42 pages • 1 hour read
David MametGlengarry Glen Ross
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Toxic Masculinity and the Competition for Dominance
A central concern of Glengarry Glen Ross—as with many of David Mamet’s plays—is the meaning of masculinity in the context of competitive capitalism. In this case, not only are there no female characters, but there are very few references to women at all. The play takes place in an almost entirely male world, and the camaraderie between these men is laced with hostility—poisoned by an economic arrangement in which each man can succeed only when the others fail.
In the first act, Mamet presents three dialogues in which masculinity isn’t explicitly mentioned but is clearly at stake. These scenes show that the act of selling is something much more significant to each of the men than simply a way to make a living. Levene offers a sizeable chunk of his commissions to Williamson in exchange for some good leads, suggesting that selling isn’t just about making money. Moss tries to convince Aaronow to be his accomplice in a robbery, the reward for which will be some money and another sales job, showing that the job isn’t about being a respected member of society. Roma, the only character in the first act who is actually engaged in selling real estate, demonstrates the reason the others are clamoring to sell: In the play, selling is an expression of masculinity. At the beginning of the third scene, the audience experiences Roma’s monologue more or less as Lingk experiences it. It isn’t clear why Roma is saying these things or who he is, but he’s enormously charismatic, and his monologue is compelling. Roma encourages Lingk to accept the things about himself that make him anxious instead of wallowing in anxiety, inviting him to embrace his masculine confidence as Roma does. By the time he gets around to an actual sales pitch, it doesn’t matter what he is selling, because Lingk is already sold.
If the Chinese restaurant in Act I is an arena of masculine competition, the office in Act II is where the façade, to varying degrees, falls away, and the men are able to express their emotional responses to the high-pressure work of sales and the added tension of the police investigation. When Roma enters shouting, he is the opposite of the cool, collected salesman from the first act. He is looking for a reason to attack Williamson, as office whipping boy, while playing paternal to the other men. Roma gives fatherly pep talks to Aaronow and Levene, and when Moss won’t play along, Roma hits below the belt by revealing that Moss hasn’t closed a sale in a month. Roma’s biggest concern about the robbery is that his contracts might have been stolen and he’ll have to go around “like a fucking schmuck hat in [his] hand and reclose” (57) everything that was pending. His primary concern, notably, is not that he will lose money but that the task will make him look weak. When Lingk shows up to cancel the sale and get his check back, Roma tries to put on the same charm and make Lingk feel invited to the boys’ club. Lingk’s wife is the one who vetoed the sale, and Roma attempts to make Lingk feel emasculated by his wife’s authority over the family finances. This is one of the few mentions of women in the play, and Mrs. Lingk is almost entirely characterized as the stereotypical woman who is stopping her husband from being his own man. Lingk, however, doesn’t live in the world of sales, and the ploy fails to sway him.
When Williamson blows the sale for Roma by claiming to have deposited the check, Roma blasts him with emasculating vitriol. He accuses Williamson of costing him six grand and a Cadillac, going instantly on the offensive to deflect blame from himself. Roma insults Williamson by calling him a “cunt” and asking who told him he “could work with men?” (96) He also calls him a “fairy” and a “child” (97). Then, after Roma goes in to be interrogated, Levene is emboldened to continue Roma’s show of masculine bravado by berating Williamson for being less than a man and causing trouble for Roma, who is a man. Levene is trying to overcompensate for showing his belly to Williamson at the restaurant and begging for leads. But Williamson doesn’t feel obligated to take abuse from Levene, and instead, he takes pleasure in not only taking him down as a criminal but destroying his manhood by telling him that the sale isn’t valid. When Roma returns, he is clearly seeing Levene in his rearview mirror and has concocted a scheme to put him in his place, but he is unaware that Levene is being held accountable by the law. Williamson has effectively caught a man committing a crime that threatened the others and sent him to jail, arguably the most dominant display of masculinity in the play. But Williamson doesn’t bother to tell Roma, whose masculinity is apparently infinitely more fragile.
