The Art of Crime

The Plays and Film of Harold Pinter and David Mamet

Leslie Kane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135883553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This collection of 15 original essays, assembled by renowned Mamet and Pinter scholar Leslie Kane, examines the pervasiveness of crime and criminality in the plays and screenplays of two of the most influential contemporary dramatists. The contributors generally focus on one or more works by a single writer, while a few take a comparative approach. Often the works studied are lesser-known or infrequently discussed works, thereby making this volume a valuable addition to current scholarship. In addition, this volume complements other works on Mamet and Pinter on our backlist, including Kane's earlier edited volumes on Mamet which both received solid sales and accolades from Choice. Assembled by a Garland/Routledge author with a proven sales record and impressive critical reception, this collection should be an easy sell to academic and theater libraries, as well as Pinter and Mamet specialists.

1 A Poetics for Thugs

VARUN BEGLEY

The psychopath is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic Storm-Trooper; he is the disinherited, betrayed antagonist whose aggressions can be mobilized on the instant at which the properly-aimed and frustrationevoking formula is communicated by that leader under whose tinseled aegis license becomes law, secret and primitive desires become virtuous ambitions readily attained, and compulsive behavior formerly deemed punishable becomes the order of the day.

—ROBERT LINDNER, Rebel without a Cause

These individuals are the most “infantile” of all: they have thoroughly failed to “develop,” have not been molded at all by civilization…. Here go the hoodlums and rowdies, plug-uglies, torturers, and all those who do the “dirty work” of a fascist movement.

—T.W.ADORNO, The Authoritarian Personality

A brief, exemplary sequence in Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955) begins with the exterior of a comfortable villa, home to a Nazi commandant. The narrator reports that the residence was located near one of the concentration camps. Subsequently, three snapshots depict the wives of various commandants. One poses in the parlor, smiling, with a group of well-dressed visitors. Another sits beside her husband, a contented dog in her lap. The banality of these images is somehow intolerable. They evoke real but macabre domestic dramas performed in the shadows of the camps. Harold Pinter’s later plays explore similar convergences of horror and civility. In particular, Party Time (1991) enlarges the moral and political implications of Resnais’s archival photographs, dramatizing a grotesque cocktail party for the ruling class during an evening of brutal military sup pression. The play’s political tenor and unspecified setting are consistent with three of Pinter’s other works of the period: The New World Order (also 1991), One for the Road (1984), and Mountain Language (1988). At the same time, however, plays like Party Time and One for the Road reveal the summit of an authoritarian class structure whose foundations date much earlier. These works extend Pinter’s previous treatments of criminality, adding a new branch to an evolving genealogy of thugs. The plutocrats, socialites, and functionaries of the later plays are affluent relations of the gangsters and sociopaths in The Birthday Party (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1960), and The Homecoming (1965). The glib prattling of the intelligentsia echoes the enigmatic chatter of the criminals. The privileged environments of the first group complement the uncertain, alienated spaces occupied by the latter. These diverse works compose Pinter’s extended meditation on the proximity of civility and barbarism. Collectively, they develop a mise èn scene in keeping with the villa, the dog, and the commandant.

From absurdist toughs to proletarian assassins, paranoid pimps, and neurotic inquisitors, Pinter’s plays encompass a spectrum of authoritarians and criminals. These characters, I will argue, function as agents of a twopronged critique of violence and its cultural representations. This chapter outlines the terms of this critique through the vehicle of the thug. For Pinter, the thug offers a dense, malleable cultural history, and this broad, iconic figure suggestively links the early gangsters with the torturers and functionaries of the anti-authoritarian cycle. Outwardly, however, Pinter’s thugs coalesce in at least two distinct, seemingly incompatible groups. The first includes the dialogic, quasi-philosophical clowning of Gus, Ben, Goldberg, and McCann in the early plays, and the second is aligned with the monologic, eroticized self-narrations of Lenny in The Homecoming and Nicolas in One for the Road. Clearly, there is a sense of development in these characters—a shift from philosophical, comic menace to more inward, erotic modes of barbarity, from an absurd to a post-Freudian thug. Moreover, the late treatments of thuggery are distinguished by an enigmatic political realism. At the same time, however, the insidious dialogue between Des and Lionel in The New World Order is clearly indebted to the more comic interrogations of Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party, and in some obvious ways the political torturer Nicolas in One for the Road seems the offspring of Lenny, a small-time pimp in The Homecoming. In hindsight, Pinter has himself remarked on overlaps between the early works and subsequent political concerns. In 1988, he suggested that plays like The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter offer a critical look at “authoritarian postures” and “power used to undermine, if not destroy, the individual, or the questioning voice” (qtd in Page 106).

