Edmond

(Originally posted as a "Noir of the Week" at the excellent film noir bulletin board The Blackboard.)

The poor don’t go into the luxury districts, whereas eventually the gentlefolk always wind up at least once…in the disreputable places. (Albert Camus, The Fall)

David Mamet – playwright, film director, and general cultural force – wrote his extended one-act play Edmond in 1982, after achieving success with Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, and A Life in the Theatre, and just two years before the multiple-award winning Glengarry Glen Ross. It is therefore one of his mature plays, not an “early” or “rough” work, as it has sometimes been described. But there is a reason why it is perhaps the least-known of Mamet’s major plays: it is utterly uncompromising in its vision, which can be accurately described as quintessentially “noir,” and in its execution.

In 23 brief, punchy, sometimes lacerating scenes, Edmond lays out the existential odyssey of a frustrated young New York City businessman who leaves his wife after an argument and heads out “on the town” with unexpected and tragic results. Much has been made of Edmond’s fable-like and oneiric qualities, yet anyone who has ever explored the “disreputable places” of Manhattan can also testify to its realistic feeling. Edmond’s adventures are nightmarish because those places can in fact be quite nightmarish (and were more so at that moment in history; Martin Scorsese’s roughly contemporary Taxi Driver is no more of an exaggeration than Edmond is).

The classic noir situation that Edmond is most reminiscent of is the premise of Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, which similarly embodies Mamet’s principle that “Every fear hides a wish.” The Woman in the Window, though, famously and controversially backs out of its own bleakest conclusions through a twist ending; Mamet allows himself and Edmond no such escape. Instead, Mamet, unfettered by the Hays Code or anything like it, carries a noir premise to its logical, undiluted, and extremely existential conclusion.

In Edmond, Mamet really underlines the existential nature of noir in general (which often manifested itself in a slightly stronger form in noir fiction than in film). I think it is no accident that the heydays of existentialism the philosophy and noir the literary and cinematic cycle were contemporary; something was “in the air.” Noir anti-heroes are often seen as pawns of fate, but can be counter-glossed as protesters against fate, who create their own meanings by the choices they make. The anxiety of noir protagonists recalls this well-known passage from Kierkegaard:

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

Once Edmond begins his exploration of night-town, there is “no way out” for him, and each encounter only draws him deeper into danger; yet looked at closely, everything that happens is by his choice. “You are not where you belong,” a fortune-teller tells him at the start of the play, and in a sense the whole action of the drama takes him to where he does belong (even if that destination, prison, seems counter-intuitive). Edmond himself appeals sometimes to fate (“You can’t control what you make of your life. There is a destiny that shapes our ends”), but in the end he seems anything but a pawn; he does convert his fears into fulfilled wishes.

Those fears are very harsh and often quite crudely expressed, as emotions in Mamet tend to be; the racism, misogyny, and homophobia of Mamet’s men don’t go down easy, and are particularly noxious in this play, one possible reason for its neglect. In the course of an evening, Edmond “progresses” from bland businessman to raving, knife-wielding, murderous maniac; yet all the intermediate steps leading to this manifestation of pure id are pretty plausible, partly because Edmond is clearly not an habitué of the “wild side.” What is unremarkable to others of his general type is clearly puzzling to him. The unfamiliar world of strip joints, “health clubs,” pawn shops, three-card monte, and casual pick-ups holds more than the usual perils for this upstanding citizen (another echo of The Woman in the Window).

Edmond is naïve because he has been late in getting to the disreputable places; he doesn’t know how to navigate them. This comes out most painfully in his reactions to the economics of the situation. He quickly and correctly perceives that the goal of all ventures in night-town is to separate him quickly and efficiently from as much of his money as possible. Edmond is well-off (although he has left the house this night without much cash), but unlike other well-off slummers, he balks at the cost of slumming. Everything is “too much.” And his insistence on trying to drive bargains actually takes him farther down faster than if he just paid up immediately. He tries to reject the “costs” of his choices, while still making them – that, too, is an existential stage.

Although Edmond has, for the reasons I’ve indicated, scarcely been the most performed of Mamet’s plays, it has sustained a considerable cult reputation and has clearly remained close to its author’s heart; as evidenced by the appearance in 2005 of a film version scripted by Mamet (hewing very close to the play indeed) and directed by Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame, and a Mamet director on stage as far back as the Seventies). The film, starring a blistering William H. Macy, is an uncommonly strong neo-noir, although clearly not made for any kind of popularity; it got one of those “barely released” releases.

Casting Macy, a powerful actor very at home in the Mamet style, has a curious side effect. In the play, Edmond’s age is given as 34, and in the original production the part was played by the excellent 35-year-old Canadian actor Colin Stinton, a Mamet regular at that time (you can see him as one of the young attorneys in the Mamet-scripted The Verdict, also a product of 1982).

Macy is clearly older than that. He was 54 when Edmond was being filmed, and Mamet changes Edmond’s age in the screenplay to 47. This changes the import of the script in a number of ways. Edmond’s naivete cannot be pigeon-holed as age-related, but has to be traced to other sources. His bitterness takes on a whiff of midlife crisis. Lines like “I worked all of my life!” sound very different coming from a man of Macy’s age than from a man of Stinton’s age. All in all, as forceful as Macy is in this role, I wouldn’t mind seeing Edmond with an actor of the age that Mamet originally envisioned, and of course it can still be cast that way on stage.

But this is the film we’ve got, and it’s a very good one. Predictably, it got some horrified reviews; the racial invective alone comes across as even more transgressive and less politically correct today than it was at the time of Edmond’s premiere. Although I don’t think there’s a specific reference to time setting, the feel of the film is very “Eighties,” and probably needs to be (based on such simple plot points as Edmond needing to use a pay phone, rather than having a cell phone). All the businessmen at the strip club are in suits, for example.

Despite my mild misgivings about his age, Macy creates a memorable “arc” for Edmond and nails every scene. (On stage, this is one of the more demanding parts in the dramatic literature; Edmond is on stage for the full duration of all 23 scenes. The play has some kinship to a 90-minute monologue.) He is riveting in the final scenes in prison, which bring the story to its memorable conclusion: Edmond exchanging a goodnight kiss with the black cellmate (Bokeem Woodbine, excellent) who, on first encounter, had forced Edmond to service him. No Forties or Fifties noir could have gone so far, but Mamet is not using the freedom of our era merely to shock (although he doesn’t mind shocking, either); he is using it to show us that Edmond has found where he does belong – and is, in true existential fashion, more authentic in his cell than he ever was outside it.