David Mamet and Male Friendship

Buddy Plays and Buddy Films

Arthur Holmberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137305183
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305190
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Using insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the history of sexuality, Holmberg explores the ambiguity that drives male bonding. Personal interviews with Mamet and with the actors who have interpreted his major roles shed light on how and why men bond with each other and complement close analysis of Mamet's texts.

1. Buddy Plays and Buddy Films: Speed-the-Plow

Algernon: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Mamet’s signature as playwright,” says Paula Vogel, “is his ability to dramatize men’s fascination with other men.” Buddy films, a staple of Hollywood, exploit this fascination, but they deny it as vigorously as they flaunt it. “In our society,” Vogel continued, “men showing tenderness for other men is taboo.” Taboo because deep male friendship triggers homosexual panic. Mamet has dealt with a broad range of psychological, social, and intellectual issues, but exploring the attraction men feel for other men remains his forte, and unlike the Hollywood product, Mamet has the sang-froid to dramatize this fascination without disavowing it. The central concern in Mamet’s work, writes David Radavich, is the “single-minded quest for lasting, fulfilling male friendship.” The turbulence of male bonding drives Mamet’s plays, and he looks at it without blinkers. No other American playwright has explored the war zone we call male friendship with as sharp a scalpel as Mamet’s. For this reason, Guido Almansi dubbed him the “chronicler . . . of the stag party.”¹

Not only artists but also psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have pondered men’s obsession with other men. Same-sex fixation begins early. Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby calls it “gender segregation.” Starting at thirty-three months “both boys and girls directed approximately twice as much social behavior toward same-sex partners as they did toward other-sex partners.” From ages eight to eleven “the median percent of social time spent with children of the other sex was zero.” Same-sex segregation also obtains at school, where sociologist Barrie Thorne sees a “fixed geography of gender.” Left to themselves—progressive teachers try to desegregate the genders—boys and girls cluster in same-sex groups about 80 percent of the time. In fact, if a boy crosses the line into enemy territory, he is accused of having been infected by female “cooties.” Representing different disciplines and using different methodologies, Maccoby and Thorne—leaders in the field of gender acquisition—came to the same conclusion: boys prefer boys, girls prefer girls.²

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger believes that the pull men feel towards other men explains the survival of Homo sapiens in the Darwinian swamp from whence we sprang. By banding together in hunting packs, Tiger argues, men brought down swifter and stronger mammals whose succulent flesh enabled our ape-like ancestors to flourish. Humans quickly took dominion of the earth, continues Tiger, because men formed groups that excluded females. These male-male bonds were highly charged emotionally and more important to men than male-female bonds.³ Women, Tiger’s theory goes, would have sown discord in the all-male ranks by encouraging fights over sexual access. Tiger attributes the evolution of our patriarchal culture to the mystique of male bonding. The phenomenon he describes is beyond dispute: powerful bonds unite men, and these bonds usually exclude women from the circuits of power. One may dismiss Tiger’s speculations about the origins of the male nexus, but his book demonstrates convincingly its strength, and his theory forces one to ponder what magnet draws men to other men.

In traditional societies, a ceremonial men’s hut symbolizes male bonding. Men frequently live apart from their wives and children. They spend most of their time with other men, hunting and fishing, gossiping and dancing. Periodically they don sacred masks and, imitating the gods, raid the women’s homes for choice delicacies and prized possessions. Inside the ceremonial men’s hut, the big men of the tribe decide matters of moment to the village, compete with each other for status, and initiate boys into the mechanisms of power. In some cultures, these initiations into manhood include ritual homosexuality. Strict taboos prohibit women from approaching the men’s hut, a male holy of holies and repository of community power.⁴

The Front Page, one of the great American farces, demonstrates the strategies contemporary men use to lock women out of the men’s hut—insults, intimidation, violence. Hecht and MacArthur’s play, which Mamet calls a “gang comedy” and cites as a model for Glengarry Glen Ross, created a new kind of dialog for the stage: male banter with snap, crackle, and pop. Wisecracks—sharp, tough, brash—replaced epigrams⁵:

WALTER: What are you going to do? Start mumbling about your girl now? You got a story to write!

HILDY: I practically told her to go to hell . . . I’ll never love anyone else again! They don’t come like that twice in a man’s life! . . .

WALTER: (Grabbing his arm) Listen, Hildy. Let me tell you something. I was in love once with my—with my—with my third wife. . . . One night I came home unexpectedly—I let myself in through the bathroom window, and there they were!⁶

The play dramatizes the misogyny that erupts when females invade a male preserve. It also shows the attachment men feel for each other but hide. The play turns on the affection a newspaper editor feels for his star reporter and the shenanigans he plays to wreck his buddy’s engagement. When Howard Hawks turned the play into Hollywood’s greatest screwball comedy—His Girl Friday—he performed a transgender operation, astutely casting Rosalind Russell as the fast-talking reporter opposite Cary Grant as the fast-talking editor. Molly Haskell explains that “Howard Hawks was reading it and had his female secretary read the part of Hildy and said, ‘Wow, this is a love story,’ and, of course, it is a love story.” Thus Hildy—the leading man—became a woman. Having a woman read the part written for a man in many canonical plays would unmask many male love stories.⁷

