Few themes had such an impact over north-american fiction as the "American dream". It emerged from the unconscious need of a young, fast-growing country, to form its own cultural and ethical identity. From the Declaration of Independence to the apple pie, the American imaginarium, albeit rich in external influences, is sui generis, of a very particular charm and character.
The American dream, to some minds, has to do primarily with the acquisition of material wealth, with one's rise in social status, with success and fame at any cost, in achieving a noisy and burlesque greatness. Nowadays, it's difficult not to reduce it to that. However, its roots are of a nobler, and more spiritual kind. In The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, this distinction is shown to us, in an exemplary way: from the trio of protagonists, only Humphrey Bogart's character doggedly follows this distorted version of the dream, and his greed is eventually punished.
On film, the cowboy and the gangster both took turns painting vivid images of the myth of the self-made man. In the noir genre, however, we can already find the seeds of a critical deconstruction of said myth. Thus begins the development of the loser, this shadow, this double of the man of success, with roots stretching as far back as Büchner's Woyzeck, or Gogol's The Overcoat. Joined at the hip, these two figures will never cease to fascinate us.
The tragic hero enters the second phase of the modern era more humane, more democratic. His smallness, the triviality of his obstacles, the vacuum of his existence, in comparison with the classical tragic heroes, has a paradoxical effect on us: it moves us, convinces us. Orestes and Oedipus are universal, but Terry Malloy is like each one of us. And, among the crop of mundane anti-heroes, few emerged on the American psyche so well defined as the salesman.
Through this windy road, we reach Glengarry Glenn Ross. With a script fathered by David Mamet, based on one of his most successful plays, it follows the affairs of a shady real estate agency, and the men who perform its dirty work. Their office is modest-looking and is located in a less respectable part of town. The core of the operation is trying to sell plots of land in Florida to any naive souls who'll take the bait. The real land, as one would expect, is a vast mass of uninhabitable swamp.
Their sales technique consists, among other things, on cold calling, or visiting people in their homes and harassing them. This is called pushing, a method based on the aggressive pursuit of each individual sale. These days, it's been supplanted by pulling, which aims to attract customers to the product. Advertising costs millions to companies, but also enables them to kill lots of birds with one stone. It is a strategic touch of genius: make them come to us. In the era of instant seduction and reckless consumerism, nothing is easier. There is an abysmal gap between the smallish office presented in Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Apple, with its hordes of fans camped outside the stores, awaiting the launch of a new product.
Which is why, perhaps, inside that smallish office things aren't too swell. The headquarters seem irritated with their performance, to the point of sending them a representative of theirs, Blake, to present an ultimatum. That role landed on Alec Baldwin's hands, in what is undoubtedly the best moment of his career, channeled through a mesmerizing speech. This Blake, with his Rolex and BMW parked outside, is like Bogart's Dobbs: a perversion of the American dream, a forged copy of it. His arguments are fallacious, his success a facade; but to logic, he opposes brute force, to outrage he opposes status, hierarchy. The company had set up a contest: who sells more, wins a car. Second place will get a set of kitchen knives (an hyper-real object: its placement seems ridiculous and asymmetrical, yet totally realistic). Now Blake introduces a third incentive: those who place last on the selling board, will be fired.
I'll introduce now the remaining characters, since they're not many. Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) is a salesman bordering on retirement, who has seen better days. His great tragedy is to have had a pinnacle. His methods are outdated, and no longer work with the new generation of consumers, now more cynical and cautious. The world he inhabits is an amnesic meritocracy: there, when you fail to produce results, you return to a void of worth. To a man of Levene's age, that means you've reached obsolescence.
Levene refuses to accept this change of status: just as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, he does not want to believe that men like him are a dime a dozen, that their achievements could be so easily forgotten, that a lifetime of toil can not be worth a damn. And as Loman, Levene puts up a facade of authority, recalling a glorious past in order to cover up his present failures. There is a desperation in it, an urgency that arouses sympathy, but ultimately results in ridicule and moral bankruptcy. What Levene is, after all, is a has-been, that beloved variant of the loser. And behind the facade of smiles, hides a slightly senile prima donna.
Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is the current hotshot of the place. Relatively young, he possesses all the qualities we admire in a leader: charismatic, attractive, capable, self-controled, unruffled for the most part, aggressive and imposing when necessary. Tactical, tenacious, leonine: he is the Machiavellian creature par excellence. Rome is Levene's successor, and seems on his way to becoming another Blake. When trying to seduce a new customer, his arms keep gesturing sharply, but his hands hang down, delicate, soft as a woman's. This is his secret, which is also the secret of the magician. He is at once manly and effeminate, an androgynous and mysterious creature, adapting to every situation, without ever completely erasing himself. On the contrary: his art consists in bedazzling the victim with his personality.
Williamson (Kevin Spacey) is the head of office, and takes all sorts of abuse from his subordinates. On paper, we take him for a man without character, no backbone. More than once, he turns out to be inept, and hardly charismatic. But Spacey lends him a subtle force: what at first seems mere passivity, ends up resembling a form of Stoic perseverance. He is the perfect bureaucrat: to the volatility of his salesmen, he opposes a strict adherence to routine and procedure. The rules, as with any domesticated man, are his courage, the worldly responsibilities, his heroism.
Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin) complete the group. We see them almost always together; this isn't just for practical purposes, for there is with them a complementarity of character, by way of contrast. Both are accomplished failures: they cannot enter into decline, like Rome or Levene, because they never had a heyday. Their mediocrity unites them. Aaronow is passive, always mumbling: Moss is effusive, but inactive, preferring to complain about everything, finding in Aaronow the perfect cup into which to pour his sour ego. Aaronow is a limp wrist; Moss the dog with much bark and no bite. How many men like that have I eccountered? Together they represent almost the sum of the human race. The average Joe: another facet of the loser, the less romantic one. They are in clear demarcation of Rome or Levene: the latter are tenacious lone wolves.
Mamet seems to harbor a particular interest in the challenges that the male culture presents, when stripped to its antrophological essence. It is an overlooked area, strangely enough, except for the usual stereotypes of juvenile indulgence, which expose the man-myth, and not the man-creature. The ideal of the manly hero has been worked to exhaustion, but it is as genuine as the artificial model of the Woman which Sex and the City tries to sell. The figure of the individual (rather than that of men), has also suffered abundant analysis, especially as a lonely abstraction fighting against the world (be it personified by a system, society, state, etc.). What is rare is a crude exploitation of masculinity on its own, and the dynamics between male members, without the blinders of escapist mechanisms: that is to say, the heroic camaraderie, the Manichaean antagonisms, the childish catharsis.
In Fight Club and American Beauty, the male issue, although the centrepiece of both films, is softened, rendered almost ineffective. Both works use the old "coming of age" treatment of masculinity. Its protagonists are like teenagers: they first revolt, engaging in playful nihilism, but in the end, it is all in order to (re)discover the maturity and the responsibilities of adulthood. In Glengarry Glenn Ross, masculinity is not a means of emancipation or escape, or even a fixed set of traditional values: it is a survival mechanism, essential and inherent in a Hobbesian world, where man is wolf to man. Hence Blake equating masculinity with success: in the modern world, to survive is to succeed materially. The weak perish, the strong win. Weakness is thus translated into failure, the weak into the loser.
Fight Club attempts to provide an alternative to this correspondence between the unforgiving laws of nature and the laws of society, but the way in which it materializes such alternative is forced, and too candid (despite its gruesomness). Fight Club and American Beauty become, from the moment the protagonist abandons his job, fairy-tales for adults: Glengarry Glenn Ross, in which everyone is desperately trying to cling to the miserable job they have, is a very real nightmare.
