THE DUCK VARIATIONS
And yet 18 years ago, that dialogue was an irritant. Then we weren’t accustomed to his characters’ stop-and-start exchanges, which sounded like a blowhard conversation you overheard on a bus whether you wanted to or not (the more scatological stuff was clearly dredged up on a late-Saturday-night ride). American Buffalo was crammed with characters you’d cross the street to avoid; their dead-end dialogue was just what they deserved and we didn’t.
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Today it’s clear that, however stylized the talk, what’s real about a Glengarry Glen Ross is just that famous ear for dialogue. Mamet’s exchanges show an awesome fidelity to the visceral way a conversation can chase its tail, overlap, fade out, or double back on itself, all the time picking up a load of industrial-strength cliches, non sequiturs, calculated repetitions, mind-numbing tautologies, and strategic silences.
They even stumble into something like environmental awareness: George lights up a cigar, then complains about the gook that’s choking up the stratosphere. “The air is more a part of our world,” he says, “than we would like to admit.” Emil’s only slightly exaggerated picture of a damaged planet sounds bitterly current, considering Exxon’s ravages: “Oil-bearing ducks floating up dead on the beaches. Beaches closing. No place to swim. The surface of the sea is solid dying wildlife.”
