Aquinas watches Glengarry Glen Ross

David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross is a thing of beauty.  This assertion is bound to shock some readers who have seen the movie (originally a stage play).  It is notoriously foul-mouthed.  The dialogue is in other ways idiosyncratic, characterized by unfamiliar slang and incomplete sentences (a Mamet trademark).  None of the characters is admirable; indeed, most of them are to some degree or other positively repulsive – ruthless, lying, manipulative, arrogant, weak, cruel, incompetent, thieving, vindictive, corrupt.  The irony is that the movie is beautiful in part because of these features, rather than despite them.  How can that be?

The answer has in part to do with the skill with which it is executed.  It is famously well-acted, every one of the performances being top notch.  It is also well-directed, conveying an atmosphere that is by turns claustrophobic, lush, or banal, as the scene requires, with the film’s score perfectly complementing the visuals.  (Into the bargain, it even includes a Donald Fagen composition.)

But it is Mamet’s script that is the key and the star of the picture.  Superficially, it’s a movie about business.  Really, though, it’s about manhood, or rather the aberrations thereof; and about the desperation to which men are led when they fail as men.  There are no women onscreen in the movie at all.  But for several of the characters, there is a woman lurking behind the scenes whose presence is more keenly felt for being only implicit – for one man, as a momentary object of desire; for another man, as someone he needs to protect and provide for; for a third man, as the one who really wears the trousers. 

The characters are extreme.  In real life, few salesmen are as cringe-makingly phony as Jack Lemmon’s Shelley Levene.  Few superiors are as breathtakingly abusive as Alec Baldwin’s Blake.  Few husbands are as pathetically whipped as Jonathan Pryce’s James Lingk.  Even in 2017, few men are quite as foul-mouthed as Al Pacino’s Ricky Roma. 

But the visual and literary arts work by means of such skillful caricatures.  They abstract simple general patterns from concrete reality, wherein they are mixed with various particular and complicating circumstances.  Then they take these patterns and re-embody them in a visual or verbal representation, so that we might consider them more closely and free of the messy, distracting subtleties of real life.  When done well, the result is an idealization conveyed via the illusion of realism.  Levene is like the Platonic Form of Sleazy Salesman, Blake is like the Form of Abusive Manager, and so forth.  But each is written and portrayed so skillfully that they seem like concrete human beings.  (To take one of the few sequences from the film devoid of bad language, consider the exchange between Levene and Larry Spannel.  Painful to watch, it conveys perfectly the dynamic between salesman and customer, even if real-world exchanges are rarely this awkward.)

Aquinas famously holds that “beautiful things are those which please when seen” (Summa Theologiae I.5.4).  The “seeing” in question is not primarily that done with the eye, but rather that done with the intellect.  And what the intellect sees and takes pleasure in are the integrity, proportion, and clarity of the thing perceived as beautiful (ST I.39.8).  Let’s walk Glengarry through these three criteria:

1. Integrity: What Aquinas has in mind here is the perfection or completion of a thing, such as the perfection a good specimen of some kind of animal exhibits or the completeness a fully developed specimen exhibits.  A horse is beautiful, but less so if it is missing a leg or some other part, or if it is still in its embryonic stage.

Now, as already noted, Glengarry’s characters are extreme, and one sense in which they are is that they exhibit in an especially full or complete way certain character traits, albeit negative ones.  Levene is the perfectly sleazy and insincere salesman, Blake the perfectly cruel manager, Lingk the perfectly weak man, and so forth.  Or at least, they are perfectly so to the extent consistent with being a realistic and therefore still believable instance of a salesman, manager, etc.  Part of what is aesthetically attractive about these characters, then, is that they enable us to consider and contemplate what it is to have these various character traits in their fullness.

(Naturally, I am using “perfection” here in an extended and analogical sense, since vicious character traits are of course in the strictest sense imperfections.  Blake, in his extreme abusiveness, is imperfect qua human being, but “perfect” qua thug.)

There is also a kind of “perfection,” in the sense of fullness or completeness, in the low state to which some of the characters are reduced.  The humiliation to which Kevin Spacey’s character John Williamson is reduced by Roma’s utterly crushing tirade is something like perfect humiliation.  The pretentious, convoluted, bold-as-brass farrago of BS by which Roma sucks Lingk into a real estate deal and tries to keep him there is perfect BS.  The helplessness, emasculation, and despair to which Levene is reduced by the end of the film is something like perfect misery.  (Again, in the extended sense of the term “perfect.”)

Consider also that the extreme obscenity and profanity the script is notorious for is largely confined to the “alpha males” or would-be alpha males.  The worst cases are Blake and Roma, who are precisely the two dominant men in the story.  Next are Levene, who was once top dog and is now past his prime; and Ed Harris’s Dave Moss, who would very much like to be top dog but can never seem to pull it off.  By contrast, the “beta males” of the story – Lingk and Alan Arkin’s George Aaronow – do little if any cussing at all; and the characters of intermediate status (such as Williamson) are also more or less intermediate in the amount of cussing they do.  The rough language is a mark of the “perfection” or completeness of the aggressiveness and swagger characteristic of distorted masculinity.  (Note the way Roma’s choice of words in his stinging rant against Williamson – “c**t,” “fairy,” “f**ing child,” etc. -- is intended precisely to strip the latter of his manhood.) 

