*** OLEANNA
David Mamet’s four features to date, none of them realistic, are all concerned to a greater or lesser extent with con games. Ultimately what one thinks of any of them has a lot to do with which side of the con one winds up on–which proves to be a matter of how one relates to the style as well as the content. Language is the major instrument of both seduction and deception in these films, and Mamet’s stylized use of it, playing on its ellipses and ambiguities as well as its more abstract and musical qualities, often deceives and seduces the audience. So how one responds to these characters has a lot to do with how one reacts to these language games.
This notion had become more complicated by the time I landed in graduate school in the mid-60s, when many students’ lives were being taken over by radical demonstrations, but even then the concept of the academy as a “free zone” outside the mainstream of American life was operative. Yet by the time I returned to academia as a teacher this concept was effectively defunct. Ironically part of the change was the consequence of student reforms the earlier demonstrations had set in motion, but by then students were attending college less as an escape and more as a form of basic training–arming themselves for the marketplace “killing” to come (which they usually wanted to encounter as soon as possible).
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In Oleanna, John is a more believable, better-fleshed-out character than Carol, perhaps because his stances are more familiar. Many viewers have concluded from this that the play is more on his side than hers, and Mamet’s epigraph for the play–a quote from Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh about the adaptability and self-deceptions of the young–seems to bear this out. Not having seen any of the play’s stage productions (though I’ve read the script), I can only report secondhand impressions, but it appears that Mamet benefited from some of the feminist critiques of the play, making the antagonists in the film more evenly matched. Doubtless other differences stem from the role of Carol being taken over by Debra Eisenstadt, who was the understudy for Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet’s wife) in the New York production but played the part during the play’s national tour. (William H. Macy, who plays John, has been involved with the play since its inception and even directed it in Los Angeles; he’s also had successively bigger roles in Mamet’s films–as an army sergeant in House of Games, a Mafia lackey in Things Change, and Mantegna’s police partner in Homicide.)
The action of Oleanna transpires in John’s office over three acts, the first of which is much longer than the other two. In the first act, John is in the process of settling a deal on the phone to purchase a house; he’s also on the verge of receiving tenure. Carol comes to ask him about a low grade she’s received on an exam paper and is clearly concerned about flunking the course. Constantly interrupting her when he isn’t being interrupted by phone calls, he proceeds to belittle a sentence in her paper about his book–the assigned classroom text–which she tells him she doesn’t understand. He then launches into a speech about the overall silliness and arbitrariness of formal education, patronizingly assures her he fully understands her confusion and her low self-esteem, which he used to have himself, says he likes her, and proposes giving her an A in the course if they can schedule further meetings.
only confirmations of or challenges to her or his own agenda in the other’s words, and neither can postulate an identity apart from academia as it’s