It is said that Baldwin based himself on George C. Scott's Patton to shape the tone of his speech. Indeed: if one of the men in that office could not handle the pressure and started crying, we can almost imagine Blake coming over to him and giving him a slap. Moreover, nothing truer than this self-portrait of the egomaniacal corporate body: a body that, once established the absolute rule of capitalism, fancies itself an air of martial nobility, comparing the market to a battlefield, equating sales with military operations, reading and absorbing The Art of War or The Book of Five Rings with pomp and pedantry. The entrepreneur wants to be, simultaneously, a Don Juan, a general, a warrior, and a guru. Above all, the alpha male.
The language used here, the obscenities, aren't an artifice of fashion, like in Fight Club - they are blunt weapons, and outlets for a violence always an inch away from materializing. The traditional interpretations suggest that the characters of Glengarry Glenn Ross represent a distortion of true masculinity and the American dream. On the contrary: it is the cultural concept of masculinity and the American dream that are distortions of the state of nature. The essence of employment itself is not artificial, just as slavery, albeit immoral, isn't artificial, because it is (adopting a Clausewitzian formula) a continuation of the state of nature through another means, that is, a continuation of the dynamics of domination and survival. James Foley himself compares this work to a documentary on animal life. This was the first thought to occur to me as well, as the film unraveled before my eyes. I've always been of the opinion that people who watch documentaries about wildlife with an inquisitive mind will end up knowing more about human nature than many a philosopher.
Foley proved reluctant to take on this project, because he couldn't see how it could be more than simply a filmed stage play. But thanks to a clever use of framing and camera movement, and other stylistic devices, he managed to achieve a genuinely cinematic experience: we can see this, for instance, in Blake's speech, where the superb camera work helps to vectorize the tension. It is a clearly superior effort to the various iterations of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (the adaptation for television with Dustin Hoffman and John Malkovich is probably the most interesting of the lot.)
Death of a Salesman (the play) is, moreover, a close relative of Glengarry Glenn Ross, perhaps like a grandfather of sorts. The former is a Romantic tragedy, for it heightens the human emotions in contrast with the coldness of the world, and the darkness of fate. The latter is hyper-real, grotesque, for reality itself is heightened, exagerated. Yes, grotesque describes it perfectly, for what is the grotesque, if not reality smashing some poor devil's face to a pulp, until it causes disgust in the viewer? Hyperbole of the heart, and hyperbole of the brain: both works use exageration, not to reach the ideal, but to depart from him, thus attaining truth.
But the real progenitor of Glengarry Glenn Ross is undoubtedly the Maysles brothers' Salesman. It's all there: the sermon of the pedantic boss, the deceit, shame, ambition, vanity, and finally, the decay and the despair. Shelley Levene is Paul Brennan. The rape and dismemberment of the American Dream, filmed with a crystal dryness.
In Glengarry Glenn Ross, rain falls incessantly on that small section of Chicago, after a day of hellish heat. While all these people bounce from here to there, subject to the cruelty of the weather and the scorn of fate, we cannot help thinking: what are these men doing here? It's crazy. But we ourselves are like them. This hyperbole is not intended to be a mirror but a portrait: unlike the mirror, it shows us not what we put in front of it, but rather the intimate truth of the individual. We can hide it in some old attic like Dorian Gray did, but we cannot deceive it.
The film has a beginning and a conclusion, but the story of these men procedes, just as it had preceded the events of that night. None of them is entirely a villain: they are unquestionably human. Certainly Levene's daughter loves him, surely Williamson's family yearns for his return from work every night. Aaronow doesn't seem to be a bad person, and Moss, despite his bitterness, is sociable. Rome runs short of a true sociopath, for he has genuine empathy lurking within him. But a shirt, if it has only a stain, is still a dirty shirt. Both in nature and in morality, there are no compromises. The stains of the soul, after dry, can never be removed.
Cast and crew: visit Glengarry Glenn Ross at IMDB.
