In the contemporary, capitalist age, man longs for “communion, confession, and forgiveness in an amoral and aleatoric universe” (Schaub 337). This is the heart of the human tragedy that Mamet captures in his dramatic universe; along with his characters, the audience experiences the poignancy and intense desperation as they, even the strongest and most despicable, “misogynist, unlovable, and unloving” (Kane 2001, 1) salesmen, are deprived of the most natural and necessary need for male bonding and friendship. These characters are forced to inhabit a world governed by fraud and deceit. Such situation warrants individual alienation. As Christopher Bigsby puts it, this is a world where the worth of everything is determined primarily in terms of its material value; in such a society, the individual “approaches another with a tainted bargain, an offer of relationship now corrupted by the values of the market … people become commodities, objects” (50). Objectified and desensitized, Mamet’s salesmen feel disoriented, and detached. Genuine male friendship, for the salesmen, parallels the Lacanian lost object of desire, ever-evading, ever-transforming and unattainable. In this void, the salesmen’s “relentless bragging is intended to impress, but underneath the cool bravado, lies a desperate vulnerability” (Dean 7). Mamet captures the essence of a most human tragedy, that of the men being forced to forfeit their right to bond positive and valuable connections with their counterparts and partners and coworkers. They individual is lost within an inhuman, autonomous system. Within this frenzy, the characters, isolated entities that they are, collide into one another not to form friendships and gain comfort, but out of raw and material necessity.
David Mamet has always been considered as quintessentially the dramatist of American urban life whose stage is peopled exclusively, and at times questionably, with men. Whether one takes the misogynistic tendencies of his characters as a reflection of Mamet’s own latent misogyny or interpret his all-male cast of characters as an attempt in a case study of the contemporary malaise of the displaced men in the contemporary American society, one cannot deny his attempt to problematize the situation in which these men are caught. At the core of Glengarry Glen Ross is a realistic and sorrowful picture of a world operating on men’s “fear of violation by other men”, their paradoxical and “insistent desire for male-friendship, and pursuit of domination and acceptance” (Radavich 69). The basis of the dramatic conflict in Mamet lies in the contradictory desire of the salesmen; one the one hand, they are driven by their need for dominance and control which cannot be achieved without the subordination of the others. On the other hand, they feel the pressing need for acceptance and friendship. The tragic fact is that the latter is suppressed for the former to be attained. The sexually assaulting language that the salesmen use to express their anger, frustration and dominance is symptomatic of the suppressed desire for meaningful male bonding. The masculine desire for a reassuring male bonding purged of the conventional stigma and social labelling is depicted as the integral yet missing constituent of a healthy social structure. Prevalent in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is “a spirit of melancholy for something lost, a kind of lamentation for male friendship that seems ever volatile and subject to unpredictable dissolution” (Radavich 79). Mamet explores and questions the fundamental myth of capitalism which underlies the foundation of contemporary American society, the problematic nature of identity formation and the dying belief in the possibility of valid and meaningful male bonding.
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Virtues are transmogrified in the microcosmic community of the salesmen; compassion, loyalty and honesty are substituted by deceit, greed, treachery and self-centeredness. Friendship is easily sold out for the sake of individual benefit. The paradigmatic pattern of reward and punishment which is endorsed by the system, represented by the absent bosses Mitch and Murray, pushes the already dying species of men as a communal creature off the edge. As Mamet himself delineates, the American culture is indeed an outgrowth of a capitalist worldview in which material success is the ultimate goal. “Instead of rising with the masses one should rise from the masses. Your extremity is my opportunity.” This, he claims, shapes the entire American milieu: “American myth. The idea of something out of nothing” (36).
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