Losers In Glengarry Glen Ross

David Mamet once referred to some of the characters he writes about as being at "the bottom of the food chain." In the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin's character seems to exist for the sole purpose of telling the real estate salesmen played by Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris and Alan Arkin that they are losers, driving that point home in a extraordinary torrent of abuse. (Al Pacino plays a 4th salesman working in the same office. He's not present for Baldwin's tirade, which seems appropriate, as he has been selling much better lately than the other 3.)

Technically, Baldwin's talk with the salesmen might be called a motivational speech, except that its intent seems to be to de-motivate. He tells the salesmen they're all fired, and that two of them have one week left in the month to win their jobs back. First place in the month's sales contest, as they already know, is a Cadillac; second place, a set of steak knives. Baldwin drops the package of steak knives onto the table and tells them that third prize is they're fired. Harris responds to some verbal abuse by asking who Baldwin is, and Baldwin responds by intensifying the abuse. He tells Harris that he came to the meeting in an $80,000 BMW, while Harris drove a Hyundai. (This was 1992, the range of Hyundais available in the US was considerably humbler than it is today.)

Baldwin takes off his watch, tells Harris it's worth more than Harris' car, sets the watch down next to Harris and walks away as if he's forgotten all about it, continuing with the verbal abuse about how the salesmen in the office are losers, how they aren't really men.

I haven't seen this since long before I became daffy for watches, so I couldn't tell you a thing about the watch. Anybody who's watched the scene can tell you how intensely Harris stares at the watch, as if he sees nothing else, as if perhaps he no longer hears Baldwin either. He wants that watch so badly, the watch or the level of success that would allow him to wear one like it. He looks as if he's right about to snap, and --

And what? Pick up the watch? What if he did, what would Baldwin do? Was Baldwin really so oblivious to the watch and Harris so crazed that he'd just steal it, put it in his pocket without Baldwin noticing?

Or maybe he'd just hold it for a while and look at it. Maybe Baldwin would notice very well, and say, "You like that, huh?"

Harris, exhaling in a gasp: "Yes."

"You like how heavy that is? You can feel it's solid gold. Go ahead, put it on. Go ahead, do it, live a little. Nice, isn't it?"

"Very nice."

"Glad you like it. It's yours."

"You're giving it to me?"

"I said it's yours. I'm not fuckin with you. I'm giving you that watch. Your gift from me to you. You feel good?"

"...Yeah!"

"Lotta positive energy flowing through you. Okay. That's selling. You saw something you liked, you reached out and took it. Congratulations. That's selling! Okay, stand up, get out of here, keep that energy flowing and sell the shit out of those leads. Just him." Baldwin motions for Lemmon and Arkin to sit back down. "His sit is over. I'm not done with you clowns yet." He calls after the departing Harris, "You better do good, son. I see how much you like that watch. It'd be a shame if next week you have to sell it to a pawnshop for grocery money while you're looking for your next job."

Dramatic, but not really Mamet-level drama. Maybe when Harris picks up the watch Baldwin reacts negatively, puts his hands on Harris, maybe Harris punches him and then suddenly everybody in the office is in a melee.

I think both of those alternate scenarios occurred to me because the scene hurts so much and I want it to be different. But pain is the point of the scene, and Mamet doesn't wimp out: Harris never touches the watch. It's a carrot that's being dangled in front of him to make him work hard. Maybe he even knows it's a carrot, and doesn't expect to ever reach it, and still can't stop sitting there and staring and hurting. Harris' face is so expressive in that moment, he makes the viewer feel his desperate rage, but also his despair.

It really is too bad that since 1992 Mamet has flipped out and become a Tea Party Republican asshole.

Poets, Artists, Hollywood, Money

For a long time I thought that I was very good at remembering passages from books and dialogue from movies and TV word-for-word. In the past few years I have come to grips with the fact that I am not especially good at it. What seems to me like a vivid and exact memory to me is, over and over, in fact quite different from the original text. For example, for a long time I was quite certain that I remembered a character in a movie -- I couldn't recall what character in which movie -- saying, "When poets dream they dream of money." I'm now fairly sure that that was a mis-remembering of a line spoken by Ricky Jay's character in David Mamet's movie The Spanish Prisoner --a terrific movie, by the way, and very much about money among other things. The thing is, I'm not sure whether we're meant to understand that Jay's character is saying (approximately if not word-for-word), "As the poet said, 'Let us dream,' and when we dream, we dream of money," or, "As the poet said, 'Let us dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.'"

