Abstract
“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
Algernon: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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Notes
Paula Vogel, personal conversation, May 2005. Guido Almansi, “David Mamet, a Virtuoso of Invective,” ed. Marc Chénetier, Critical Angles (Carbondale, 1986), 191. David Radavich, “Man among Men: David Mamet’s Homosocial Order,” American Drama 1.1 (1991): 46. See also Hersh Zeifman, “Phallus in Wonderland: Machismo and Business in David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet: A Casebook, ed. Kane (New York, 1992); Carla McDonough, Staging Masculinity (Jefferson, 1997), 85–94; Robert Vorlicky, Act Like a Man (Ann Arbor, 1995), 25–56, 213–29; Ira Nadel, David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre (New York, 2008), Chapter 6.
Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 9–10, 27. Barrie Thorne, Gender Play (New Brunswick, 1993), 40, 44, 46, 73. See also Arthur Holmberg, David Mamet and American Macho (Cambridge, 2012), 142–43.
Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York, 1984), Chapter 3, 100–01. Other anthropological evidence supports Tiger’s theory of the importance of male bonding to the social organization of early human cultures: Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males (Boston, 1996), 23–24.
Daphne Spain, “The Spatial Foundations of Men’s Friendships and Men’s Power,” Men’s Friendships, ed. Peter M. Nardi (Newbury Park, 1992), 59–73. Walter L. Williams, “The Relationship between Male-Male Friendship and Male-Female Marriage: American Indian and Asian Comparisons,” Men’s Friendships, ed. Nardi, 186–200. On ritual homosexuality, see Gilbert Herdt, The Sambia (Fort Worth, 1987).
Arthur Dorlag and John Irvine, introduction, The Stage Works of Charles MacArthur (Tallahassee, 1974), 4–7. Glengarry a “gang comedy” in Leslie Kane, David Mamet in Conversation (Ann Arbor, 2001), 64.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page (New York, 1955), 114–15.
Molly Haskell, quoted in Romantic Comedy, The American Cinema, PBS, KCET, Los Angeles, 1995, videotape, Fox, 1995. His Girl Friday, dir. Howard Hawks, Columbia, 1940.
Dana M. Britton, “Homophobia and Homosociality,” The Sociological Quarterly 31 (1990): 423–39.
David Mamet, Speed-the-Plow (New York, 1988), 20.
Arm around shoulders is not a stage direction; it refers to a production I saw in Boston. The men also call each other “baby” and “beauty” (23, 25, 30, 37, 63). Geis sees Fox’s “I know you, Bob. I know you from the back ” (34) as “another sexualizing of dominance (in homoerotic terms)” Deborah R. Geis, Postmodern Theatrick(k)s (Ann Arbor, 1993), 114.
Stewart Stern interview, “James Dean: Sense Memories,” American Masters, PBS, WNET, New York, May 27, 2005. On honor duels, see Hans Toch, Violent Men (Washington DC, 1972), 121–30; and Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime (New York, 1988), 139–42. Stern wrote the dialog. He did not come up with the cigarette routine. Either the actors themselves or the director suggested it in response to Stern’s script. In the cinematographic language of the day, the exchange of cigarettes symbolized flirtation. Many actors used cigarettes to reinforce the masculinity of their characters. Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, 1993), Chapter 6.
Aljean Harmetz, “Boy Meets Boy—Or Where the Girls Aren’t,” New York Times, January 20, 1974.
Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” ed. Strachey, vol. 18, 65–143. See also Peter Gay, Freud 405–406. Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (New York, 2008), 36. On homoeroticism in the armed services, see also Steven Zeeland, Sailors and Sexual Identity (New York, 1995), 65; and Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship (Durham, NH, 2011). For other historical examples of Freud’s thesis, see Paul D. Hardman, Homoaffectionalism: Male Bonding from Gilgamesh to the Present (San Francisco, 1993); and Antony Easthope, “The Mysterious Phallus,” What a Man’s Gotta Do (New York, 1990), 11–16. Tiger, Men in Groups 79.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York, 1975), 157–210.
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (Urbana, 2000), 48–51.
Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape, 2nd ed. (New York, 2007), 23, 41, 124, Chapter 2.
Alan Dundes, “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown,” Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington, 1980), 199–210. Simon J. Bronner, “Menfolk,” Manly Tradition (Bloomington, 2005), 1–58; and Crossing the Line (Amsterdam, 2006). Zeeland, Sailors and Sexual Identity 57–58, 119–20, 157–58, 191–93, 281–83.
Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves (New York, 1977), 46, 147, 150, 315.
Mamet, True and False (New York, 1997), 97.
David Mamet, Some Freaks (New York, 1989), 87–88.
Kathryn Ann Farr, “Dominance Bonding through the Good Old Boys Sociability Group,” Kimmel and Messner, 2nd ed., 412–13. On how the boy culture shapes masculinity, see Holmberg, David Mamet, Chapter 4.
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© 2014 Arthur Holmberg
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Holmberg, A. (2014). Buddy Plays and Buddy Films. In: David Mamet and Male Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305190_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305190_2
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