David Mamet and James Foley, 1992
#20 of 28 in the 20th century series
This movie, like the play on which it is based, is famously stuffed to the gills with talk. Great gobs of talk. It is glengarrulous. But for all its quantity of talk, Glengarry Glen Ross does not offer much in the way of variety. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell has O’Brien explain that in the world created by the Party, “there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement”. That is pretty much what is on display in Glengarry Glen Ross as well. Nearly all of the talk in this movie can be categorized as either con artistry, abuse, self-aggrandizement, or desperate groveling. This is a collection of characters who have been stunted into grotesques by our economic system.
Those of you who read these articles semi-regularly have heard all this before, so you may well want to skip over the bullet points that follow. But for those who are new to the site, or those who like repetition—and since you’re reading about something by David Mamet, maybe you do—here’s this week’s version of the litany:
Autarky (i.e., providing everything for oneself) puts a pretty low ceiling on one’s standard of living. No one can hunt for and/or grow food, prepare that food, gather construction materials, produce tools, build shelter with those materials and tools, create luxury goods, etc., etc., all on one’s own as well as a pool of specialists can.
Of course, what allows the members of a group to benefit from each other’s specialized skills is exchange. If I make very good bread and terrible shoes, and you make very good shoes and terrible bread, then I should focus on bread, you should focus on shoes, and we should trade. In so doing we both end up with very good bread and very good shoes.
However, these sorts of one-to-one exchanges are very unwieldy. If I make very good bread, and you are very good at teaching children to read, we can’t trade if I don’t have any children. If I make very good bread, and you are very good at building houses, then if I want one of your houses, what do I do—bake you a hundred thousand loaves? So while we can try to envision an extremely complex web of exchanges, it is more straightforward to think of producing goods and services as contributing to the common wealth of the community, and of consuming goods and services as drawing upon that common wealth.
Prior to the rise of civilization, human communities were small enough that everyone in the group knew everyone else, and allocation of the very limited common wealth, chiefly food, was informal. Need, a sense of fairness, and standing within the group all factored into who got what—the same sorts of considerations that govern who gets what at a family dinner in a typical household.
The array of goods and services that members of a group create for one another will remain very limited so long as the group remains so small that every member is familiar with every other member. A larger pool of specialists will be able to create a wider array of goods and services, raising the potential standard of living of the members of the group. However, increasing the size of a society to that extent requires people to cooperate with strangers, making it necessary to adopt a more formal economic system.
At the broadest level, an economic system establishes a set of principles by which the pool of goods and services produced by a society is to be divided up among its members. But it should do more than that. To increase the standard of living in a society, its economic system should provide motivation for its members to expand that pool of goods and services by contributing more to it.
Encouraging people to work for the benefit of strangers does not work particularly well. People aren’t entirely selfish; again, prior to the rise of civilization, the continued existence of humankind depended on the willingness of people to work for the benefit of their kin and their tribe. Notions such as ethnicity and nationalism can create similar bonds on larger scales, but those bonds are generally weaker. Self-interest tends to more effectively motivate people to contribute to the common wealth.
Thus, a principle underlying the most successful economic systems has been that the more people contribute to the common wealth, the more they should be entitled to take out of it. It’s a principle that strikes most people as fair, and the prospect of being able to take a heftier chunk out of the society’s pool of goods and services does quite a bit to motivate people to pitch in to expand that pool.
When a society is large enough that not everyone knows firsthand what each member has added to the pool of goods and services, then if its economic system is intended to reward people for contributing to the common wealth, it must provide a way to track those contributions. This is the purpose of money. Say that I bake a loaf of bread and offer it up for sale. No one would have wanted to eat the flour, salt, or yeast I used on their own, but I put in time and effort and use my specialized skill to combine them with water and apply heat in just the right way, turning those ingredients into something tasty and nutritious. I have thereby added value to the common wealth of society! Then I do something that, on the face of it, is preposterous: I exchange this useful product for a slip of colored paper. Say that my profit from the loaf of bread is five dollars. The $5 bill representing this profit has no intrinsic use to me, unless I really enjoy gazing at portraits of Abraham Lincoln. But I accept it as a reasonable reward for my efforts, because I believe that I will later be able to exchange it for something that is of use to me—perhaps an ice cream cone. The people who sell me the ice cream cone may not consciously think about why they are letting me exchange intrinsically useless colored paper for their valuable product. But the economy is based on the idea that the $5 bill that I bring into the store is a voucher from the person to whom I sold the bread, attesting to these strangers that I have contributed $5 worth of goods and services to the common wealth of society and therefore deserve to take $5 worth of goods and services out of it.
The problem with money is that it does a very poor job of accurately tracking how much each member of society has contributed to the common wealth. For instance, you might win that $5 from me in a poker game. Now you can walk into that ice cream shop with a voucher from my customer saying that you have contributed $5 to the common wealth of society, when in fact you have done nothing of the kind.
Adding to the mismatch between what people truly deserve and what they are able to acquire is the confusion between productive activity and mere labor. Prior to the rise of civilization, effort generally was a reasonably good shorthand for production. If you spent hours energetically gathering berries, you would bring back a lot more berries for your community to share than would someone who spent a few minutes lazily picking through a couple of brambles. Thus, the ideology arose that those who work harder deserve a greater share of the common wealth. A relatively recent corollary is that everyone must do some sort of work in order to merit any share at all.