Capitalism and the Corruption of the American Dream
In his bestselling 1931 book The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “American Dream,” which he defined as “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth and position” (Adams. James Truslow. The Epic of America. Routledge, 2012. P. 404). The American dream doesn’t promise that everyone will become wealthy, but it suggests a basic equality of opportunities, ignoring the class, gender, and racial disparities that have always shaped Americans’ prospects. Adams recognized this discrepancy between fantasy and reality when he coined the phrase, which describes not the actual social order but “a dream of a social order”: a hope for what America could be, not a description of the way the US economy functions in reality. The play highlights one of the problems of the American dream, which is that it puts the full burden of success squarely on the shoulders of the individual, absolving society of any responsibility for its citizens’ well-being. The characters have internalized the notion that success or failure at work is a reflection of their worthiness as men. They imagine themselves as noble competitors on a level playing field, but their gladiatorial combat serves primarily to enrich Mitch and Murray—the owners who sit comfortably offstage, collecting the profits. Glengarry Glen Ross demonstrates how the American dream supports capitalism by convincing the working class to serve the wealthy under the false promise that they’ll one day be wealthy too.
In the first scene of the first act, Levene identifies the problem of inequity in the office, which serves as a microcosm of the inequity in capitalism. At first, Williamson claims that the leads are handed out at random, but then he adds, “apart from the top men on the contest board” (22). All the salesmen recognize that better leads mean higher closing numbers, but those advantages are only handed to salesmen who are already selling. As in capitalism on a macro level, having privilege makes it easier to succeed and gain more privilege. Conversely, failure compounds itself, making it harder and harder to dig out from under a run of bad luck. Even Roma, who is at the top, is acutely aware of how easily he could drop. Moss tells Aaronow that the firm should be invested in building their workers rather than decimating them, but Mitch and Murray wring the most from their salesforce by threatening their livelihood to make them scramble to sell. Mitch and Murray are the quintessential bosses, taking the bulk of the profit because they had the money on hand for the initial investment. They don’t seem to do any work, and they don’t even make it to the office to deal with the robbery. They even have the manager Williamson to function as their stand-in and scapegoat, absorbing frustrations and abuse from the sales staff. Moreover, there is no path of advancement at any level—only the looming threat of unemployment.
The Constant Pursuit of Selling
From the first scene of Act I, when Levene is trying to sell himself as a salesman to convince Williamson to give him better leads, every interaction in the play is a sales pitch. Next, Moss tries to sell Aaronow on the robbery, including taking on all the risk for half the reward that Moss is taking. Roma is actually selling property, but the first part of his pitch—the part that happens onstage—is essentially selling himself to Lingk. The salesmen treat nearly every interaction as a sale or negotiation to be closed in their favor, which means that they are always selling, and their personal success is just as much determined by their sales abilities as their professional successes. Since Mamet’s salesmen are a satirical representation of the effects of capitalism, their success depends on the degree to which selling and closing have become integral to their personalities. Ultimately, success requires a willingness to abandon all scruples. Roma’s persona is almost entirely based on selling, while Aaronow, by contrast, is a poor closer who has limits to what he will do to sell, and who can barely mask his anxiety in the second act, despite the fact that he is innocent.
Theoretically, these men have private lives with families, friends, hobbies, and other aspects of identity that are separate from selling. But they make their personal lives invisible, not allowing feelings and attachments to get in the way of cold, hard salesmanship, and avoiding the potential exposure of personal weaknesses. When Roma sees Aaronow in the office and asks how he’s doing, Aaronow answers that he’s fine and then realizes that Roma wants to know about his sales and is asking as a competitor rather than as a person. The only character who lets out any personal information is Levene, who refers to the hotel he lives in and mentions his daughter as a reason that he needs money. Presumably, this is the same adult daughter he brags about putting through college, so his plea, which trails off rather than giving details, suggests that she has some kind of costly problem. But the salesmen can’t be trusted because they’re always trying to close. Levene lies easily, roleplaying for Roma and feigning ignorance about the robbery that fools the audience. Similarly, Roma pretends to care about the other salesmen until he homes in on Levene and sees potential for exploitation. It’s not even a certainty that Levene’s daughter exists at all. The only moments of sincerity from Levene seem to be when he can’t control himself and lashes out bitterly at Williamson, suggesting underneath his façade, his real personality is consumed by bitterness, and this is the weakness that takes Levene down.
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By David Mamet