In the pressroom, the reporters see women as intruders. Work and one’s position in a male hierarchy drive these men. The Front Page is a homosocial world. Sociologists use the term “homosocial” in opposition to “homosexual.” “Homosocial” means a strong social preference for members of the same gender without implying sexual activity. Many macho men, for example, who enjoy women in bed, find them boring outside the boudoir. They prefer drinking and joking and kicking balls with the boys. These men thrive in all-male environments: boardrooms, locker rooms, steam rooms. Co-operating with and competing against other men energize them and spike their virility. Male bonding dominates politics and business. Homosociability, with its offspring, misogyny and homophobia, forms the backbone of hegemonic masculinity. An electric charge surges through all-male groups, and homophobia serves to maintain the boundary “between social and sexual interaction in a homosocially stratified society.”⁸

As in The Front Page, so too in Speed-the-Plow, Mamet’s acid love letter to Hollywood. When Karen, a beautiful temp, seduces her boss, she lets loose pandemonium (figure 1.1). Bearing Tiger’s theory out, the sex appeal of the female threatens the power bond between Bobby Gould, a producer, and Charlie Fox, his sidekick. The two get off on money and power. Working together, they can peddle an idiotic blockbuster that will make “great big jolly shitloads” of money.⁹ In addition, they will sit at the “big table” with the big boys, and when “I say ‘kiss the hem,’ ” Gould exults, “every swinging dick in this man’s studio will kiss [my] hem” (76, 26). “Is it a good film?” Karen asks. “It’s a commodity,” Bobby replies (40–41). “He takes his coffee like he makes his movies,” Fox explains, “nothing in it” (25).

Figure 1.1 The arrival of a beautiful woman threatens the male bond in Speed-the-Plow (Joe Mantegna, left; Madonna, center; Ron Silver, right), 1988, dir. Gregory Mosher. Photo courtesy of Photofest.

Karen, however, does see something in it: degradation and violence and rage (55). After spending the night with Gould, she steers him away from Fox’s project in favor of a film with social “values,” a film that will “make a difference” (44, 76). When Charlie tricks her into admitting that she slept with the boss to manipulate him, she inadvertently reveals her hunger for power: “a Tight Pussy wrapped around Ambition” (78). Order is restored. The deceptive female who had the balls to invade the men’s hut is exorcised, and the two buddies, after a fistfight, call each other “Babe,” pledge eternal devotion, and renew their worship of Mammon. “How bad can life be?” gloats Charlie. Strolling out with his partner, Bobby puts his arm around Charlie’s shoulders.¹⁰

Referring to the male bonding in Rebel Without a Cause, Stewart Stern, the scriptwriter, used the term “romantic,” a strange word for hooligans who say hello with switchblades. But the scene between Jim Stark (James Dean) and Buzz, the gang leader who harasses Stark, makes clear what Stern meant by romance. Judy (Natalie Wood in Maidenform bra and tight, pink sweater) sparks sexual jealousy between the young bucks, who find themselves on a cliff overlooking the ocean as they prepare for a “chickie run” to prove who is tougher. In a male honor duel, they will race their cars over the ledge, and the yellow belly who jumps first loses face and girl. Looking down into the dark waves crashing against the rocks, the male rivals share a tender moment. “That’s the edge,” Buzz philosophizes. “That’s the end.” Jim lights a cigarette. Buzz takes it out of Jim’s mouth, puts it in his own, sucks on it, puts it back into Jim’s mouth (figure 1.2). “You know something,” Buzz says. “I like you.”

Stern describes the scene he wrote:

These two gladiators going through these tests of manhood . . . recognized in each other something that they wanted . . . I went back to an earlier draft . . . and what Buzz said in the first rendition . . . was “Hey, lover, I’m Buzz.” Now where that came from I don’t know. But then I thought, maybe that’s true . . . I had come out of World War II where we had friendships in the army that were as committed and emotional and romantic in a way as any we had ever had, not sexual but romantic.¹¹

Although the writer does not know where the word “lover” came from and although he cut it from the script, he insists it is a “true” word. He also underscores the nonsexual aspect of the male romance as does New York Times critic Aljean Harmetz, who in a piece entitled “Boy Meets Boy—Or Where the Girls Aren’t” hailed Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman (Papillon), Al Pacino and Gene Hackman (Scarecrow), Robert Redford and Paul Newman (The Sting) as “the new romantic teams of the 1970s.” Although these romantic pairs portray “male friendship as a more encompassing and more satisfying emotional experience than love for a woman,” Harmetz like Stern does not see homoeroticism in the relationships. The buddies simply “huddle together for emotional warmth.” Harmetz, however, does not explain why “emotional warmth” requires “huddling together,” which is physical. In closing, Harmetz notes, “Our culture regards deep male friendships after adolescence with uneasiness.”¹²

Figure 1.2 Rivals, Jim and Buzz (James Dean, left, and Corey Allen) fight for sexual access to the female in Rebel Without a Cause. But they also flirt with each other. Eros and danger swirl around them in a polymorphous vortex. Warner Bros, 1955, dir. Nicholas Ray.

Freud’s analysis of Schreber’s Memoirs makes clear what triggers our culture’s paranoia about close male bonds: homosexual panic. Unlike Harmetz, Freud sees homoeroticism as the fire that ignites the “emotional warmth” buddies crave from each other:

After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be supposed, done ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.   Buddy Plays and Buddy Films: Speed-the-Plow
• 2.   Buddy Cops: Homicide
• 3.   Honor among Thieves? American Buffalo
• 4.   The Cycle of Friendship: A Life in the Theatre
• 5.   Comrades in Competition: Glengarry Glen Ross
• 6.   Friends without Benefits: Sexual Perversity in Chicago
• 7.    Is It Legal? Romance
• 8.   The Dialog of Life: The Duck Variations
• 9.   Climbing Plato’s Ladder: Edmond
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index