A Few Bad Friends: Dynamics of Male Dominance and Failure of Masculine Bonding in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>David Mamet is often considered as the quintessential dramatist of American urban life whose stage is peopled exclusively, and at times questionably, with men. <jats:italic>Glengarry Glen Ross</jats:italic> is the outstanding epitome of Mamet’s avid engagement with the world of men and their primordial, instinctive thirst for dominance, authority, and the celebration of their masculine prowess. Exploring the turbulent dynamics of male interactions determined and affected by contemporary capitalism, the present study investigates the disturbed depiction of masculinity and male bonding. Mainstream masculinity has been fundamentally linked to power and organized for domination. Historically changing and politically fraught, masculinity is the product of social learning or socialization. Rather than a celebration of the camaraderie of men, as most criticisms of Mamet focus upon, it is argued that the play highlights the failure of such fellowship and the tragic consequences. In Mamet, capitalism and the market economy do to men what in a patriarchal system men do to women: marginalize, dominate, displace. Men, therefore, are losing their cultural centrality, and with that, their capacity for constructive male bonds. <jats:italic>Glengarry Glen Ross</jats:italic> faithfully captures the sad ethos of American capitalism. The dynamics of dominance and success, the exercise of power, and the hierarchies of control lead to a dysfunctional network of male connections and interactions. Men are expected to develop more instrumentally functioning abilities and roles while maintaining the more expressively dominant roles they used to possess. Caught in between, they are only subject to alienation. This is the paradox of contemporary American men.</jats:p>