The representational genealogy of Pinter’s thugs is thus enmeshed in larger questions about his politics. It is difficult to assess whether the “polit ical” plays of the 1980s and 1990s represent a qualitative shift or an organic development. For example, despite elements of realism, the antitorture plays insist on historical indeterminacy and are less concerned with representing torture or violence than with implicating ostensibly benign linguistic, rhetorical, and social practices in murky offstage violence. The abstractness of these plays seems at odds with the notion of concrete political intervention. Jeanne Colleran argues that in Mountain Language, the “dramatic situation…is now grounded in a configuration that is at once political and ontological and which accords neither privilege” (58), yet Pinter’s comment above takes a similar view of his earlier work. Indeed, in a previous interview, Pinter remarked of The Birthday Party: “I don’t think it is all that surrealistic and curious, because this thing, of people arriving at the door, has been happening in Europe for the last twenty years. Not only the last twenty years, the last two to three hundred” (qtd. in Esslin 36).

Here Pinter echoes Robert Lindner, who suggests that the psychopath is the embryonic storm trooper. In what follows, I contend that Pinter’s thugs reflect a coherent social philosophy. The later plays indicate that thuggery is political, but they retain an ontological violence derived from earlier absurdist variants. Indeed, collectively, Pinter’s thugs express and endure a violence that is both ubiquitous and invisible. Assassins, gangsters, pimps, and torturers serve as equivocal links to a “real” violence, which is then deferred and mediated in the plays. In symptomatic fashion, The Dumb Waiter concludes with a static tableau, deferring the resolution promised by Ben’s pointed gun. The tension of this unspent bullet reverberates across Pinter’s dramatic universe. Physical cruelty is typically consigned to anticipation, memory, or offstage space. His work is more centrally concerned with the sublimation of urges, the sedimentation of violence in posture, gesture, and speech, and the complicity of all such symbolic displacements with unrepresented barbarities. Hence, this preoccupation has often passed under the name of menace, or, more euphemistically, “power.” But apart from superficial machinations lies an inarticulate suffering that cannot, or should not, be mimetically represented. For example, when Nicolas tells Victor in One for the Road that his son “was a little prick” (79), the mere shift of tense signals an inexpressible ending. The guilt of a language that commands, justifies, or obscures violence extends as well to the play’s trappings of civility. The imagery oscillates between etiquette and barbarism, glib urbanity and abject terror, hors d’oeuvres and the “rancid omelette,” cocktails and “wet shit” (40). Even the title’s inane, incongruous formality mocks the subject matter, positioning the play in a chasm between rhetoric and brutality, decomposed language and grisly reality, the visible and cruelty beyond figuring.