I had assumed it was the latter, and thought that it might make sense because poets -- poets in the USA, at least -- tend to make very little money from poetry, so that they would dream of money as naturally as hungry people dream of food.

If it's the former then it sounds much more like the attempt of a man whose business is money to lend an artistic air to his profession.

In the past couple of days I saw another character in another movie, an actress, I've already forgotten which actress and which movie, say something like, "Don't they say that artists dream of money?" The actual line may be quite different, the only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that the movie didn't seem particularly interesting to me and I didn't watch the whole thing.

Movies are probably the art form which makes the most money. Movies or pop music. Gene Siskel said, in a good PBS series about Hollywood from the early 90's, said it with notable conviction and no ifs ands or buts, that Hollywood movies were the biggest big-time in showbiz, implying that if TV people doubted this they were deluded. Remember, my mortal enemy is Cliche Man, and cliches are cliches, not necessarily, as the cliche says, because they are true, but because they sound good. But Siskel may have gotten this one right.

Guy Ritchie's movie RocknRolla --another terrific movie, by the way, and also very much with money as one of its themes --seems to suggest that rock n roll is the biggest big-time in show biz. Perhaps that's true when you compare British rock n roll to British movies, and and false when you compare the most big-time pop music to Hollywood movies.

Without a doubt, the biggest big-time Hollywood movies involve a lot of money. Folks is gettin' paid. (The producers and studios heads are gettin' paid much more than the stars.) And so perhaps this business about artists (or poets) dreaming of money, if it does not merely sound good but is also true, is more true about Hollywood movie folks than about artists in general. It may be relevant, not because it applies to impoverished artists, but, quite on the contrary, because it applies to the very wealthiest people who could conceivably be called artistic or poetic, and it may be that these rick folks are rich because they're always dreaming of money, and the poor poets and artists, generally speaking, may not miss the money as much as I would think. Perhaps, among the group of children with anything like an interest in writing, the ones more preoccupied with money tend to give up poetry before they're full-grown, in favor of writing screenplays full-time, or the better-looking ones among the potential screenwriters may have tended to have gotten their teeth whitened and noses fixed in order to go after the bigger movie-star money, if they haven't given that up to become movie execs, if they haven't given up Hollywood altogether for Wall Street, to work with people like Ricky Jay's character in The Spanish Prisoner and tell each other in their spare time that they're artistic.

As with so many posts on this blog, I have no answers here, but mainly just a few questions, which I hope some reader or another may have found to be interesting food for thought.

Things I Still Haven't Done

1. Ski down Mt Everest --in my sleep.

2. Cover the entire surface of Michelangelo's Pietà with peanut butter.

3. Be Pope.

4. Go to court and force Koch Industries to provide $300 billion for the creation of wind farms, including Jim Gordon's project for an offshore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod. In addition to this $300 billion in start-up capital, Koch industries would be required to pay all of the operating expenses for the wind farms for the first 10 years after they began generating power, with all of the revenue from that electricity going to the Democratic Party for the same 10-year period. After that, all of the wind farms would become Federally-owned and operated public utilities, with the exception of that Cape Cod facility, which would become the property of Jim Gordon.

5. Produce a remake of David Mamet's House of Gameswhich would follow the original word-for-word with one exception: the word "thing" would always be replaced by "vagina." This also would apply to "something," "anything" and "everything." Just think about it: "There are a lot of vaginas in this world." "Some vagina is wrong. I can feel it." "Let me know if there's any vagina I can do." "Hold on! I'm doing every vagina I can!" You know this one is brilliant.

6. Ride across China on one of Charlie Sheen's motorcycles. (After first having had it thoroughly sterilized, of course. The motorcycle, I mean.)

7. Restore Latin to its prominence among the languages of academia and diplomacy. (The Papacy would be a great help with this one. See, this all fits together logically.)

8. Prove definitively either that Jesus existed or that he didn't, so that we can all move on.

I'm counting on your support, my readers, to help me accomplish all of these things. Together we can do great things. (Together, but with me in charge, of course. I'm the alpha ape in this shrewdness.)