The title of David Mamet’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross, refers to two of the real estate developments that salesmen in the drama have been pushing on investors: Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. The names evoke verdancy and wealth, a precious swath of finite land – “they’re not making it any more”, to quote Mark Twain – and the salesmen have the glossy brochures to prove it. But it’s a swindle peddled by swindlers who themselves are being swindled. What they’re selling has no value and they have no value if they’re not selling. In the brilliant film adaptation, still electric 30 years later, a motivational speaker lays it out for them: “Only one things counts in this life: get them to sign on the line that is dotted.”
Glengarry Glen Ross is about many things – masculinity, morality, capitalism – but it’s fundamentally an “honor among thieves” story, following anguished men as they struggle to hang on to their integrity while acting as low-level rip-off artists. Mamet could have turned them all into antagonists, but he has too keen an appreciation for their circumstances and even a little admiration for their craft. Mamet’s 1987 debut feature, House of Games, was about the art of the con, and here it takes a lot of smoke and mirrors to turn clients into suckers, selling them on a sinkhole that looks like paradise. Even in a system of unending exploitation, the way they’re treated – and the way they treat one another – still matters.