Of course One for the Road is itself a sublimation—an aesthetic, nearly abstract rendering of presumed realities, a transformed piece of dramatic speech spoken on behalf of victims. As the play demonstrates, the power to describe and narrate both masks and enables real agency (“You’re a lovely woman. Well, you were” [71]). In this sense, Pinter’s theatrical critique of authoritarian politics constitutes his own artistic usurpation. Clearly, Pinter’s theater is alive to tensions between political and aesthetic speech, and his work resists imaginary resolutions of unresolved social contradictions, to modify a phrase from Fredric Jameson. Consider his response, in the late 1960s, to a journalist’s question about politicians. “I’ll tell you what I really think about politicians. The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame-thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire how they would assess this action from a political point of view” (qtd. in States 13). In juxtaposing rhetoric and brutality, Pinter ironically undercuts his own position as commentator. His expressed opinion concerns the noxious dissembling of politicians in their representations of Vietnam. However, this intervention is accomplished through the looking glass, as it were, making the literal images of violence seem fantastic while imparting violent overtones to the rhetorical emptiness of “talking about Vietnam” or “assess(ing) this action from a political point of view.” For all its nebulous influence, Vietnam itself lingers out of reach. This is not a facile resolution of the aesthetic and the political, but instead a complex rhetorical figure that Pinter offers in response to the question he chooses to answer, which is in this case less about Vietnam than about the relationship between representation and reality. His comment underlines the power of rhetoric to offer false reconciliations, for politicians and playwrights.

In 1953, Ionesco wondered: “But how does one manage to represent the non-representable? How do you represent the non-representational and not represent the representational?” (53). Pinter’s plays raise similar questions about the representation of violence. His emphasis on symbolic displacement rather than visibility indicates resistance to a culture saturated with violent imagery. Yet Pinter’s thugs are also political and cultural constructions assembled from available models. To dramatize thuggery is always to confront prior incarnations; Pinter’s thugs comment on their predecessors, and the dramas subtly engage the conventions by which social violence is coded and represented.

But the representational history of thuggery is itself notably complex. The thug serves as a figure of collective fantasy, a symbolic negotiation of conflicting cultural attitudes toward violence, criminality, and social existence. For example, the thug’s presumptive vocation is violence, yet the poignancy of thug narratives often depends on the sublimation of destructive urges. When juxtaposed with overt brutality, the hoodlum’s love of his mother (White Heat), Beethoven (A Clockwork Orange), or even fresh produce (The Godfather) establishes contiguity between recognizable human attributes and insensible aggression. As cultural icon, the thug embodies coherent social meanings beyond opaque, pathological otherness. The disturbing quality of a film like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer—with its coldly objective, naturalistic aesthetic—rests on the absence on any figure, voice, or code to make sense of the wanton killing. More typically, however, such representations simultaneously demystify and fetishize violence by mapping its unknowability on familiar iconographies. The thug’s prohibited, recalcitrant deviancy enables collective fantasies around inverse questions of authority and submission. Yet an emphasis on violent closure and narrative coherence effectively orchestrates and represses potential transgressions; most often, deviance is contained.

In the two epigraphs above, Lindner and Adorno suggest that even from the thug’s point of view, violence is not a consummation but a substitution; a symbolic, compensatory release of displaced aggression. The act matters less than the symbolic work it performs in relation to trauma, maladjustment, and fantasy, triggered by actual or perceived external provocation. Pinter’s thugs, by contrast, are denied vocational fulfillment. They pursue the mechanics of barbarity detached from its physical culmination. This is a dual estrangement, encompassing both characters and audience. Pinter’s crime dramas withhold crime, offering the formal shell of suspense without the release of violent spectacle. What remains is a gallery of authoritarian personalities rendered without the solace of visible horror. Through the very absence of conventional gratifications, Pinter’s work highlights our expectation of represented violence and our veiled authoritarian sympathies.

The social symbolism of thuggery in Pinter’s work is predominantly framed by popular narratives. His thugs operate within conventions of the crime story and the dominant form of suspense. In reshaping basic patterns in the cultural aesthetics of crime, Pinter exposes the repressive ideological sublimations at work in many crime narratives that contain (and sanction) violence by making it coherent and pleasurable. Suspense usually entails the aesthetic organization of violence for purposes of pleasure, and suspense narratives typically impose strategies of closure on the more broadly social, contradictory components of the represented crimes. At the same time, suspense depends on anxiety and fear—heightened by the deferral of narrative objectives and the withholding of information—as the raw material of pleasurable resolution. Suspense narratives are dangerous because the disturbing fantasies they seek to manage are socially and psychologically hazardous if left uncontained. Pinter retools the conventions of crime narrative by exploiting this dual aspect of suspense, refiguring its ideological shape in small, perverse fragments. His plays organize responses to violence by deferring its final representation, thereby emphasizing patterns of dominance and submission in social and linguistic relationships and highlighting the psychosocial aggression that suspense both encourages and conceals.

