Selling Myself
This past week, I found myself with a little more free time than usual and decided to re-watch the film adaptation of one of my all-time favorite plays: Glengarry Glen Ross. I’ve never seen the play onstage but I’ve read it over a dozen times and, while there were some changes made, I can’t imagine a production doing the script more justice than the one put onscreen by James Foley and co. As I was watching Alec Baldwin give his famous “Always Be Closing” speech again, I came to a realisation that some of my favorite things about the movie might stem from just how relevant it is to what I’ve spoken about so many times this summer: my cultural identity.
Sure, the movie is grounded in the post-industrial Chicago setting David Mamet loves writing about so much, but really the story it tells is universal. The movie is about a group of men, sitting around and doing nothing but selling themselves. For those who are unfamiliar with the movie, it concerns an office of salesmen who must compete in a sales contest. As stated by the unnamed corporate entity played by Alec Baldwin, “third price is you’re fired.”
This high-stakes game they play is reflected in many ways by the experience of immigrants in America. From the first second we are introduced to someone new, we are trying to convince them that we are not all that alien, that we are worthy of both respect and attention. With this in mind, we can look at how a couple of the characters in the movie interact with the people around them and dissect what makes them fundamentally good and bad at what they do. Hopefully, this can shed some light on what tactics make for an effective first impression as an immigrant.
The first character we can take a glance at is Jack Lemmon’s Shelley Levene. We, as an audience, are quite clearly not meant to like him very much, and Mamet is keen for us to be aware of why. He grovels constantly, and outright asks for what he wants. He is very much the living antithesis of “show don’t tell”. Mamet always created his characters’ dialogue based on the coarse vernacular of working-class Americans in the late 20th century, even drawing dialectical inspiration from his own family. He once described in an interview how they would often sit by the fire and “while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, based solely on our ability to speak the language viciously.”1 For language to be “vicious”, there needs to be a victim at the end of it, and that is Levene.
The mistakes he makes are consistent, and easy to fall into, especially from the perspective of an immigrant. His approach seems to be “fake it ’til you make it” but he falls apart at the first signs of resistance. For an immigrant, this is easy to do. The temptation is always there to take the path of least resistance and pretend to be something false in order to gain quick acceptance. Levene does this by claiming that one “can’t learn it enough, got to learn on the streets. You can’t buy it, you gotta live it.” He sounds grandiose, but he isn’t really saying anything, and the second he gets caught he falls back into a position of weakness. In the movie, he commits a crime and gets caught at the end, and in trying to explain himself starts explaining that “I wasn’t cut out to be a thief. I was cut out to be a salesman. And now I’m back, and I got my balls back… and, you know, John, you have the advantage on me now. Whatever it takes to make it right, we’ll make it right. We’re going to make it right.” As an immigrant watching this, it becomes clear that little can be gained by making big claims that can’t be backed up, since inevitably there will be reckoning for which you will have no defense.
Since this approach clearly doesn’t work, perhaps we could look at Al Pacino’s Richard Roma. He is Mamet’s vision of the successful salesman, one who can charismatically win over anyone with almost no visible effort. He is the figure a modern immigrant can in some ways model themselves on. The first scene in which he appears opens on a Chinese restaurant where two men are talking about how “all train compartments smell vaguely of shit”. Pacino embarks on a grandiose monologue about taking advantage of life’s opportunities, no matter how small. The success of the pitch hinges on Roma’s mark, Lingk (and by extension, the audience), not even being aware of the sales pitch until the end of the scene, by which time he is completely enraptured by Roma’s charisma. Roma here relies on his audience’s assumption that anyone who could be lying would never spout off on his world view for several minutes, and this lends him an air of confidence and control. He doesn’t even let Lingk speak, and in a metaphoric way, this can be a useful approach. He knows that anything Lingk might say could undercut his message. Roma says what he has to say, and only engages in a dialogue after the first impression has been made.
This approach to first impressions would no doubt work for an immigrant, and in fact this scene is what I always cast my mind towards when I’m nervous about a meeting, a job interview, or even a first date. Of course, it’s wrong to be as duplicitous as Richard Roma, but the way he unabashedly speaks his mind and trusts in his own ability to be interesting is valuable to emulate. It would be wrong to monologue for five minutes upon meeting someone for the first time, but the message that a clear picture of one’s personality should be painted from the get-go is a valuable one. Often, immigrants in strange surroundings might tend towards a shy silence, or go too far towards projecting a brash image. What Mamet teaches us through Roma is that having the confidence to enter a situation and clearly explain one’s unique perspective on the world is valuable. Even in an uncomfortable scenario there can be much to gain from leaning into your own identity and sharing that with the world.
Works Cited
1 John Lahr, Stephen Randall ed., ‘David Mamet: April 1996, interviewed by Geoffrey Norman and John Rezek’, The Playboy Interviews: The Directors, London, Methuen Press, 2006, p276.
2 Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross, London, Bloomsbury, 1996.