However, effort is no longer a good measure of one’s contribution to the common wealth. Say that I work for an advertising firm, putting together a campaign for Pepsi. The deal is pretty straightforward. Currently, a certain number of vouchers are flowing into the pockets of Coca‑Cola executives. The Pepsi executives would like me to reroute some of those vouchers into their pockets, and in exchange, I can keep a few for myself. When I roll up my driveway in my shiny new Cadillac Eldorado, the neighbors don’t complain: they know that I work long hours, employing specialized skills that took years of effort to develop. But my work has not added any value to the common wealth of society. If I teach a group of children to read, not only do the children benefit, but so does everyone who benefits from their literacy later on in life: their future employers, their family members who depend on that employment, drivers who need the drivers around them to be able to make sense of the street signs, etc. If I bake and sell a loaf of bread, then, sure, only the people who eat the bread benefit, but no one loses anything either—the net effect on society is positive. But if I create an ad campaign for Pepsi, the benefit to the Pepsi executives comes at the expense of their rivals. It’s zero sum. One could even argue that it’s negative, as the essence of the campaign is to reach out to people who may have been perfectly content and convince them that, no, they can’t be fully content until they go out and buy a Pepsi. I’m creating unhappiness. On balance, the rest of the world would be no worse off, and maybe even better off, if I got my Cadillac Eldorado for sitting at home doing nothing. But then the neighbors would be outraged.
The backstory of Glengarry Glen Ross starts with two characters who are never even seen: Mitch and Murray. Mitch and Murray have acquired some land. Their goal is to sell the land for more than they paid despite not having done anything to improve it—i.e., to increase their share of the common wealth while making no contributions to it. The problem is that there is no inherent demand for the land at a price higher than Mitch and Murray paid; if there had been, Mitch and Murray wouldn’t have been able to acquire it in the first place. So they turn to their platoon of salesmen to create that demand, among some very unpromising potential marks (“leads”). This brings us to the first category of talk in Glengarry Glen Ross: the con artistry. There’s more to it than just flat-footedly misrepresenting the value of the land to the marks—the salesmen lean much more heavily into ethos and pathos than logos. Ethos: the salesmen pass themselves off as important jet-setters, just in town for a day or two, who have condescended to let the marks in on the deal of a lifetime (while finalizing travel plans with their imaginary secretaries or concluding similar deals with fake satisfied clients). Surely you’ll never get a chance to move in the same circles as these power players again, so take advantage of your opportunity while you can! Pathos: while the salesman do nod at the idea that the land on offer will increase in value, most of their pitches are appeals to emotion. Don’t you resent the way that you always miss out on the strokes of fortune that always seem to alight upon the undeserving people around you? Now opportunity is knocking at your door! You can finally feel the thrill of seizing the day, acting without fear! Acting on your own instead of being henpecked! Ultimately, it’s all very primitive. The salesmen build themselves up as a dominance display. They try to cow the marks into submitting—into meekly taking the pen and signing the contract. Failing that, they try to leverage that resistance to submission, maneuver the marks into seeing signing the contract as a dominance display of their own.
The dominance displays are even worse among the salesmen themselves. Mitch and Murray want the salesmen driving themselves as if the wolves were at their heels, and so pit them against each other in a “sales incentive promotion”: “As you all know,” the motivational speaker they send explains, “first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” This is part of one of the most famous speeches in cinematic history, and when you step back from it, it’s ridiculous. The crass boasting (“You see this watch? That watch cost more than your car!”); the stupid slogans, stupidly explained (“Attention: do I have your attention? Interest: are you interested?”); the hyper-aggressive and weirdly sexualized rhetoric—holding a literal pair of brass balls in front of his crotch… like, this guy isn’t a pickup artist psyching his incel protégés up to pick up women at a bar. This isn’t a drill sergeant sending troops off to war. This is a guy trying to get a bunch of doughy men in late middle age to get some unfortunate dupes to sign some real estate paperwork, and he presents himself as a gorilla pounding his chest. And when the salesmen do get a mark to sign a contract, they behave the same way.
Along with his boasting, the motivational speaker subjects the other salesmen to an avalanche of outright abuse (“FUCK YOU, that’s my name!” “You can’t close shit? You ARE shit!”). So why do they just sit and take it? Why does their manager take it, during those moments when the salesmen think they have the upper hand and direct the abuse his way? Why do they resort to panicked word salad or desperate groveling instead of just washing their hands of the place? As the office manager tells one of the salesmen, “You don’t like the rules, Dave? There’s the door!” The answer is that our society hews to the idea that it is better to do any kind of work, even work that is actively destructive— swindling people out of great sums of money, lying to their faces when the marks discover they’ve been cheated—than to do no work at all. The salesman are terrified to risk even a brief stretch of unemployment, because there will be no safety net protecting them from poverty, homelessness, or worse. One of the salesmen has a child fighting for her life in the hospital; to lose his job would be a death sentence for her, but the office manager doesn’t care. “My daughter,” the salesman mewls, tears in his eyes. When the office manager replies, “Fuck you,” he is speaking on behalf of our economic system.
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