freaks 163). By further linking these arts and media to means of transportation (steamboat, railroad, aviation), Mamet also confirms remediation's relevance for The Water Engine in all its guises. Once again the author's concern is the general public's relinquishment of responsibility, though not by blaming evil forces for the unfeasibility of its ideals, but by idolizing those specialists "encased by technology," the "pilots," "engineers" and "captain{s}" who will "steer us through a dream" (162-3). This select group, whose sophisticated skills and technologies threaten the democratic availability of knowledge, includes movie directors like himself, since ordering and celebrating our collective dream life is what movies do. Yet they do so, to Mamet, by "creating an image not on the screen, but in the mind of the beholder" (160), and in this they are said to resemble the movies' ancestor, the theater, which allegedly has "required no technology whatever, and is just a story told in a formalized manner" (158). Here the artist further explains his insistence on radio's psychic immediacy at the expense of its production values, and betrays his lingering nostalgia for a non-existing, total transparency. For Mamet's theater depends on language, and language, like any other medium embroiled in Bolter & Grusin's double logic of remediation, promises communication (transparency) as well as deception (opacity), whether through the singular jargon of the technocrat or the varied voices of Melville's Confidence Man (1857), which Mamet's essay invokes by way of the riverboat lingo Twain resorts to in Life on the Mississippi (1883). And if Melville's apocalyptic satire is driven by the protean guises of its antihero, so it is the dynamic of remediation that fuels Mamet's equally bleak The Water Engine, as it morphs from one medium and genre to the next. The story ends provisionally with a boy's discovery of Lang's blue prints, sent by mail, as if from a distant future. Mamet ends his essay by fantasizing the discovery in a post-apocalyptic landscape of a film strip, requiring no technology to discern the human shapes imprinted on it.

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