Popular narratives form one subtext of The Birthday Party (1958), a play that jarringly mixes absurdist thugs with stereotypes derived from domestic drama. In this work, Pinter parodies suspense conventions through violent generic mutation, yielding a curious hybrid of music-hall comedy, absurdism, melodrama, and the crime thriller. More radically, the play injects two otherwise gratuitous interrogations, fragmented and misplaced in the domestic context. Oddly, these clichéd interrogation scenes constitute the theatrical and emotional core of the play, though their alarming incongruity resists assimilation. In seminal fashion, the interrogations inaugurate a number of characteristic tensions and displacements. Stanley, a former pianist of uncertain renown, has been living for some time in a strangely deserted seaside boarding house run by a solemn man, Petey, and his flirtatious wife, Meg, who are both in their sixties. One morning, on what may or may not be Stanley’s birthday, Meg announces that two men have been inquiring about lodgings. Immediately suspicious, Stanley avoids the two men, Goldberg and McCann, when they arrive. In the evening, however, Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley, berating him with nonsensical questions, finally inducing a semi-catatonic silence. The next morning, they subject the unresponsive Stanley to a second interrogation, then abduct him, explaining to Petey: “He needs special treatment” (85).

The first interrogation begins with Goldberg and McCann forcing Stanley into a chair, asking questions like “Why did you leave the organization?” (48). The initial overtones of gangsterism and complicity are juxtaposed with Stanley’s escalating confusion and the woeful insufficiency of his responses. For example, when asked to defend his choice of lodging, Stanley cryptically mentions a headache and Goldberg presses him to describe his course of headache treatment. Stanley is unable to recall the precise brand of fruit salts, nor definitively assert that he stirred them properly. “Did they fizz?” Goldberg asks portentously. “Did they fizz or didn’t they fizz?” (48).

After its conventional opening, the interrogation soon withdraws from reassuring film noir or gangster clichés. Administering headache remedies acquires the force of a categorical imperative. Even in the mundane consumer space of using products and following directions the inability to stir “properly” is taken as an index of some more universal guilt. As the interrogation proceeds, the initial gangsterism takes an even more ominous shape. Goldberg and McCann inquire about the political situation in Ireland, wicket-watering on a cricket pitch in Melbourne, and “the Albigensenist heresy.” They accuse Stanley of being a traitor to the cloth, of soiling the sheet of his birth (after he admits that he sleeps in the nude), before incongruously asking, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” When Stanley cannot satisfactorily respond, they demand to know “Chicken? Egg? Which came first?” that leads Stanley to an aphasic scream (51–52).

In compressed, economical fashion, the interrogation suggests a terrifying anxiety connected to even the most banal phenomena. The frame of ref erence oscillates between one’s sleeping habits and the arcane tortures inflicted on heretics. Conventions, stereotypes, mundane references, and clichés enable a sense of familiarity, which is then subjected to the most outrageous abuses and manipulations. Certainly, there are a number of recognizable threads—religious, political, epistemological, social—sewn into Goldberg and McCann’s accusations. Yet the structure of the interrogation is reminiscent of revue-sketch comedy, with its furious rhythms, incongruous responses, and conceptual free association. For example, Stanley first suffers the acute social embarrassment of not completing an ancient comic setup with a thousand possible punch lines (Why did the chicken cross the road?). Then, in a metonymic displacement via the chicken, we arrive at the clichéd recalcitrance of ontology itself (the chicken or the egg?). Thus Stanley is very nearly being “entertained” as he is humiliated, although, in the manner of Don Rickles, Goldberg and McCann ridicule him when he cannot keep pace, in what one might characterize as burlesque inquisition.

