Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet - Literature review Example

Number] Glengarry Glen Ross Glengarry Glen Ross is a 1984 award winning play by David Mamet. The play is about the realities in the Chicago real estate office where there is only pressure on the salesmen to do the best and any mistake would charge them their job. The play is about brutal reality of the American businesses and the desperation of the characters just to win the contest held by their company. They are given a sales contest in which they have to succeed and the winner will get a Cadillac El Dorado and the losers will get fired. Thus, the characters are highly under pressure and in order to succeed they commit various actions such as robbery, bribe, fraud, and other ways to generate sales and win. This play can be considered as a modern tragedy in regard to the tragic lives of the characters in an American business setting especially of Levene who is considered as a tragedy hero in this play due to his desperation about winning the contest. The play involved several crimes and frauds that the characters committed just to win the contest and achieve the Cadillac. The characters were using one another to maximize their sales. The play also shows the cruel business of the real estate industry where salesmen sell the lands at higher prices in order to achieve their goals. The characters have throughout tried to bring their co-workers down instead of looking at themselves and working out their sales. The play has been an attack on the American business practices. These practices have existed in the 1980s and still they exist where employees are pressurized and provoked to cheat or act immorally. The story is a tragedy of the lives of these workers who have suffered at the hands of the real estate industry. There is no character in the play which is not seen attempting to cheat, steals, bribe, lie, or trick one another. Those characters who are struggling for success and to retain their jobs are trying their best to achieve their positions and do anything to win the contest. As Mamet writes ‘That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed.’ (49). The real estate office in the play acts as a microcosm of the capitalist culture since it gives the top man a Cadillac while the bottom man gets fired. This results in every man fighting for his own success but at the same time hoping and even working for the failure of his co-worker. As the play marks the ideology that ‘I do things which seem correct to me today’ (49), this shows that every person has a selfish being who is acting in order to bring the other person down. With all the immoralities being used and even crimes being committed, the characters are so involved in winning the contest that one of them even says that ‘bad people go to hell? I don’t think so.’ (47). Success and failure are motifs in this play which rather make it a modern tragic story. These aspects are important for the conventional businesses as well as modern business practices because success and failure are two themes that exist in every era and that make people bad or good. In this play it is the success of one worker and the failure of the others which have lead them to act in criminal and immoral ways. Moreover, success is rewarded with the opportunity for further success while punishment for failure is guaranteed failure for the future. This is the system which is brutal and which continues to haunt the lives of workers in the modern era. The threat of lifetime failure is what has led Levene to adopt any method that would make him successful but his practices have unfortunately led him to appear as a greater failure and nothing else. He struggles from the beginning of the play till the end to escape failure but he rather ends up building his professional demise by being involved in a robbery. At the beginning of the play when he is convincing Williamson to accept his bribe and bring him more sales he says to him ‘bad luck. That’s all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks.’ (16). Levene is going through a psychological breakdown where he tends to be under pressure. He wants to gain his respect and position back that he once had amongst the real estate salesmen. However, now he is weak and pressurized and the thought of losing his job fears him to the extent that he is disliked by all others due to his activities to bribe or commit robbery. His failure is so evident in his personality that other co-workers want to stay away from him. The play unfolds showing him the tragic hero of the entire story. As he says, ‘You do get the opportunity...You get them.’ (69). This shows that throughout he has been looking for an opportunity to win. Moreover, in the play’s climax, Levene asks Williamson that why is he reporting him to the police and to that Williamson replies that because I don’t like you. This kind of a response shows the personal problem that Williamson had from Levene. It is also because Levene from the beginning of the play has been portrayed as a failure and Williamson as a businessman hates and fears failure and thus he wants to stay away from Levene. Williamson tells Levene that he has a big mouth but he has a bigger one and thus he uses that in the end to tell the investigator that Levene actually committed the crime. There are many elements in the play which make it a modern tragedy. Tragedy is defined as any dramatic composition which deals with a sober or serious theme. Typically a tragedy is about a great person who is destined to a flaw of conflict or character with some overpowering force towards destruction or downfall. Even though in this play, Mamet has not shown sympathy towards any specific character but it can be observed that Levene is the closest character in the play which is portrayed as a tragic figure. Ever since the play begun, Levene was shown as a man who was on the brink of total failure. He has become desperate and wants to take up every opportunity to elude his failure as he says ‘what we have to do is admit to ourselves that we see that opportunity...and take it.’ (72). In order to grab his opportunities desperately to run away from failure, he ends up causing huge troubles for himself and that result in worse consequences. Bad luck, as he says, is not the only problem with Levene, it is also his fears. He has great fears for failure because of which he clings to anything that makes him feel he is successful. Throughout the play he is seen boastful about his accomplishments from the past in the same company. He starts taking his successes as his upper hand on Williamson whom he criticizes and shout upon whenever he gets the opportunity. During the play, this kind of treatment with Williamson shows that Levene will be contributing to his own downfall. Levene has been a successful and good salesman in his youth, but not as good as he claims to be, he has grown older now and the real estate company would no longer have any use of him. In the play, it is also evident that the system which teaches people to run after success and detest failure is what trains them to cause self-destruction; just like what happened with Levene. Levene’s self-destruction and his desperateness for winning the contest which eventually led to his own downfall is what makes him a tragic hero of the play. His desperate character shows sympathetic gestures and actions which marks him as a tragedy hero. In the end of the film, Levene gets to know that he had been scammed by the other co-worker and Williamson also betrayed him just because he didn’t like him. No one in the real business world helps one another or supports failure. This is the reality which is evident in every era. In a contemporary setting these tragic elements of the play fit in as they tend to discuss people who suffer at the hands of others as well as their own inner fears to fail. In the corporate world, such aspects are very evident and even in the modern era there are people who are pressurized and then they face failure due to that pressure. Thus, this play is a tragedy play about the American capitalist system which has taken over many employees and one of those employees was Levene who was destructed by his own fears of failing. Such characters and such business settings have been commonly seen in the American system from the conventional era till the modern era. Even today, this system is seen as a destructive system which depends so much on success and failure that it can result in the downfall of many individuals. Work Cited Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross: A Play. NY: Grove Press, 1984. Print. Read More