In 1982, David Mamet shared troubling news. The American dream — our national amble, the short sunstruck highway between birth and success — had come to an end. “And the people it has sustained,” the dramatist told an interviewer, “the white males, are going nuts.”
But the play he wrote about all this — subject, those going-nuts white males — itself enjoyed a dream career: “Glengarry Glen Ross” won a Pulitzer in 1984, and then brought its low news to every corner of the globe. The star-studded film adaptation is one of the few absolutely surviving movie items of 1992. And when its third Broadway revival opened earlier this spring, in our own unsustained times, four sizable stars greeted the fans and selfie sticks.
That is, Mr. Mamet’s drama should cross the stage like a returned prophet, an I-told-you-so with lighting cues and an act break. That it does not — that the sales pitch to our imaginations has wickedly shifted — is the story of a fascinating national cooling.
Why does “Glengarry” feel weirdly wrong for now? Even though you can tick the parallels off on your fingers: Tilt-a-Whirl economy, conservatives (even Mr. Mamet now claims to be a conservative), frantically discouraged males?
Part of it’s that instead of being horrified — except perhaps by the non-P.C. language — we’ve become inured, listless: We’re now ruled by Mr. Mamet’s antiheroes, and lots of us just cheer them on.
The news Mr. Mamet had to deliver was always bad. When audience members sit down to “Glengarry,” what they’re really commemorating is a cardiac event. In the early ’80s, Mr. Mamet’s stepfather-in-law told him the following bad-economy story: Before an office presentation, one older salesman had become so anxious about his job that his heart gave out. And the company president simply “stepped over his body to leave the room.”
The primal office fear: no mercy; loss of the capacity to do our jobs could literally kill us.
Mr. Mamet intended a kind of protest — of “a society,” he said, “with only one bottom line: how much money you make.” He wasn’t the only writer tracking this radar signature: recession, conservatives in ascendence, all the social guardrails being removed. The first sentence of V.S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” extends readers this hearty welcome: “The world is what it is; and men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” (It’s “Glengarry” in one line.) That was the feel; of the fat being trimmed, margins so tight you could feel them along your skin.
By 1983, Mr. Mamet told The Times he was at work on something new. “I would describe it,” he admitted, “as overlong and depressing.” He sent off the pages to his British mentor, Harold Pinter, with a note: “There’s something wrong with this play. What is it?”
“The only thing” the play needed, Pinter wrote back, was a cast and a production. (Writers: Before the next draft, consult a reader.) The last words of the next spring’s Times review were best-case. A message transmitted, the message received. Mr. Mamet’s play was about “the abject terror of a life in which all words are finally nothing because it’s only money that really talks.”
Most of us know “Glengarry” from the movie. (Which, if you’re curious, Mr. Mamet loved. “I wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said in 2004.) The heart attack stand-in is the Jack Lemmon character. Shelley Levene, an older real estate salesman on the howling way down. Al Pacino plays the inflexibly upward-trending Ricky Roma — a Zen salesman.
Roma’s approach isn’t just digital; it’s artificial intelligence to Levene’s analog. It surrounds you in a kind of sales fog, from which you emerge, somehow, with a purchase. There’s nothing Levene can do, happens to the best of us. Your skills age out, the present becomes a language you can’t speak, no mercy.
That’s the story. And for years, nobody I know — most of them fans — has watched a movie called “Glengarry Glen Ross.” They watch a do-it-yourself edit: “Glen,” or “Ross.” Everything but the Levene parts. His capsize is so naked and complete it makes you shudder. Pure frank collapse is terrifying. After a certain point, you identify with the winners, the Romas, in self-defense, for relief.
At the same time, there’s the accumulated weight of 25 prestige-TV seasons celebrating the hero who survives: Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, the various belligerent claimants to Westeros and Yellowstone. All, in their ways, Romas. Dark-hearted but still on their feet. People even developed a meme soft spot for Patrick Bateman of “American Psycho,” who buys such great stuff that his murderous competence becomes likable, the homicides a sort of weekend flaw viewers can overlook. It’s the same effect as a few hours of the Discovery Channel. The herd scatter, the sudden paw — and out of exhausted sympathy we begin to root for the lion and not the gazelles.
To resist this may be to counter some baked-in humanness. “Tame submission,” the essayist William Hazlitt wrote in 1817, “has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination.” He was discussing the Shakespeare play “Coriolanus.” (A key text for our times. Combine “Coriolanus” — a banished leader brings unhappiness to his former nation — with “Glengarry,” and the features that begin to come clear are Donald Trump’s.) “The love of power in ourselves,” Hazlitt observed coolly, “and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man.”
It’s there in the poll numbers for the Democratic Party — 27 percent approval, an obstructed-view seat, the worst in more than three decades. The awful shame of identifying with the losing side. Asked in April what the party might do to recapture the public’s sympathy, veteran strategist James Carville gave the Ricky Roma answer, twice. “Win elections. Win elections.”
Another change is a sort of compassion fatigue — after a decade of an unprecedented national mania for empathy. In her 2021 novel, “No One Is Talking About This,” Patricia Lockwood defined the overall question of the era’s social media: “Who am I failing to protect?”
This feels gone; with, as its replacement, a kind of sympathy hangover. A depleted, fatalistic willingness to let difficult situations — immigration, the environment, homelessness, abortion — take what shape they will. We now seem to find it more natural to identify not with the employee on the floor but with the executive stepping out of the room.
These might be the signals Bob Odenkirk — now starring as Shelley Levene on Broadway — was picking up when he told “Playbill” that he did not intend to portray the capsizing salesman as tragic. Instead, Mr. Odenkirk aimed for a “hopeful” “Glengarry.” “It’s an American thing,” the actor explained, “to find that positivity and try to ride that wave.” Mr. Mamet, with a somewhat different understanding of audience, had written his director a letter one month before the original Broadway premiere. Failure to insist on the play’s “not nice things,” its “viciousness,” he said, “is to betray the play and the audience.”
The audience when I saw it seemed most excited not by the fates of the characters but by the celebrity of the actors — fellow professionals facing up to a fresh challenge, Broadway, and living a success way bigger than Roma’s.
There were stage door calls. Each star: a whoop, a push, phones swinging in their direction like bouquets. Fans thrilled to selfie, to photo-bomb, have their programs autographed. I asked one woman what she thought of the play. She explained she’d just come East for treatment — no information what kind — had never heard of the play; had just seen a crowd, picked up the program and understood immediately this was her good fortune, an omen. “Glengarry” as lucky break. The dream has returned, or, as we watch, is becoming something far stranger.
David Lipsky is the author of “The Parrot and the Igloo,” “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” and other books.
Source photograph by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.
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