Comedy, however, does not mesh comfortably with the manifest cruelty of these exchanges. With a toehold in a realist world, the interrogations refuse the consolation of a stable frame of reference not only in relation to questions of fact but also at the level of the generic sensibility informing the audience. The second interrogation, for example, undercuts even the limited stability of the first. At the conclusion of the second interrogation, Stanley has fully regressed to a prelinguistic gurgling. Goldberg and McCann now unexpectedly employ the rhetoric of restoration and cure. They assure Stanley that he will be reorientated, rich, adjusted, a mensch, and a success. Stanley is told that he will give orders and make decisions as a magnate and statesman with yachts and animals. Here the earlier avenues of threat are unexpectedly transformed into the disembodied, sunny disposition of self-help advertising fantasy.

Taken together, the two interrogations transcode contradictory notions drawn from various social, philosophical, and commercial discourses. Goldberg and McCann represent an unnamed organization, and as Raymond Williams contends, “the fact that it is unnamed allows every effect at once: criminal, political, religious, metaphysical” (324). The broad ambiguity of menace miniaturizes suspense. Language, freed from the burdens of referential realism, is purely instrumentalized toward domination, and the deferral of physical violence effectively insinuates coercion into the naked power of speech, independent of meaning or content. This extreme, perverted form of conversation is in turn reflected on the skeletal banalities littered throughout the play, evoking what Williams terms “the dead strangeness and menace of a drifting, routine-haunted, available common life” (325).

In a purer form, Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (1960) presses the conventions of suspense narrative, evoking the imprint of violence on the symbolic parameters of social and cultural life. The Dumb Waiter clearly owes a debt to existing iconographies, engaging these traditions in complex ways. Yet the play—with its absurdist thugs, endless digressions, and final paralysis— is again concerned with symbolic crimes, with representational displacements of violence. The plot concerns a pair of ostensible assassins, Gus and Ben, who bide time in the basement of what once may have been a restaurant, waiting for instructions on their next hit. After much desultory and occasionally malevolent conversation on a variety of topics, the disused dumbwaiter in the back wall springs to life, issuing written demands for increasingly bizarre and exotic meals. Finally, Gus leaves to get a glass of water. Ben receives instructions from the heretofore silent speaking tube, indicating the target is on the way. Gus reenters, disheveled. Ben, his pistol drawn, stares at Gus in a final tableau.

The play’s opening foregrounds the problem of represented cruelty and suffering. Ben disgustedly reads two newspaper stories aloud while Gus intermittently responds with astonishment: “He what?” “No?” “Go on!” “Get away.” “It’s unbelievable.” This extended theatrical business subtly indicates the remote barbarity of an unknowable world—a gratuitous, generalized violence that permeates the apparent ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Studies in Modern Drama
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Poetics for Thugs
• 2 “You’ll Never Be without a Police Siren”: Pinter and the Subject of Law
• 3 Harold Pinter’s “Before the Law”
• 4 Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes: The Criminality of Indifference and the Failure of Empathy
• 5 Comedy and Crime: Pinter’s Primal Power
• 6 Lost in the Funhouse: Spectacle and Crime in Pinter’s Screenplay of Kafka’s The Trial
• 7 Lie Detectors: Pinter/Mamet and the Victorian Concept of Crime
• 8 Gradations of Criminality in the Plays of David Mamet
• 9 Melville’s The Confidence Man and His Descendants in David Mamet’s Work
• 10 Fantasy Crimes/Fictional Lives: Lakeboat
• 11 David Mamet’s House of Games and the Allegory of Performance
• 12 More Uses of the Knife as Signifier in The Cryptogram, The Old Religion, and The Edge
• 13 A Theater of the Self: Mamet’s The Edge as a Figura of Otherness
• 14 Suckered Again: The Perfect Patsy and The Spanish Prisoner
• Contributors