No one would want to be a person of one of these kinds, or to be in the situations they find themselves in.  But we do want to understand them, and the perfection or completeness they represent helps us precisely to do that, which is one reason the film is aesthetically pleasing despite its unpleasant subject matter.

2. Proportion: By this criterion, what Aquinas has in mind is order, and in the context of a good story this would be manifest in the coherence and structure of its plot, the development of its characters, the quality of the dialogue, and so forth.

In Glengarry, we have several instances of such order.  We have a simple, unifying principle ordering the actions of the characters and driving the story – the imperative to make a big sale within a week, at any cost, or lose employment.  We have Levene’s character arc from desperation and near despair up to apparent triumph and elation and finally back down again to utter failure and total, unmitigated despair.  We have the symmetry of Roma and Aaranow, the top man and bottom man in the office respectively, ending up the only survivors of the sales competition.  We have the justice of Levene and Moss, who resort to crime in order to maintain their place in the company, facing swift retribution.  We have Lingk’s progression from a quietly insecure man to an utterly frightened, confused, and frantic man – from a deer in the headlights to a deer stuffed and mounted, as it were.  We have the banality of sales office life as represented at the beginning of the film rudely interrupted by Blake’s bracing challenge and the events that follow upon it, only to end the film with a return to banality.  We have Mamet’s perfectly crafted dialogue, in which every pause, stammer, and verbal tic is thought through and intended to be spoken by the actors exactly as written.

3. Clarity: As I’ve said, the movie abstracts from concrete reality certain general character types, purges from them the nuance and complexity in which we find these general patterns embedded in everyday life, and re-embodies them in extreme characters so that we might more carefully consider those types.  Just as we know more clearly what it is to be a triangle by abstracting from particular triangles (red ones, green ones, triangles drawn in ink, triangles drawn in chalk, etc.) and considering the general pattern, so too does the movie allow us to see more clearly what it is to be a desperate man, a cruel man, a weak man, a dishonest man, a broken man, and so on, by way of its skillful caricatures.

So, in its integrity, proportion, and clarity, Glengarry has the marks of a beautiful thing, despite its grim subject matter.  One need not admire and approve of Satan in order to admire and approve of Dante’s or Milton’s literary representations of Satan, and one need not admire or approve of the sorts of people represented in a film like Glengarry in order to admire and approve of the representation itself.

Examples of this sort of artistic beauty are interesting in themselves, and also because they help us more deeply to understand the nature of beauty.  In a sentimental culture like our own, the notion of beauty, like that of love, is often misunderstood.  Like love, beauty is often taken to be something schmaltzy, and certainly to be something that appeals primarily to the affective side of our nature.  But as with love, that is in fact not the case.  Love is primarily a matter of the will, even though it has, of course, an affective side.  And beauty is primarily a matter of the intellect, even though it too has an affective side. 

When the object of an artistic representation is itself beautiful – a beautiful woman, say, or a beautiful natural setting – it can seem that it is what the senses take in, rather than what the intellect grasps, that primarily accounts for the beauty of the representation.  But when the object of the representation is ugly, and yet we nevertheless judge the representation itself to be beautiful, the intellect’s essential role in the perception of beauty is more evident.  The intellect “sees past” the ugliness of the object of the representation and focuses instead on the virtues of the representation itself.

One way to understand kitsch is as art that leans too heavily on the sensory and affective aspects of a work of art and too little on the content that the intellect alone can grasp, and which is thus superficial.  And one way to understand modern art is as an overcompensation in the opposite direction.  The modern artist wants to avoid kitsch but often falls into the opposite error of making art an entirely theoretical exercise that can appeal only to the intellect and not at all to our senses or passions.  Hence the obsession with highly abstract modes of representation or with extremely ugly subject matter.  Art becomes meta-art (a phenomenon I have discussed here and here).

As this indicates, there are limits to the distance that can exist between the sensory and affective content of a work of art on the one hand, and its intellectual content on the other, if it is to be capable of real beauty.  To be sure, I am not claiming that there is a limit to the ugliness of the object of the representation – again, even a literary representation of Satan can be beautiful (as in Dante or Milton), despite Satan’s being maximally repulsive himself.  But there are nevertheless ways of representing what is ugly that are themselves so ugly that the representation cannot be beautiful.  This is what happens in works of art that reflect an essentially nihilistic or transgressive spirit.  The aim in such depraved art is not to convey truth or represent reality (as Glengarry does) but rather to “do dirt” on reality and “give the finger” to some hated truth.  But that is a subject worth a post of its own.

[Interested readers can find links to earlier posts on movies, art, and pop culture in general collected here.]